Mind-Reading Technology Speeds Ahead
- By scanning blogs of brain activity, scientists may be able to decode people's thoughts, dreams and intentions.
- Although companies are starting to pursue brain decoding for a few applications, such as market research and lie detection, scientists are far more interested in seeing if these techniques can tell them about the basic principles governing brain
organization and how it encodes memories, behavior and emotion.
- The computer program uses the details of a scan to guess what the participant has watched in the past.
- Brain decoding took off about a decade ago, when neuroscientists realized that there was a lot of untapped information in the brain scans they were producing using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
- That technique measures brain activity by identifying areas that are being fed oxygenated blood, which light up as colored blobs in the scans.
- To analyze activity patterns, the brain is segmented into little boxes called voxels — the three-dimensional equivalent of pixels — and researchers typically look to see which voxels respond most strongly to a stimulus, such as seeing a face.
- By discarding data from the voxels that respond weakly, they conclude which areas are processing faces.
- Jack Gallant from the University of California trained the program by showing it patterns of brain activity elicited by a range of images and film clips.
- People around the world use techniques like these to try to decode brain scans and decipher what people are seeing, hearing and feeling, as well as what they remember or even dream about.
- Reports say that these techniques have brought mind reading from the realms of fantasy to fact.
- Companies are starting to pursue brain decoding for market research and lie detection.
- Scientists are using this process to learn about the brain itself.
