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Scientists Use fMRI To (Sort of) Read Minds
NigelTheFrog writes "Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers' hippocampuses. From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly where they were in a virtual reality landscape. 'Specific parts of each participant's hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn "predict" new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person's pattern of brain activity.'"
I read kdawson's mind and knew he was about to post this article. Thanks England for getting me a first post!
How can a hippopotamus give consent?
Employers are already looking into early-stage prototypes they can fit on their employees to predict their position and movement within buildings. This will save them time and money since they will never again have to ask, "where did Tom go?"
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Thoughts are just electrical signals flowing throgh your brain (darn, I'm sounding like Morpheus). Electricity can be measured in excruciatingly fine detail so reading minds has been possible for some time now.
The difficulty is trying to make head or tail out of what is read. Until the technology can tell the difference between: "I wonder what's her IQ"" and "Dose she swallow?" it's like scanning pages of Japanese text and handing it to someone who speaks only English.
These guys have taken another step towards translating that data into useful information. I say they should keep it up, maybe in a few decades we can won't just hook up a machine that tells us if you are lying, we will hook up a machine that tells us where you hid the body.
After that the next step is full mind download.
At least uploading stuff into someone else's brain isn't difficult. Hell. I just did it to you.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Shouldn't that be hippocampi?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Obviously, if you have a campus full of hippos, you're in the US.
...of a number between 1 and 43.
I wonder if this kind of thing can be used to train people to better remember locations. If it could see how I respond, maybe it could help me train to use my brain more effectively. For example, train myself to make a specific kind of association I'm not used to making. Or better yet, the computer model could just do the thinking for me :)
Tom Mitchell et al. have done some work on differentiating memory recall of nouns. Hearing him give a talk on the subject really made me rethink some things. To what extent are different human brains structured similarly? It seems as though two people thinking about a given noun (e.g. a hammer) really have similarities in their fMRI patterns.
Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529141354.htm
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1191
Insert self-referential sig here.
Where is my Tin foil hat!!??
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
So between Gizmodo, physorg and digg... kdawson just likes to repost articles from the last 3 weeks that long since appeared on other sites.
/. one headline at a time.
This is KDawson killing
i know kungfu
Our Glorious Leader Gordon Brown-shirt is pleased to announce a major victory on he war against: terror/crime/pedophiles/obesity/knife culture/the Royal Bank of Scotland. (delete as applicable)
We are please to announce that new mind reading technology will now be installed into all 5 million cctv cameras, airports, public houses, and anywhere else we want to.
Thank you for your continued obedience (or else).
I gave the original article a good solid skim. There are some truly interesting things in it, few having much to do with mind reading, even at a superficial level. The authors have presented some interesting evidence concerning how space is represented in the medial temporal lobe. The mind reading, such as it is, is not a parlor trick to make headlines. It's a demonstration that the activity in a given region is sufficient to predict a specific mental state, namely knowledge of spatial location.
Of course, just about every BOLD fMRI study ever carried out could be called an exercise in mind reading. Does this study get us any closer to the science fiction version? Well, it's a nice application of multivariate analysis methods, i.e., methods that allow us to investigate relationships between some cognitive state of interest and the pattern of neural activity over a larger area of the brain (not just a single "voxel"). These methods are not exactly new, but they do have a bit of a mind-reading flavor to them, in that they can allow us to extract information about mental states from their distributed representations in the brain. So maybe I have to put aside my knee-jerk reaction and concede that there is a little something in there that you could call mind reading if you wanted to.
Shouldn't that be brain reading, rather than mind reading?
CBS 60 Minutes did a piece on FMRI at CMU in January. Watch it -- http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4697682n.
Cognitive map. That's the concept that your brain places you (and your position/posture) in the space you perceive. It has been localized to the hippocampus for decades. It has even been reliably recorded from rat brains that were replaying a learned maze while the rat was dreaming.
The only news here is that this study used fMRI to show what's been shown many times many ways.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
We are reliant on the interpreter.
If they say a particular combination of brain cells firing together means, "Yep, I stole the money", who's to say that another person might not interpret it differently, and the person whose brain is being scanned might have a third claim as to what it all means.
A graph of electrical activity is not the same as thought, even if the two are inextricably linked.
I see a future full of injustice ahead, all because some dimwit politician with a desire to control the minds of others grabbed the technology without really understanding it.