A Monkey Brain and an AI Teamed Up to Make These Unsettling Images

An image being evolved over hundreds of trials as a monkey neuron selects what it likes best. (Credit: Ponce, Xiao, and Schade et al./Cell) Impressionist art, or perhaps nightmare fuel — these images are a confusing mess to the human eye. But to a macaque's brain cells, says a group of researchers, the images are fascinating. The pictures are the result of an experiment that paired artificial intelligence with primate intelligence. The goal was to create images specifically tuned to stimulate neurons in a monkey's visual cortex. It's not an attempt to create monkey-centric art. Instead, the jumbled images might help make sense of the way our brains see the world around us. And the researchers say these renderings are even more potent than natural images in provoking monkey's brains to respond.