Usually, research on the brain goes from something presented to the brain--an image, for example--to brain activity in response to that image. However, in this line of research, the researchers are doing the opposite. They started with brain activity that was generated when participants viewed something and then tried to infer what that something was. Really cool stuff!
What you are seeing in this video is a compilation of the brain activity of three subjects. If you watch carefully, for each stimulus on the left, you will see three brief recreations of what the brain recorded on the right, one from each subject.
I was especially struck that the subjects "saw" scenes with Steve Martin but their brains didn't register the details of the set behind him. This is consistent with research on inattentional blindness; astonishingly, our sense of a unified and rich reality is an illusion. We actually attend to three or four things in our environment, and the rest is filled in by the brain. I find this very profound. Do you?
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