by Regina Nuzzo, PhD
Biomedical Computation Review
Fall 2006
News Bytes
Peek inside the skull of a couch potato watching reruns on TV and you’ll see non-stop patterns of blood flow throughout the brain. If you learn to pick out which activity patterns match up with, say, a good belly laugh, then you might be on your way to reading the viewer’s internal experiences. Recently, experts from a variety of fields competed to glean subjective perceptions like humor from functional MRIs of TV viewers. They were surprisingly successful.
“Our goal is to know how the brain represents information,” says Walter Schneider, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and principal investigator of the Experience Based Cognition group, which sponsored the competition. “In theory, if we can understand the information in the activity of somebody’s brain, then we can understand what they perceived.”
