Seeing through cats' eyes.
Or more appropriately through cats' neurons. The top row is the original image and the bottom the one generated from the car. It's a little bit blurry - but hey! close enough. It's from a while ago (1999) - so some of you might have seen this before - but it's pretty cool huh?!
These are the first pictures from an extraordinary experiment which has probed what it is like to look through the eyes of another creature.
As reported on BBC News Online last week, a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and created videos of what the animal was seeing.
By recording the electrical activity of nerve cells in the thalamus, a region of the brain that receives signals from the eyes, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley were able to view these shapes.
The team used what they describe as a "linear decoding technique" to convert the signals from the stimulated cells into visual images.
2 Comments:
It's very cool, but i wonder how biased we are by our ability to interpret those images. Without looking past the veridical retinotopic mappings and such, it's hard to tell if the cat is seeing "face" or "OMG big blobby thing!!!"
Work on implants for blind people usually works like this, but in reverse, right?
Tue Aug 15, 11:50:12 AM CDT
I'm with Brian on this. Really all this might show is their level of visual acuity. We're still seeing with our own eyes the images that were created (using our brains to program the computer) from the cat's neurons. So...that's multiple filters, and our brains probably interpret the visual input different from the cat's brain anyway.
I think it's really neat, but we can't think of it as seeing through their eyes.
Tue Aug 15, 01:51:04 PM CDT
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