Brain-imaging in Japanese

When I got to Mitani this morning, dressed as "Spidey Santa", the school nurse Kuboyama-sensei had newspaper clippings for me.

Last week, when Kamitani's "Neuron" paper came out on Thursday it made the front page of the Asahi Shinbun (目で見た文字や図形、脳活動からコンピューターが再現 "Letters and Shapes seen with the eye are recreated from brain activity by a computer.") The Asahi is kind of like Japan's NYTimes, one of the two most-read national newspapers, with the Yomiuri. It was also written-up on page 3 of the more local Sanyou Shinbun. Both had some great manga like the ones I've doodled in my notebooks, to illustrate how brain-imaging and pattern classification work. A person imagining a snowman, having his brain decoded and the snowman reproduced on a computer screen. The headlines mention mental images, too: "Dreams and fantasies we can see" was the headline of one:夢や空想見えれかも, yume ya kuusou mierekamo. It's exciting to see the experiment start popping up in the real-world press.

I haven't spotted anything in the mainstream U.S. media yet, but it popped up on pink tentacle through digg.com if anybody wants to read something in English that's not hardcore technical jargon. My friend Adam mentioned the experiment on a train on Saturday, after reading about it on Digg, without ever having heard of it from me ;-)

I spent all afternoon learning how to say things like "brain-imaging", "changes in cerebral blood flow", and "functional magnetic resonance imaging" in Japanese. It's exciting to be learning the vocabulary, and even kanji, I'd need to talk about my thesis in Japan. Let me know if you guys spot the study anywhere else.

p.s. No newspaper yet has mentioned the foreigner who provided mild grammatical help and was credited in small print on page 33. Most papers, true to Japanese style, don't even mention the main author of the paper. Just Kamitani, since he's the 研究室長、the head of the lab. No credit to the little guys...