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Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking
neurospace writes "Caltech scientists have successfully decoded movement plans from the brains of awake humans. This work has direct application to the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply using their thoughts. The lead scientist on this project will be interviewed on Sunday, March 20, on the SETI Institute's weekly radio show, 'Are We Alone?'"
If we could find the mechanical outcome of what we think when we listen to music.
There was actually Nature paper a few days ago about that very topic:
Musical imagery: Sound of silence activates auditory cortex
Auditory imagery occurs when one mentally rehearses telephone numbers or has a song 'on the brain' -- it is the subjective experience of hearing in the absence of auditory stimulation, and is useful for investigating aspects of human cognition1. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify and characterize the neural substrates that support unprompted auditory imagery and find that auditory and visual imagery seem to obey similar basic neural principles.
Here's a popular press article.
"We played music in the scanner (FMRI) and then we hit a virtual "mute' button," said David Kraemer, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department and author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature.
With familiar songs, "we found that people couldn't help continuing the song in their heads, and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped," Kraemer said.
The researchers said the findings extend previous research that showed sensory-specific memories are stored in the brain regions that first experienced those events.
"It's fascinating that although the ear isn't actually hearing the song, the brain is perceptually hearing it," said co-author William Kelley, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.
Here's a link to the actual research paper (and abstract) describing the work:
Rizzuto, DS, Mamelak, AN, Sutherling, WW, Fineman, I and Andersen, RA (2005) Spatial selectivity in human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In press at Nature Neuroscience.
The functional organization of lateral prefrontal cortex is not well understood, and there is debate as to whether the dorsal and ventral aspects mediate distinct spatial and non-spatial functions, respectively. We show for the first time that recordings from human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex show spatial selectivity, supporting the idea that ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in spatial processing. Our results also indicate that prefrontal cortex may be a source of control signals for neuroprosthetic applications.
For an overview of the neural prosthetics work in Richard Andersen's lab at Caltech, this presentation is handy.
I wonder if this new science will be used to prove the guily or innocent in crimes?
TFA is about signals in the brain regarding physical movement. What does this have to do with proving innocence or guilt with crimes? "Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking" was just the title. It's not a story about scientists being able to peer into people's memories or complex thoughts.
Mind.Forth AI for Robots is a primitive but evolving artificial intelligence which may be able to enter into a direct mind-link -- a kind of "Vulcan Mind-Meld" a la Star Trek -- with human brains implanted with this new technology.
User Manual for Mind.Forth invites high-tech "early adopters" to set aside and dedicate an old MS-DOS machine to exactly this sort of brain communication technology, and to seeing who will hold the bragging rights to the longest-running artificial intelligence for parsecs around.
Sure they're reliable. They just aren't lie detectors. They're interrogation aids, just like bright lights, bamboo shoots, rubber hoses, racks, ...
Hearing may actually be harder.
Not at all: http://www.cochlear.com/
My mother's got one. Speaking with her, you cannot tell.
All rites reversed 2010