Take a look, and you'll see, into your imagination

There have been significant limitations, however, beginning with a necessity to extensively catalog each subject's unique brain patterns, which are then matched with a small number of pre-programmed images. These procedures require that subjects undergo lengthy and expensive fMRI testing. Now a team of researchers in Kyoto has used neural network-based artificial intelligence to decode and predict what a person is seeing or imagining, referring to a significantly larger catalog of images. Their results are reported in Nature Communications. "When we gaze at an object, our brains process these patterns hierarchically, starting with the simplest and progressing to more complex features," explains team leader Yukiyasu Kamitani of Kyoto University.