Scientists recreated what mice saw from brain activity alone

Scientists have reconstructed short videos using only brain activity recorded from mice, effectively allowing researchers to recreate what the animals were seeing. The study, led by researchers at University College London (UCL), offers a new way to investigate how the brain transforms visual input into an internal representation of the world.

Published in eLife , the findings could help scientists better understand how visual information is processed in the brain and may eventually make it possible to compare how different species perceive the same surroundings.

Researchers have spent years trying to understand how the brain interprets signals arriving from the eyes. In human studies, scientists have shown people images and movies while recording brain activity with fMRI, then used those measurements to try to reconstruct visual information down to the level of individual pixels.