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Scientists Use fMRI To (Sort of) Read Minds

Posted by kdawson on from the penny-for-your-thoughts-nevermind-we'll-just-take-them dept.

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.'"

20 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. First post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I read kdawson's mind and knew he was about to post this article. Thanks England for getting me a first post!

  2. Volunteer? by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 3, Funny

    How can a hippopotamus give consent?

    1. Re:Volunteer? by Hecatonchires · · Score: 5, Funny

      The paw the ground once for yes, and eat you for no.

      --

      Yay me!

    2. Re:Volunteer? by hirose.it · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's easy.
      "By entering this trap you are regarded as agreeing to get MRI brain scans...

  3. Now they want to understand what they read. by Forge · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 ?
    1. Re:Now they want to understand what they read. by Fastball · · Score: 2, Funny

      "Dose she swallow?"

      Alas, some doses are bigger than others.

    2. Re:Now they want to understand what they read. by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 2, Insightful

      At least uploading stuff into someone else's brain isn't difficult. Hell. I just did it to you.

      But that process is slow and unreliable, and requires a working system to receive it. Kind of like TCP/IP as opposed to drive cloning.

    3. Re:Now they want to understand what they read. by value_added · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Electricity can be measured in excruciatingly fine detail so reading minds has been possible for some time now.

      Perhaps you could explain how that's so. Seems to me that while the study is interesting enough, the results are sufficiently crude to dismiss any notion of "reading minds". Put another way, we're still at the "poke it with a stick and see what happens" stage of inquiry. Carefully calibrated poking, perhaps, but not much more.

  4. plural by Hognoxious · · Score: 2, Informative

    Shouldn't that be hippocampi?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  5. Not England by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Obviously, if you have a campus full of hippos, you're in the US.

  6. Improved learning by Mia'cova · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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 :)

    1. Re:Improved learning by buswolley · · Score: 2, Informative
      Yes certainly. In fact I am involved in a project that will try to target train the hippocampus and working memory components of declarative episodic memory.

      Scientists know enough about the brain today that we are can design procedures that target-train a cognitive processes and see results in the neural tissues responsible for those cognitve processes.

      An example with working memory. If you commit to doing the n-back test 20 minutes daily, and gradually increase difficulty, you will not only see improvements in the post-test working memory performance, but you will see structural changes in the neural tissues in the cortex responsible for working memory. Moreover, to the extent that working memory improves recall and recognition memory, you will see improvements there too.

      --

      A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.

  7. Related Work by bazald · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Related Work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      These studies are actually about as unrelated as you can get. Both are trying to decode a parameter from fMRI BOLD response (as do hundreds of other studies), but they are looking at very different brain areas and different tasks. There are hundreds of rodent electrophysiology studies showing that specific hippocampal cells respond when the rodent is in a specific position in its cage. There is even a study showing spatially selective cells in the human hippocampus (Ekstrom et al., 2003).

      The really remarkable thing about this study is that they have managed to find spatially selective voxels in an fMRI. Electrophysiology has provided similar results, but records from a region hundreds of thousands of times smaller and requires invasive surgery. Results here are patient-specific; there is no spatial map in the hippocampus, and place cells (or "place voxels," in this case) are located in different places for each subject.

  8. Attention Comrades of the Untied Kingdom! by owlnation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  9. Re:Practical applications by The+Grim+Reefer2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?"

    Unfortunately those early tests have shown a slight decrease in productivity after every computer within 10 feet of the 3 Tesla magnetic field failed to boot. There was also a serious setback when one of the testers forgot to remove the prototype before taking a train home and derailed it.

  10. Re:Tin foil hat by drawlight · · Score: 2, Funny

    What would the side effects be if you were wearing a tin foil hat inside a MRI machine? I hope it isn't anything like wearing a tin foil hat inside a microwave.

  11. Re:Tin foil hat by deglr6328 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well it would be simillar to that. aluminum is not magnetic so you wouldn't notice anything when getting into the machine, but as soon as the scan started, the ultrafast sweeping of the gradient magnet's fields that's needed to perform echo sequences with the time resolution relevant to fMRI would create HUGE ohmic heating in the conductive metal and severely burn you, if not light your hair on fire.

    --
    - "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
  12. Brain reading by colinrichardday · · Score: 3, Funny

    Shouldn't that be brain reading, rather than mind reading?

  13. old news by NicknamesAreStupid · · Score: 2, Informative

    CBS 60 Minutes did a piece on FMRI at CMU in January. Watch it -- http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4697682n.