Weizmann team says brain-scan decoding calibration drops from 40 hours to 1

A team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel says its AI model can reconstruct what a person is looking at from brain scans, needing only one hour of calibration data from a new user.

Lead researcher Michal Irani presented the result at the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference in New York last month. The comparison figures are her own: similar tools typically require about 40 hours of fMRI data per new person, her decoder needs one hour, she says — at $600 to $1,000 per scanning hour, a large drop in per-subject cost.

Tommy Sprague, a neuroscientist at UC Santa Barbara who was not involved, finds the results impressive but warns such methods could reveal inner mental imagery without consent. Irani acknowledges failure cases and plans to extend the work to video and audio.