The top row contains the original images, followed by reconstructions from three different people Guohua Shen et al

AI can pluck images directly from a person’s brain. Given an fMRI scan of someone looking at a picture, an algorithm can reconstruct the original picture from the scan. Though the results aren’t yet perfect, they are still often recognisable and hint at what may be possible in the future.

Guohua Shen at Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute and his colleagues experimented with three types of images: “natural” pictures of things like bats, snowmobiles and stained glass, artificial shapes …