MRIs That Read Your Thoughts

Nicholas Roussos writes "Functional MRIs have been used in several studies to accurately predict what volunteers were looking at even when they themselves were unsure. According to the BBC, 'When two images were flashed in quick succession, the volunteers only consciously saw the second one and were unable to make out the first. But the brain scans clearly distinguished the patterns of brain activity created by the "invisible" images.'"

Comments

Exciting?

[Anonymous Commando]

"You could use it to detect people's prejudices, intuition and things that are hidden and influence our behaviour... it is exciting."

Ok, I'm not normally part of the tinfoil-hat brigade, but this guy scares the living hell out of me...

Stay the hell out of my mind, we don't need the thought police.

Re:Exciting?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Look. Have you seen the size of MRI equipment? Who could sneak that on you?

2) Can you read? "You could use it". Don't you realize by now that 90% of headlines and soundbites (for EVERYTHING, not just /.) are ridiculously overstated for effect? Like those people who claim to be learning 40 languages, so you think they'll be as fluent in 40 languages as you are in english, but in reality, they're learning "hello" in 40 languages? Or like this MRI claim, probably made by a university student so s/he can get his paper?

Do you really think we (the human race) has the knowledge to decode thought patterns on a wholesale basis? At best, you can correlate ONE PERSON'S prejudices to a certain pattern on a certain MRI, but only because you already knew the result before hand.

Yes but...

[Cyclotron_Boy]

to quote TFA "That's a long way off, but it is exciting." It is indeed a long, long way off. Specifically, the experiments involved only detected & predicted what the brain was seeing. The predition part was only demonstrating that the brain might see something, but not understand/decode immediately. The computer detected the visual input, but the brain didn't process it. This is a long way from predicting prejudices, fears, and phobias.

But on the other hand, we might not be cognisent of subliminal cues that trigger anger, fear, rejection, etc. in the brain, but the computer might be able to detect the triggers more readily/quickly/reliably. Who knows? We (and Big Brother) will have to see...

and the ubiquitous "I for one welcome our mind-reading computer-aided MRI overlords."

They totally misunderstand their own research.

[Elwood P Dowd]

A team at University College London found with fMRI they could tell what a person was thinking deep down even when the individual was unaware themselves.

This research may present novel information, but this is not what you were "thinking deep down". Many parts of your brain do their processing automatically and without conscious intervention. If you break the part of your brain that identifies objects visually for cognition, but do not break the part of your brain that identifies objects visually for physical use, you can use objects that you cannot consciously identify. You could use a kleenex without knowing that it was on your desk ahead of time.

It should be completely unsurprising that without being aware of an image being flashed, other ("unaware") parts of your brain are doing things with that image. That doesn't mean that it's what you were "thinking deep down".

"This is the first basic step to reading somebody's mind "

Researcher Dr Geraint Rees

This quote is in reference to fMRI detecting whether you are paying attention to vertical stripes or diagonal stripes. It is well known that parts of the primate visual cortex are dedicated to identifying verticle and horizontal lines. This is like saying that Neil Armstrong's first breath was the first step towards Alpha Centauri. Yeah, maybe. Maybe not.

Re:They totally misunderstand their own research.

[Pinefresh]

Or maybe the BBC misunderstands the research. Or maybe they're trying to make it simple enough for everyone to understand.

The BBC article is a common kind of media fraud...

[Futurepower(R)]

The BBC article is a common kind of media fraud, in my opinion. The BBC, to make its article more interesting, has vastly over-extended what the science shows. The researchers themselves commonly participate in this kind of fraud, as is shown in this quote from the article,

"When volunteers were shown a plaid pattern made up of two different sets of stripes but asked to pay attention to only one set, the program was able to tell which one the subjects were thinking about."

"Dr Rees said: 'This is the first basic step to reading somebody's mind...' "

Complete baloney. It was the first step toward detecting what someone was doing when they cooperated fully.

Fraud, fraud, fraud. BBC, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Unfortunately

[Corpus_Callosum]

Unfortunately, any behavior that is learned rather than instictual will show pattern responses that are unique in every brain. It should be possible to map out sexual response, hunger, pain and other instictual (read: built-in) programming.

But a database for other stuff would be person specific. A general purpose mind-reader is unlikely to happen anytime soon.