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For context, early vision is easier to map than you might expect.

Here's a radiograph of the primary visual cortex created in 1982 by projecting a pattern onto a macaque's retina: https://web.archive.org/web/20100814085656im_/http://hubel.m...

An injection of radioactive sugar lets you see where the neurons were firing away and metabolizing the sugar.

(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7134981/)

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But can brain activity be mapped anywhere like this with fmri? I doubt it. But yes — it is cool that the brain keeps spatial proportions of reality in the brain map! Very unlike latent space.

In some ways, absolutely not - precision is a huge challenge with an indirect method like fMRI - but this example is over a decade old now: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130346/

Fig4 shows the letter M on the cortical surface, where the stimulus accounted for the effects of foveal magnification (foveal vision gets more cortical space). Keep in mind that we now, in theory, have stronger magnets, better head coils (the part that picks up the image information), and better sequences (the software that manipulates the magnets to produce the images) so we could do even better than that these days.

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