> It seems valid to me. There's no reason to ask them to somehow extract this visual data "unbiased", without bootstrapping off of video clips like that.
I agree that their approach seems valid. There is a reason to ask them to extract the visual data in an even more unbiased fashion, though: if we understand how the brain is wired, then it should be "trivial" to back out the image from the patterns of activation.
Of course, the previous sentence is making a couple assumptions that I don't think are anywhere close to valid. 1) "the brain" implies that there is a single, nearly completely conserved architecture that is remotely similar from one person to another; 2) I think you'd need to get the activity to much higher resolution than fMRI can give you; 3) the stimulus <--> response mapping is moderately close to bijective, so for a given input, there's only one set of activity, and vice versa. Still, this study is an interesting first step on what will, no doubt, be a very long journey to improve the technology.
I agree that their approach seems valid. There is a reason to ask them to extract the visual data in an even more unbiased fashion, though: if we understand how the brain is wired, then it should be "trivial" to back out the image from the patterns of activation.
Of course, the previous sentence is making a couple assumptions that I don't think are anywhere close to valid. 1) "the brain" implies that there is a single, nearly completely conserved architecture that is remotely similar from one person to another; 2) I think you'd need to get the activity to much higher resolution than fMRI can give you; 3) the stimulus <--> response mapping is moderately close to bijective, so for a given input, there's only one set of activity, and vice versa. Still, this study is an interesting first step on what will, no doubt, be a very long journey to improve the technology.