Researchers have built an AI tool that can recreate what a person is looking at from scans of their brain, MIT Technology Review reported.
The system rebuilds the image with notable precision.
It also works the other way round, predicting how a person's brain will respond to a given image.
Reading the visual brain
The tool relies on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks changes in blood flow to show which parts of the brain are active.
Its creators say it could help scientists understand how the brain works.
It could also give locked-in patients, who are conscious but unable to move or speak, a new way to communicate.
The researchers even suggest it could one day reconstruct the content of dreams.
A crowded field
The work is part of a fast-moving area of research into decoding what people see from their brain activity.
Earlier this year, Princeton researchers described a method that rebuilt images in near real time, about 15 seconds after a person viewed them.
The Weizmann Institute's Brain-IT model used a two-way approach, translating between brain data and images, to recreate scenes from fMRI scans alone.
A separate 2025 project, known as mind captioning, turned brain scans into written descriptions instead of pictures.
Asked to pick the right description of a video clip from 100 options, it was correct in nearly half of cases, far better than chance.
Privacy worries
Not everyone is comfortable with the pace of progress.
Other scientists warn that decoding techniques like these could one day expose a person's private thoughts or mental images without their consent.
That concern has grown with each jump in accuracy and speed.
For now, the technology needs a large scanner and a willing volunteer lying still inside it.
