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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?
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 ?
Obviously, if you have a campus full of hippos, you're in the US.
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.
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).
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.
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!"
Shouldn't that be brain reading, rather than mind reading?