decoding dreams | prev @mit @medialab | fellow @osvllc @foresightinst | new media artist
SF / Paris
Joined July 2010
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For the past year at MIT @medialab I’ve been driving at one question: can we reconstruct 3D objects people see in VR directly from their brain activity (EEG)? Tomorrow 3:30-5:00 pm at #NeurIPS2025 #NeurReps I’m presenting our answer. 1/5
Ninon Lizé Masclef retweeted
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
My Roman Empire is the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are also the reason I think about the basal ganglia a lot.
Ninon Lizé Masclef retweeted
DINOv2 has never seen a caption, and Qwen3 has never seen an image. We still aligned their embedding spaces without a single image-caption pair.
It even works when the images and the captions come from different datasets.
Project page: dominik-schnaus.github.io/un…
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Your imagination is closer to your own perception than your perception is to other people's. On average 1.6×, in our EEG data.
I presented this at @foresightinst AI for Frontier & Meta Science. The future of BCI is being built in this room.
We measured the least effort to move perception onto imagination, across people in EEG and within persons in single neurons.
Alignment should move from behaviour to representations, measured in each person's own neural geometry: aligning to an average brain is neuronormativity.
Building on our workshop poster "Decoding What You Imagine from What Others Saw", accepted to NeurIPS.
“There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart is bursting with the aspiration to make art that will last forever. I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death. […] This is the way I have lived my life, and it is the way I shall go on living.” — Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net
Queen of infinity, color, and the polka dot. RIP Yayoi Kusama.
ALT Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room, Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011/2017
I didn’t realize so many of you were into BCI + Riemannian geometry 🙃
I’ll be giving a talk on decoding visual imagination, Sept 30 at @foresightinst AI for Frontier workshop in SF.
Looking for beta testers - DM me if interested.
“Don't forget that costumes, like dreams, are symbolic communication. Dreams teach us that a language for everything exists - for every object, every color worn, every clothing detail. Hence, costumes provide an aesthetic objectification that helps to tell the character's story”. — Federico Fellini: Interviews (ed. 2006)
Photo: Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits, 1965
“The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all — that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open — has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?” — Fellini, I’m a Born Liar, 2002
Artwork: Federico Fellini's drawing and dream description, from The Book of Dreams
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.” — Federico Fellini, Rolling Stone no. 421, 1984
𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝒅𝒓𝒂𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒔𝒍𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝒐𝒑𝒆𝒏 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒊𝒅𝒐𝒓
In an 1857 letter, Leo Tolstoy sketched a corridor of thoughts, drawers of memory and mood, popped open by nothing more than weather, food, or flattery. It was one small piece of a much larger habit: diagramming his own mind, decades before anyone had the tools for it.
Artists anticipate future inventions. Their imagination and philosophical analysis go beyond the current state of the art in sciences. The difficulty is the proof. It often shows up decades after their death.
Take Tolstoy's theory of sleep: he claimed sleeping was « the particularly active work of the brain », years ahead of Hans Berger's invention of electroencephalography in 1924, and his recording of brain activity during sleep five years later that proved Tolstoy was right. At Tolstoy's epoch that was seen as nonsense: the best experts of his time believed in brain passivity during sleep.
Discovering Tolstoy was many years ahead of his contemporaries may not surprise, given his literary heritage. That his intuition reached into neurology, through nothing but his own dream observations, does.
Source: Leo Tolstoy’s theory of sleep, Alla Vein, Sleep Medicine 9, 2008
Photo portrait: Tolstoy, 1908 (two years before his death), first color photo portrait in Russia, by Prokudin-Gorsky
