Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The paw the ground once for yes, and eat you for no.
Yay me!
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).
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.