An introduction to Mind-to-Image
Mind‑to‑Image is an end‑to‑end pipeline developed at Obvious which translates the brain’s fMRI signals into pictures a person is merely imagining. While earlier projects could only rebuild what someone was looking at, here the participants were asked to picture scenes in their minds.
We collected six hours of brain‑scans, and worked on the basis of a top‑tier brain‑to‑image system to build one which could handle the richer signals of pure imagination. The result is a demonstration that remembered and purely invented scenes can be turned into visuals straight from neural data.
A 3-step process for reconstructing imagination
The model was trained using several hours of fMRI data collected while an artist first viewed, then remembered, and finally imagined images inside the scanner. From the first two phases, it learned to associate distinct patterns of brain activation with visual features such as shape and composition.
Once this mapping was established, it could be applied to the imagination phase, allowing the reconstruction of scenes that existed only in thought.
Image generation based on brain scan analysis
When a participant lies in the MRI and imagines a scene, Mind-to-Image interprets the resulting pattern of brain activity and converts it into a “visual fingerprint.” That fingerprint guides an image generator to produce a picture.
The picture is meant to correspond to the imagined content: whether a portrait, a landscape, or something more abstract. In this way, the system turns purely mental images into visible ones, offering a direct glimpse of imagination itself.
The extension of the surrealist movement
This technique inscribes itself as a following of the surrealist movement. Surrealism is a cultural movement which explores the expression of the subconscious, and the techniques which allow for the suppression of the different filters between the realm of the mind, and physical artistic expression.
The mind-to-image protocol inscribes itself as a scientific follow up of techniques such as hypnosis, automatic writing and exquisite corpse, allowing creation to emerge from the mind and be given a physical form.
