When your brain receives signals from your eyes, this is what it sees

One of the more interesting goals in neuroscience is to reconstruct perceived images by analyzing brain scans. The idea is to work out what people are looking at by monitoring the activity in their visual cortex. The difficulty, of course, is finding ways to efficiently process the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The task is to map the activity in three-dimensional voxels inside the brain to two-dimensional pixels in an image. That turns out to be hard.