16.7 CENTIMETERS (LENGTH OF A HUMAN BRAIN) I What If I couldn't just guess what you were thinking but could actually see it? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a system that uses fMRI (a specialized MRI scan) to model what we're thinking while awake and even what we see in our dreams. In experiments, subjects watched random clips of Hollywood movies, and the system reconstructed their brain activity through a process called quantitative modeling. The images from the subjects' minds bore incredible similarities to the ones they were watching. The fMRI technology has been around for about two decades, but the breakthrough came in a smaller form. "The real invention was entirely software," Professor Jack Gallant tells TIME. "It is a new way to model the brain, which allows one to build a much better brain decoder than could be done in the past."
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