According to one of the paper authors—professor of psychology, cognitive science and neurobiology Marvin Chun—"it is a form of mind reading." He says that other brain scans methods "can only tell you they are viewing an animal or a building, not what animal or building. This is a different level of sophistication."

The researchers says this new method "yield strikingly accurate neural reconstructions of faces even when excluding occipital cortex. This methodology not only represents a novel and promising approach for investigating face perception, but also suggests avenues for reconstructing 'offline' visual experiences—including dreams, memories, and imagination—which are chiefly represented in higher-level cortical areas."

This experiment follows the same method as the UC Berkeley experiment, where they captured the brain activity of subjects watching videos using a fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner. Those readings were stored in a database using voxels—a three-dimensional pixels unit like those used to build worlds in Minecraft. A computer then used that database combined with a palette of 18 million YouTube videos to create a composite video using the real time fMRI scans of other subjects. The method worked, effectively "extracting" a crude version of what the person was seeing in real time.

I really can't wait for Project Brainstorm to become a reality (not to talk about all the weird porn.)