Cracking the Brain Code

Although I anticipated this would happen sometime, I didn't expect it this year: Scientists at UC-Berkeley were able to use a algorithm to decode fMRI images into accurate visual patterns. The images were admittedly blurry, and not surprisingly images of people were clearer than images of objects. Nevertheless, the fact that there was some accuracy is astounding.

For a second, I thought this was voodoo correlations all over again, but according to the news article, the algorithm was prepared in advance, presumably from prior research.