Monday, September 26, 2011

Review Of Will's Article by Sawyer White


            Will Dougherty’s review of the article “Brain Scans Let Computers Reconstruct Movie Scenes,” was particularly interesting and immediately grabbed my attention due to the impressive title.  The review had many good aspects.  Firstly, it gave enough detail about the experiment to adequately explain how this breakthrough occurred, without giving so much information as to make the review boring.  Secondly, it is succeeds in listing why this breakthrough is important, noting that in the future it could even be used to read minds.  Lastly, the review was very well-written and had good clarity of thought and was easy to follow.  However, the review also had room for improvement.  In describing the experiment, the one place the review was lacking was in stating exactly what the computer did.  I was confused whether the computer was linking the brain activity back to the videos it had stored, and thus displaying them, or if it was simply using the stored videos to show the subjects, and then creating images from scratch sing their brain activity.  Also, I felt that Will could have elaborated more on how this technology could help people with difficulty processing visual information, since this did not make sense to me.  However, the article covered the information so well and had such good logical flow that these issues really did not detract from it at all.  If anything, they only made me want to learn more on the subject. The most impressive part of this article, to me, was that this technology exists at all, which almost literally reads people’s minds to make images, and that it can be perfected in the future to give even clearly and better pictures and thus more insight into the human mind.  A future where dreams, hallucinations, and all thoughts can be perfectly displayed on a screen would be a very interesting place to live in.

1 comment:

  1. Will’s review of the article “Brain Scans Let Computers Reconstruct Movie Scenes”, was very interesting to me. The title sounded like it was from a science fiction book and immediately had me hooked. Will’s review was well written as well as very informative. It gave a good amount of detail, which made it interesting, but not too much to where it was bland. The review did a good job of assessing what the article was currently saying as well as what could happen next, such as how this technology that is being used now could be used in the future. However, this review could be improved. I would have like to know more about what impact the computer has on this experiment, and how it tracked the brain activities and then displayed them. Despite this, Will’s review provided for an interesting read, and the style in which it was written proved to be a fluid one as well. I found that this article has been the most interesting one blogged about so far. It was shocking to me that we have this kind of technology that essentially can read a humans mind.

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