# Brain Decoding Is on the Road to Full-Bandwidth Interfaces by Alexander Wissner-Gross > Functional MRI has hard spatial and temporal limits, but it is already supporting vision, language, and dream decoding. Reaching full-dive virtual reality and full-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces will require much higher precision, yet every frontier begins with primitive systems—and Brain-IT, Jack Gallant, and Jean-Rémi King are part of that beginning. > **— Adapted from Alexander Wissner-Gross**, *MOONSHOTS Live, October 2026* ## Sources and Context - **Recording or publication:** [MOONSHOTS Live at 25:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM&t=1544s) — The poster text is an explicit non-verbatim adaptation assembled from the source excerpts below. It preserves the speaker's argument while removing spoken-language filler, restoring the subject, and completing the mechanism or consequence needed for independent use. - **Exact transcript excerpt at [25:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM&t=1544s):** “Yeah, so this actually is a result from March. Uh, so it, this, the broader field of doing decoding of brain states from functional imaging or EEG or electrodes, this has a long, long history at this point. I remember 20-plus years ago at this point, the, the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley was doing this to decode the, the visual cortex of cats. Actually, like, 20-plus years ago, we were starting to see images of how a cat perceives the world, and I remember, like, the first grainy images that were coming out were, like, a cat seeing a branch. And, and then moving fast-forwarding to non-invasive fMRI, there are so many groups at this point. Meta in particular has been sponsoring quite a bit of work in this area, from Jean-Marie King, many other groups doing language decoding, vision decoding. M- more recently, even fast-forwarding to just the past 24 hours, Neuralink just announced their first scaling law studies on pre-training foundation models, frontier models, off of Neuralink electronic data. Uh, I, and th- this is on an individual patient basis, but they're capturing copious amounts of, of data at high temporal resolution, much higher than fMRI can capture. fMRI, like rule of thumb, fMRI can give you, with today's technology, at best cubic millimeter spatial resolution for voxels and, at best, approximately one second temporal resolution. So that somewhat limits how well you can do in terms of decoding a person's internal visual state. You can still, make no mistake, there are folks who have, are making a cottage industry out of decoding dreams, uh, and de- decoding visually what a person perceives or what they hallucinate in their visual cortex while they're sleeping or while they're awake, and I'm sure this is going to be a, a vibrant, vibrant space training frontier models and foundation models off of copious amounts of fMRI data. But ultimately, where I think this has to go, there are spatial and temporal limits to fMRI decoding. It's going to require higher temporal precision and higher spatial precision to get where we really want to go, which is full dive VR and full bandwidth BCIs, and we will get there, but the good news is you have to start somewhere. The large language models had to start with GPT-1, just a, a single artificial neuron that could predict the polarity of Amazon reviews. Similarly here, if we're gonna get full bandwidth BCIs, it's going to start with studies like BrainIT and Jean-Marie King and Jack Gallant.” - **Reconciled source dossier:** [[research/ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots|ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots]] — preserves broadcast order, speaker reconciliation, editorial conventions, and the surrounding argument from which this Reminder was promoted. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] - **Article:** [[articles/2026 Annual Report on Brain-Computer Interfaces|2026 Annual Report on Brain-Computer Interfaces]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas|The Organic-Synthetic Brain Atlas]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Alexander Wissner-Gross|Alexander Wissner-Gross]] - [[wiki/Full-Bandwidth Brain-Computer Interface|Full-Bandwidth Brain-Computer Interface]] - [[wiki/Dream Reconstruction|Dream Reconstruction]] ## Share on Social Media ``` Functional MRI has hard spatial and temporal limits, but it is already supporting vision, language, and dream decoding. Reaching full-dive virtual reality and full-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces will require much higher precision, yet every frontier begins with primitive systems—and Brain-IT, Jack Gallant, and Jean-Rémi King are part of that beginning. — Adapted from Alexander Wissner-Gross, MOONSHOTS Live, October 2026 https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-alexander-wissner-gross-brain-decoding-is-on-the-road-to-full-bandwidth-interfaces ```