I send out weekly schedules to my various collaborators and devote Mondays to taking time to speaking via Skype with anyone who might want to talk with me. I started to take the opportunity of these weekly schedule updates to let everyone know some of the ideas on my mind, of which they might want to partake. I now extend the invitation to readers of the blog. Perhaps inspired by the work of Helmut Hirsch on kitten visual cortex and the model we published in which linear receptive fields act like rays in computed tomography:

I started thinking about the reverse process of vision. How could we get an image in our mind out, so others could see it. Now, of course, this is precisely what a fine artist does, and what happens when a forensic artist reconstructs a face you’ve seen through a set of questions. But could each of us do it ourselves, with less training, and faster? Sometime in the mid-1970s I conceived of a device that could pick up an image from our skin, by noting that each hair has a ring muscle around it. This then got the silly name of “goose bump voluntary mind reader”. As is my wont, I of course did not even attempt to build such a contraption. With modern technology, I suppose it could be built.

Since octopuses can learn quite a bit, maybe it could do even more. So the question arises whether the patterning (and mimic behavior) is built-in? If not, then this octopus perhaps can project an image in its mind onto its skin. Perhaps, indeed, we could do the same. So here’s the tentative title for a paper:

Visual projection to the skin in the mimic octopus? (OCTM)