Scientists have reconstructed short videos using only brain activity recorded from mice, effectively allowing researchers to recreate what the animals were seeing. The study, led by researchers at University College London (UCL), offers a new way to investigate how the brain transforms visual input into an internal representation of the world. Published in eLife, the findings could help scientists better understand how visual information is processed in the brain and may eventually make it possible to compare how different species perceive the same surroundings.
Researchers have spent years trying to understand how the brain interprets signals arriving from the eyes. In human studies, scientists have shown people images and movies while recording brain activity with fMRI, then used those measurements to try to reconstruct visual information down to the level of individual pixels. The new work takes a different approach.
Instead of relying on broader brain imaging signals, the researchers used recordings from individual brain cells in mice. These single-cell measurements can provide a more detailed picture of how visual information is represented in the brain. Using activity recorded from the visual cortex, the team was able to generate high-quality reconstructions of videos that had been shown to the mice.
Joel Bauer (Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL) said: "We wanted to have a better way of investigating how the brain interprets what we see. The current methods of understanding what specific groups of neurons are representing are not very generalizable to situations which haven't been specifically tested for. And so, we wanted to develop a method that can capture what is being represented in the brain and compare that to reality." The researchers are especially interested in the differences between what is physically present in front of an animal and how that information is represented inside the brain.
Studying those differences could reveal which visual features the brain emphasizes, changes, or filters out. To reconstruct the movies, Dr. Bauer and his colleagues used a dynamic neural encoding model originally developed by another research team for the 2023 Sensorium Competition.
The model is designed to predict how individual neurons (brain cells) will respond while mice watch movies. It also takes into account other factors, including the animals' movements and changes in pupil diameter. The UCL researchers then refined the approach using the same dataset.
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