“There are several projects that try to translate fMRI signals into images, mostly because neuroscientists want to understand how brains process visual information,” said Sikun Lin, the lead author of a paper that appeared in a recent NeurIPS conference in November 2022. An interdisciplinary team at UC Santa Barbara is among those pushing those boundaries, with a method that applies deep learning to fMRI data to create complex reconstructions of what the study subjects were seeing. In recent years researchers have turned to artificial intelligence to make sense of brain activity as measured by fMRI, turning AI models on the data in an effort to understand, with increasing specificity, what people are thinking and what those thoughts look like in their brains. Understanding where and how this happens has long been among neuroscience’s fundamental goals. The brain is a wonderful, mysterious thing: three pounds of soft gelatinous tissue through which we interact with the world, generate ideas and construct meaning and representation.

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