New System Can Recreate Faces From Brain Signals
"You could potentially recognise 6 billion people, but you don't have 6 billion face cells in the IT cortex. There had to be some other solution," he said.
In the current study, published in the journal Cell, researchers found that rather than representing a specific identity, each face cell represents a specific axis within a multidimensional space, which they call the face space.
In the same way that red, blue, and green light combine in different ways to create every possible colour on the spectrum, these axes can combine in different ways to create every possible face.
Using macaque monkeys as a model system, the researchers inserted electrodes into the brains that could record individual signals from single face cells within the face patches.
They then developed an algorithm that could decode additional faces from neural responses.
They could now show the monkey an arbitrary new face, and recreate the face that the monkey was seeing from electrical activity of face cells in the animal's brain.
When placed side by side, the photos that the monkeys were shown and the faces that were recreated using the algorithm were nearly identical.
Face cells from only two of the face patches were enough to reconstruct the faces.
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