December 2023 at the Institute
DECEMBER 21, 2023
On December 5, the 100 College Street Opening Celebration brought together Yale University leaders, the departments of Psychology and Neuroscience, the Wu Tsai Institute, and nearly 200 humans from across the Yale family. The landmark event commemorated historic firsts for the University, showcased the collaborative spirit embedded in the building's dramatic renovations, and demonstrated the diverse research happening on seven of the thirteen floors at 100 College Street.
The day's activities culminated in a gift to Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai in gratitude for their transformative generosity that created the Institute and paved the way for multidisciplinary scientific exploration to understand human cognition. Institute director Nick Turk-Browne and Wu Tsai Faculty Member Smita Krishnaswamy presented a lenticular print — a way of depicting a video as a static image that changes when viewed from different angles. The video shown in the print is the result of a new collaboration between their labs that reveals the potential of combining experimental data with computational models.
Lab members Erica Busch, Arman Afrasiyabi, Dhananjay Bhaskar, and Rahul Singh worked together on the project. They first used fMRI to measure brain activity while human participants were tasked with thinking about Yale. They designed a new generative AI model, grounded in a large dataset about how the human brain processes visual and emotional information, to translate the measured brain activity into videos of what the participant saw in their mind's eye.
The brain-generated video selected for the lenticular print evokes architecture, trees, and passages seen around campus. Strikingly, one frame morphed this natural content into what appears to be the University's signature "Y."
"We were astonished by how clearly the model took brain activity during mental imagery and reflected aspects so reminiscent of Yale. This new window into our inner world speaks to the power and potential of collaboration between neuroscience and computer science," Busch shared.
Once optimized and scaled, the computational model built to generate the gift could hold promise to advance AI and provide a new tool for understanding cognition. The ability to visualize the mind could yield insights into the subjective experience of infants or other species, or in individuals or patients unable to communicate through language.
The custom lenticular print was expertly produced by Parallax Printing.
Read more about the 100 College Opening Celebration, and view more news and events in the December edition of the Institute's newsletter.