aaaaaaaaaaaa

Sep26

on September 26, 2011

AAAAAAAAAA!! AAAAAA!!!!!

AAAAAAAAA

└ Tags: aaaa, aaaaaaaa, berkeley, brain, brain movies, brain scan, decoding brain signals, dreams, gallant lab, holy shit, i can't believe this is real, memories, memory, mri, sci-fi, science fiction, the mind's eye, theater of the mind, this means we will be able to see other people's dreams someday, thoughts, uc berkeley, visual cortex, visualizing dreams

iaoth

Personally, I can't wait to YouTube all my wet inceptions.
- B.R. Brainerd
  
  We need to go deeper!
_L_

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!
- Chicken
  
  Chicken chicken, chicken!!
Ninepoint_R

I can only imagine how this will turn out for all of the pubescent teenagers who fall asleep in class. It's like having to go up to the board with a boner, only 100x worse.
- magflare
  
  The unanswered question hangs in the air like a cloud of chalk dust. The teacher scans the rows of bored adolescent faces. "Billy," she says, selecting a preoccupied-looking boy in the back of the classroom. "Will you plug your brainjack into the cerebrojector and show us the answer?"
  
  With every evidence of reluctance, Billy rises from his desk, shuffles to the front of the class, and attaches a fiberoptic cable to the port at the base of his skull.
  
  The classroom's green-grey institutional walls shimmer and drop away, and the class now find themselves sitting on a cobblestone path that meanders invitingly through a forest of boners. Colossal erect dongs, huge as redwoods, thrust majestically from the forest floor and flex in the cool, fragrant summer breeze; the afternoon sun filters between them and produces shifting bands of light and shadow on the ground below. A boy reaches for a tuft of hardy, bristly grass that pokes from between the cobblestones and feels its roughness against the skin of his fingers. A girl reaches for the trunk of one of the tremendous boners. It is warm and very slightly sweaty, and pulses under her hand with the long, slow heartbeat of the forest. The world has been realized in every detail. This is a place Billy visits often.
  
  "Sorry, no," says the teacher. "Anyone else?"
  - Fondue
    
    I never expected that I would ever read something that was both so beautiful and so filled with boners.
    - Merlin
      
      Dear Penthouse Forum…
    - magflare
      
      Thank you. I hope that in future you'll continue to view me as the Chainsawsuit comments section's preeminent supplier of hauntingly surreal boner descriptions.
      - lexisunshine
        
        My I ask why you're so good at these said "surreal boner descriptions"?? It is.. disconcerting o_0
MattMcCullar

Time to trademark Dream Reconstruction Studios, Inc. Also, the American Dream Ratings Board.
- jknevitt
  
  The Dream Industry Association of America would like to have words with you.
Chuck

If the drugged out hippies at Berkley have this tech, imagine what's at Area 51!!!!

In all seriousness though, this is amazing technology. Imagine using it to reconstruct the memories of criminals, or helping give those in comas a means to communicate with those around them.

Joe Public has a right to be scared but you can't put the genie back in the bottle now. Its here, it will become better. We, as a society, will learn to harness its power for both good and evil purposes.
- lolz
  
  Stupid smelly berkeley hippies, they're so dumb and know nothing about computer science http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com/graduate…
  
  U mad?
tradertimm

I'm going to post this now before anyone is tempted. Do not, under any circumstances watch "Until The End Of The World". No really, don't.

Also – AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
andrwblz

One of my biggest fears in this is that once anybody can put whatever they have in their heads into reality with ease, it'll be the end for film makers and even us webcomic artists who have to WORK to get these ideas out.

So yes, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA indeed.
- @franktinsley
  
  You don't think you can out-imagine them?
- Chuck
  
  Just because Joe Bob can put his idea onto the net doesn't mean people will actually like it.
  
  It takes a fair amount of talent to do that, and you can't have a machine pull art out of an empty brain.
  - oobgarm
    
    So wait, you mean chainsawsuit is actually produced by a real human being? What the hell have I been reading for the past couple years, then?
    - Brendan Adkins
      
      You've never read anything. It's all been one long, long wet inception.
@dartigen

That…does not even look remotely like a bird.
That looks like a horrible screaming grimdark horrorterror.

…humans – weird, or disturbing?
Shishu

I share your sentiments, Kris.
Josh

I can see no way whatsoever for this technology to be frightfully abused by the government in some dark dystopian future. Carry on Berkley, carry on with your horror-monster reconstructions.
- watcher
  
  Actually, humans have previously used "technology to be frightfully abused by the government in some dark dystopian future" in mundane ways. Example: internet. The ability to instantaniously communicate with every place of the planet, the ability to have every last bit of information on the planet at your fingertips, a/v recodring equipment wired to the global net, and people come up with lolcats, farmville and uncyclopedia.
  What will this one lead to, rate-my-wet-dream.com?
  - d00d
    
    Indeed, dude! No repressive governments have managed to use the internet to bad ends, and the internet has certainly not destroyed our last vestiges of privacy.
davidovkosovo

Well, I think that we could -Cough-
Stranger

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! THE WORLD IS MORE TERRIFYING THAN I THOUGHT POSSIBLE!!!! AND MY SOCIAL STATION IS SO DEHUMANIZING!!!!
@ralphomon

Holy balls those images are nightmarish
Sockfox

Uh, what? Why are the brain scan versions of people different races, genders and wearing different outfits than the real ones? This is clearly a scan from a crazy person.
- d00d
  
  You have to read the article if you actually want to know how the technology works. It isn't "reading their brain" directly so much as "correlating brain activity with similar brain activity when they looked at other images." Which is still very clever and pretty creepy. http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct…
  - Sockfox
    
    I realised that after I posted. Oops!
    
    It's interesting to me that the most clear matches are the clips of people. I guess the brain pays more attention when it's looking at other humans. All the clips without people in ended up looking more like horrible vehicular accidents.
Phoenix

to me, the blob in the right image looks like rebecca black

come to think of it, that might be worse than what other people have said
Strauberry Shortcake

So when he saw the parrot he was thinking about a blurry red dude? Good work, science!
mudfoot

It's not reading your mind. It's reading the statistical analysis of your correlated brainwaves…

Which means that eventually the technology will be abused by law enforcement to convict some guy who happened to be peeping through the window at the wrong time…
Code Red

I see – a parrot
I think – Monet painting.

I'm sorry, but without the picture on the left you would have no idea what the picture on the right is meant to be, and even then it doesn't look much like it.

Also, surely this only works with brainwaves you're currently generating as you sit in the lab. So the only image the machine will ever generate is of a couple of speccy twerps in white coats hitting buttons…
- d00d
  
  I say there, this "telephone" you speak of, it will never work. It is very hard to hear anything that is transmitted. It is no achievement at all — just a trifle. It will never displace the telegraph!
D, just D

hey, it can't be the 1990's forever.
- Richard D. Dickinson
  
  You obviously haven't been to Oregon.
- Psycho Happy
  
  So where the hell are my flying cars?
  - richard d. dickinson
    
    You obviously haven't been to oregon.
Vincent

Finally! We can find out if men really DO think of sex every three seconds!
- Kintrex
  
  Protip: They don't.
RoboGoofers

The reconstructed movie looks like the killer movie from "The Ring"

What if they played that movie to the test subjects? I smell feedback loop!
- RoboGoofers
  
  no wait, that's the Smell Wizard.
jhuger

In other news, researchers* at UC Berkeley** have determined that 95%*** of all reporters couldn't write an accurate science article if the existence of all life on Earth depended on it.****

* One guy
** Not affiliated with UC Berkeley, he just hangs out at the coffee shop on campus
*** +/- 10%
**** True story
Marasmusine

c.f. Until The End of The World (1991)
krisstraub

dear skeptics, if you are not impressed, re-read the description of how the method works. it is trying to reconstruct the parrot image out of other still frames from other films because they probably don't have x,y coordinates for these brain-retrieved images, so movie stills are serving as some kind of meta-pixels.

science doesn't work like it does on a fucking t-shirt where you yell "science" and a zombie ninja in a top hat flies out of a test tube. the fact that you can clearly tell the guy was watching a person talk using just his brain scan is beyond amazing. in 30 years we will be looking at goddamn memory recordings. welcome to step one.

the only thing disappointing about this study is that they made him watch the pink panther remake with steve martin
- tradertimm
  
  You're right, all innovation comes from the use of porn. Pink Panther!? Bah!!
  
  Of course, there is the possibility of wearable displays with brain images piped to them, creating a cornucopia of things for people to be offended by.*
  
  *(Sometime in the 2100's)
- Mojomonkeyfish
  
  Kraub,
  
  I wish there was a t-shirt with paragraph 2 on it.
  
  Also, one of the limitations of the technology (for now), is that it's really only going to work reconstructing movies from movies. Why? The way movies are shot and framed. It's easy to find correlation of the "person facing screen-left, on the right side of the screen, talking, with a chiron underneath her face… but only if that's what you're watching.
  
  Of course, once the technology doesn't require you to be in an MRI machine, and you're wearing it all day every day, will all your erotic Home Alone dreams be copyrighted, or in violation of copyright? "Ahhhhhh" indeed.
  - dickbutt
    
    I second that T-shirt request.
- RoboGoofers
  
  "dabu'ggaar"
  
  (hamburger scene was best scene in that remake)
- paat
  
  Does this mean you're not going to be selling that t-shirt?
Odious

It kinda looks like the murdering girl from The Ring and a lil less than the parrot.
Xzibit

yo dawg, I heard you like seeing through your mind's eye, so I let you see your mind's eye through your mind's eye, so you can contemplate the nature of your mind's eye with your mind's eye.
Miles Teg

Has anybody read 'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk? It touches on this lightly.

(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA)
WaitWhat

See, Marge. I told you they could deep fry my pants.

I didn't say "They couldn't." I said "You shouldn't."
RoboGoofers

dateline: 50 years from now.

Doctor: "So you've been having disturbing dreams? Well, lets hook you up to the dream-o-scope"
"hmm."
"oh ugh. That's, uh… eww"
"Is that your grandmother? Why would you dream about that?"
"haha wow your sick. Really really sick"
"Yeah, you were right. Those were pretty disturbing dreams."
"And that's all the time we have tonight. Thanks again everyone for watching AMERICA'S FUNNIEST WET DREAMS!!!"
bonjovifriday

Dear Hollywood,

Please use this horror technology in the next Nightmare on Elm Street movie.
- Sortelli
  
  Dear Hollywood,
  
  Please do not make the next Nightmare on Elm Street movie. You need help, Hollywood. You are kind of like an idiot who just keeps pressing the same button.
  - magflare
    
    Dear Bollywood:
    
    Don't you crazy fuckers get any ideas, either.
Reignleif

I can't believe this is the only comic with the "I can't believe this is real" tag.
- tradertimm
  
  Yeah, given the large populations of smell wizards in any urban area.
Heisenberg

hmm, what would the output of a person watching their own output look like?

Aaaaaaaaaaa! squared?
- buttdick
  
  I doubt that it works in real-time as of yet, but once it does, people should definitely try this.
Zack

I'm not positive that this will work on unreal memories. The reconstruction is based on what was seen–with the eyes. That's a crystal clear, real, undeniable sense. Capturing the imagination and its memories will be difficult.

I've seen submarines, and I've seen planes. I can imagine a submarine with jetliner wings easily enough. But if that data were to be interpreted without refinement, it would look even worse than the sludgy mess shown in the reconstructions. I'm an artist, so I know this–imagination and memory are vague and non-photographic places. We don't think in photographs or movies, but in compressed data. Anyone can imagine anything. Being an artist is all about image refinement.

If this technology does end up entering the consumer market, we might end up with a new class of artists whose jobs are to resolve fuzzy brain-made images.
Cain

It looks like my investments in tinfoil hats are about to surge; just as planned.
Dt. Case Solverson

Looks like the shroud of turin with a coolaid stain…
WHICH IS NO DOUBT WHAT THAT BIRD IS SMUGGLING.
Case closed.
cvix

This is what happens when everyone's H&H character rolls strange aeons.
Kwijibo

Don't worry, I'm sure copyright infringement laws will prevent anyone from having Transformers 3 memory-reconstructed for them.
me really

All flashbacks in all movies and tv shows must now use this video format.
Yelrah_Rehguab

What happens when you use it on insane people?

aaaaaaaaaaaa

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