The brain is a wonderful, mysterious thing: three pounds of soft gelatinous tissue through which we interact with the world, generate ideas, and construct meaning and representation. Understanding where and how this happens has long been among neuroscience’s fundamental goals. In recent years, researchers have turned to artificial intelligence to make sense of brain activity as measured by fMRI, running AI models on the data in an effort to understand with increasing specificity what people think and how those thoughts in their brain looks An interdisciplinary team at UC Santa Barbara is among those pushing those boundaries, with a method that applies deep learning to fMRI data to create complex reconstructions of what the study subjects saw.