The day might come when you can upload the dream you had last night to YouTube for others to see. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a method where they can scan the mind of a person watching a movie and record what they see from their brain. The feat is performed using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which scans the brand for activity, and computational models that have been created to "decode" the visual signals created in the mind. The video below shows the results from sessions where volunteers were asked to watch Hollywood movie trailers. While the images are a bit muddy at this early stage, the success at any scale is incredible.

The idea isn't to introduce a new era in movie piracy, but to pave the way towards gaining a better understanding of what goes on in the brain. The technology could potentially be used to record dreams or gain insight into what's happening with patients incapable of communicating verbally including coma and stroke patients or those with neurodegenerative diseases. It also has the potential to unclock new methods for allowing the brain to guide computers.

It'll be quite some time before videos from the mind can be captured easily, volunteers have to sit still inside an MRI machines for hours at a time and the accuracy of the decoding still needs work and computers depend on being fed libraries of YouTube videos for reference. We're still along way from being able to scan the mind of witness to a crime or have daydreamer start a revolution in Hollywood. The one aspect the process can't help with, researchers warn, is in capturing the intent or perception of the person being scanned.

More details avaialble at UC Berkeley's website.