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Scientists 'Read Thoughts' Using Brain Scans
Bruce_of_the_Cosmos writes "Researchers at University College London and University College Los Angeles say that the can 'read' thoughts using fMRI brain scans. While a subject's attention switched between two images, scientists could monitor activity in the visual cortex and accurately determine, among other things, which image the patient was looking at."
*Scan* WRONG! I was thinking about the implosion of a star, not explosion! HAHA
Homer: "I know you can read *my* thoughts, scientists! Meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow."
I predict a hughe cash infushion in the near future for this research project from our great government in the name of anti-terrorism.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
There's an even easier method for determining whether a guy is looking at teh porn or teh still life painting.
Unless of course he has friut fetish.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This should make /. moderation much easier
*evil cackle*
But it only has one button...
The Admin and the Engineer
Instructions here
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When it happens, Aug 7th 2035, everyone will remember RM6f9, slashdot UID 825298, was the person that predicted this. You shall go down in history young sir.
But you need to science-up the description, there. This sort of thing leads to those "NASA spent millions on device that tells which picture a person is looking at by scanning their brain, Russia looked over their shoulder," space-pen jokes.
Alcoa stock skyrockets. Wall Street stunned.
The time course of fMRI is currently way too slow for use in neuroprosthetics. As for reading thoughts -- the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought. The mind reading, neuroprosthetic spin is just that, spin. The really importart finding in these studies is the correlation of fMRI signals with electrical activity in the brain. fMRI measures increases in blood flow which has been suggested to be caused by increases in electrical activity in the brain - these studies provide evidence to suport this hypothesis. Scientist that study the electical signals in the brain directly (like me) have routinely critized fMRI studies because until now in was unclear how the results related to signal processing in the brain. There is still one major short coming of fMRI. Imagine that 50% of the neurons in an area of the brain increase their electrical activity while 50% equaly decrease their activity. This would result in a large change in signal processing but no change in blood flow and therefore would not show up in a fMRI scan. That said, fMRI is a powerful tool for understanding neural function, particularly in human who for some reason object to letting you stick electrodes into their brains. These new studies make in an even more useful tool.
Well, duh. Guess why they decided to describe this project using such language. In reality, they are probably aiming for a more general understanding of the brain. But that military grant is certainly tempting...
I can read thoughts too if i show you 2 images and look at where your eyes point I will be able to accurately determine where you were looking. This amazing new discovery can be yours for only 3 easy payments of 99.99
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
This isn't mind reading, they seem to be far from it. This is just a crude process that still has yet to show actual results. Actual mind reading devices are probably 45-60 yrs away. There needs to be many major break throughs in understand human physiology and a better understanding of how the brain works. Unless someone shows up with a whole neural map of the brain and in detail specifics what each nerve ending and so on does, than this kinda technology has some years to go. But if someone were to come out with that within the next 5 yrs, cut that time frame in half.
fMRI uses powerful magnetic fields (> 1 Tesla) to generate a signal. So your tin foil cap won't help. But on the bright side, with current technology it take a super-cooled machine weighing several tons to do the job.
The researchers know what stimuli the participant is engaged with. It would be remarkable if they didn't know and could guess what general type of stimuli (fright, romance, etc.) the participant is engaged with based on the brain's varying reactions.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
My research work (and my doctoral dissertation) involved developing technology to enable exactly these studies. The basic mechanism which these studies use was published back in 1992 by three groups almost simultaneously (Harvard-MGH, U. of Minnesota and the Medical College of WI).
After almost 15 years, the workings of the brain that causes this phenomenon is still not completely understood. What happens when a region of the brain starts working towards a particular mental task, be it visual, auditory, memory, etc., is that blood supply to that part of the brain increases to such an extent that there is an oversupply of oxygen (via hemoglobin). The differing levels of oxy- and deoxy- hemoglobin have different enough magnetic properties that the change in relative amounts can be detected by a suitably equipped MRI scanner.
I've been telling this joke at parties for years when people ask me what I do - much better than saying I'm an engineer developing MRI hardware and software.
Bottom line - we've been able to do this for years. But the workings of the living brain are incredibly complex, and it'll be a little while before we get to the bottom of things. That piece on lie detectors using brain scans that came out a few months ago was based on this same technology/research. But we really don't know anywhere near enough for me to think that research was anything close to valid.
I can't even read my own mind. ... ... ... ...nope, still nothing.
computerdude33's stuff: My blog of wonder.
Every time someone publishes an interesting fMRI result the press call it mind reading. This is study about binocular rivalry and being able to predict which of two rivalrous stimuli are being attended just by looking at MR signal. Lots of people are working on this sort of thing. What happens is that under certain conditions, when two stimuli are presented separately to each eye, rather than combining the images, the brain maintains both separately and "switches" between which of the two are currently being attended. You have some limited ability to control which of the two you attend to, although you kind of habituate and then spontaneously switch. It's similar to viewing a Necker cube: you can switch which faces are in front or in the back of the cube. Anyway, the coolness of this study is that they could tell which of the two stimuli were being attended just by looking at the brain data (confirmed by the subjective reports of the participants in real time). It's important to note that they don't do this in real time! The MR data take a lot of post-processing and statistical analysis before they get anything out of it.
Anyway, the novelty here is that rather than stimulus predicting what brain area should be recruited (like most MR vision studies), they say, given that this bit of brain lit up, we're going to predict what you were looking at (or in this case, attending to). This is mind-reading, but you know, only in the most academic and post-hoc sense. It's not the first time it's been done, btw. Jim Haxby has done this sort of thing with people looking at overlapping pictures of people and places.
It's cool (to scientists) without needing to sensationalize it as mind-reading. Real mind-reading is coming, don't worry. But not for decades, if not a century. And yes, the government is interested in it (they approach brain scientists about this sort of stuff all the time). Right now they want a "better" lie detector. (By which, I suppose, means one that works at all since the polygraph is bunk). But we're a long, long way off.
Schizophrenia has nothing to do with split personalities, you are thinking of disassociative identity disorder.
What you're seeing is not the raw data.. we don't know how to get that (if 'raw data' even makes sense in this context).. you're seeing noise from the activity of the brain. It's like sticking an aerial next to a PC, recording the RF noise and playing that back next to a different PC - you aren't going to suddenly get a free copy of Quake downloaded into it...
a) Breasts
b) Breasts running Linux
c) A Beowolf cluster of breasts
d) Cowboy Neal's breasts
e) Other breasts (Specify)
What?
The mind works in a rather non linear way - preemtively sending signals through so many weird connections: which is why we can get caught out with word games that trick our answers.
Imagine walking through the airport thinking:
This party is going to be the bomb! When do I board the airplane?
or worse:
I hope not terrorists carry bombs ontot he plane and blow us up! look at all this security, why are they looking at me! (and then you start to sweat)
You then get shot, in the head, with an elephant gun, at close range, while being rubber gloved by a man with very large hands.
Not a nice thought. Oh man check out my word of the day!!
To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: implants
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
SWEET!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Most MRI measurements are extremely sensitive to any metal/magnetic material in the image field of view. If you had any metal near your head (a bobby pin or a paper clip, etc), it would destroy the image, assuming it didn't get pulled off by the magnet. As for tinfoil, the article doesn't say what field the magnet is, but it's probably between 3 and 7 tesla (128-300 MHz). At those frequencies, the skin dept of aluminum is small enough that you wouldn't be able to see anything through the tinfoil.
Sodium pentathol aka "truth serum", and other various drugs/methods, already allows one today to determine quite well what one is thinking / knows.
Technology may eventually the authorities, or whoever, to get an idea as to what one is looking at / possibly thinking of at a given moment from a distance; appealing to marketers, but may be of limited usefulness to authorities, since people's thoughts can be so random / common to what others are thinking - even the most law abiding people have various deep, dark thoughts, but most don't act upon them.
In a nutshell, reading one's thoughts isn't all that useful until one acts upon them - and for many types of actions, that is impossible to trully determine for sure ahead of time due to the randomness of nature; chaos theory.
Ron
Missing option: breasts covered in hot grits!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Hi, I'm Joe Bruin.
We at the University of California, Los Angeles have been able to read your thoughts for a while now. Previous to this story, we've been doing it by pumping sleeping gas into your classroom once a week, and taking MRIs of your brain while you're out (though for 8am classes, we don't bother with the gas). We particularly enjoy reading the minds of some of the North Campus girls. Those chicks are wild.
Also, we invented the Internet.
Thank you for using URSA, go number one Bruins.
Joe