A mouse's brain activity may give some indication into what it is seeing A black-and-white movie has been extracted almost perfectly from the brain signals of mice using an artificial intelligence tool. Mackenzie Mathis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and her colleagues collected brain activity data from around 50 mice while they watched a 30-second movie clip nine times. The researchers then trained an AI to link this data to 600 frames of the clip, in which a man runs to a car and opens its boot. The data was previously collected by other researchers who inserted metal probes, which record electrical pulses from neurons, into the mice's primary visual cortexes, the area of the brain involved in processing visual information. Some brain activity data was also collected by imaging the mice's brains using a microscope. Next, Mathis and her team tested the ability of their trained AI to predict the order of frames within the clip using brain activity data that was collected from the mice as they watched the movie for the tenth time.

Our movements may be controlled by two distinct networks in our brain, rather than just one. For nearly a century, we have known that the motor cortex – a relatively thin strip of tissue in the centre of the brain that runs across both hemispheres – controls our body movements. In the 1930s, neuroscientists Wilder Penfield and Edwin Boldrey electrically stimulated the brains of people undergoing brain surgery, showing that different parts of the primary motor cortex control different parts of the body. They also found that these control areas are arranged in the same order as the body parts they direct, with the toes at one end and the face at the other, as depicted by the so-called homunculus map. Evan Gordon at Washington University School of Medicine in Missouri and his colleagues wanted to use modern technology to look into the Penfield-Boldrey idea in more detail.

Using only a few seconds of brain activity data, the AI guesses what a person has heard. It lists the correct answer in its top 10 possibilities up to 73 percent of the time, researchers found in a preliminary study. The AI's "performance was above what many people thought was possible at this stage," says Giovanni Di Liberto, a computer scientist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the research. Thank you for signing up! There was a problem signing you up.

At each identical desk, there is a computer with a person sitting in front of it playing a simple identification game. The game asks the user to complete an assortment of basic recognition tasks, such as choosing which photo out of a series that shows someone smiling or depicts a person with dark hair or wearing glasses. The player must make their decision before moving onto the next picture. Only they don't do it by clicking with their mouse or tapping a touchscreen. Instead, they select the right answer simply by thinking it.

Reading minds has just come a step closer to reality: scientists have developed artificial intelligence that can turn brain activity into text. While the system currently works on neural patterns detected while someone is speaking aloud, experts say it could eventually aid communication for patients who are unable to speak or type, such as those with locked in syndrome. "We are not there yet but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis," said Dr Joseph Makin, co-author of the research from the University of California, San Francisco. Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Makin and colleagues reveal how they developed their system by recruiting four participants who had electrode arrays implanted in their brain to monitor epileptic seizures. These participants were asked to read aloud from 50 set sentences multiple times, including "Tina Turner is a pop singer", and "Those thieves stole 30 jewels".