This final note, from the Marketplace “this just sounds way too weird” file.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley sat some volunteers down, had them watch movie clips, and scanned their brain activity. And then, from those impulses, a computer was able to make rough reconstructions of what they saw.

Only crude shapes and movements, mind you — nothing as identifiable as a face, for example. And no, they weren’t trying to find a way to make cheap movies. But one day, they suggest, this might help, say, stroke victims, who have no other way to communicate.