The technology could one day decode dreams—or reveal our most private thoughts.

Brain scans contain clues about what someone is looking at, but turning those signals back into recognizable images is difficult. Now, researchers in Israel have built an AI system that recreates what people are looking at with uncanny accuracy.

Functional MRI scans, which track blood flow in the brain, are a common tool for decoding what is going on in people’s minds. Previous research has shown they can reveal neural activity linked to what a person is seeing, and scientists have long been interested in using AI to convert these signals into a visual representation of the scene in front of them.

So far, this has proved difficult, with early attempts producing blurry images and AI image generators inventing details that bear little resemblance to what the person saw. But now, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science has developed a system called Brain-IT that sets a new bar for accuracy and can be adapted to a new person using just an hour of scan data.

“All in all, really we outperformed the others by a significant margin,” Michal Irani, who led the research, told MIT Technology Review. She adds that the team hopes the tool could enable new discoveries about how the brain works and even help paralyzed people communicate.

Existing methods for reconstructing images from brain scans can look good, but they often get important details like the position or color of objects wrong, thanks largely to AI image generators’ willingness to fill gaps in the data with what they expect to see.

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