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?'"

Comments

Sex over IP ?

[shadowdata]

If thoughts can be decoded and translated into binary and transmitted across the net , can we have the real cybersex ????? :P

Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking

[ikkonoishi]

In a word.
Porn.

Re:Possible other uses

[Xerxes2695]

It already has (to some extent) http://www.brainwavescience.com/HomePage.php

Re:Possible other uses

[rkcallaghan]

Oh dear please, no.

Talk about a literal interpretation of "thoughtcrime"! I shudder to think of the outcomes if our very thoughts could be used against us. How many slashdotters have thought some nasty things about our current president?

Besides, it says "what you are thinking" and not "anything you ever said, did, or thought."

~Rebecca

Re:Language

[Danger Stevens]

The problem with that is our words for things may be confusing, but they are far more standardized than our thoughts for things.

Words are the handles that we put on our reality. They are difficult to standardize often even within one language because of the variety of experiences that different speakers will have associated with each word.

In computer terms it's like this:
A Mac, a PC, and a Linux box are all using the same HTTP protocol to access websites. They have identical interactions with the exception of the User-Agent header. This is like people using words.
If we were to plug directly into a person's brain in order to attempt to translate the meanings behind words it would be like removing the abstraction layer of a standardized http protocol and looking at the innards of each computer system. As each computer handles internal communication in wildly differing manners it would be much harder to understand what these computers were trying to do than if we experienced them only through their web browser.

So a person using words is not unlike a wrapper or abstraction layer - it makes meaning MORE accessible, not less. Universal translators will be impossible until we have properly mapped all the different meanings in all the different brains.

For more info, I recommend The Language War by Robin Tolmach Lakoff

No more diplomacy

[elgatozorbas]

But I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.

I doubt I would like to see it in my lifetime.

While language can be a barrier between people, it also allows for a suitable wording of your ideas, for diplomacy etc. If everyone could 'read' other's real ideas, people would not necessarily get along better...

Don't know what to say

[PhreakinPenguin]

Rarely do I read about something that makes my jaw drop but this is one of them. All I can say is wow. I can't even imagine the possibilities that this could bring to disabled people. It's things like this that make me believe that anything is possible.