NeuroGen: Activation optimized image synthesis for discovery neuroscience

•We propose a state-of-the-art generative framework, called NeuroGen, which allows synthesis of images that are optimized to achieve specific, predetermined brain activation responses in the human brain.•We apply this framework as a discovery architecture to amplify differences in regional and individual brain response patterns to visual stimuli, which we then verify using several thousand observed image responses measured with fMRI.•We demonstrated that NeuroGen has the capacity of generating images predicted to achieve activation levels that are more extreme than the predicted activations of the best natural images.•NeuroGen extends the utility of brain encoding models and opens up a new avenue for exploring, and possibly precisely controlling, the human visual system.