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Generating Text From Functional Brain Images
Med-trump writes "Can you get a text output of your thoughts? Princeton scientists show that it is possible to generate text about the mental content reflected in brain images. The paper published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience describe the functional magnetic resonance imaging method used to identify areas of the brain activated when study participants thought about physical objects such as a carrot, a horse or a house."
It's pretty cool boobs, when you can boobs just think of boobs anything and it gets boobs directly input boobs.
I think I'll beer go have a beer lie down.
Boobs for now.
You're basically talking about Whorfianism AKA linguistic relativity. Strong Whorfianism suggests that language has a deep restrictive influence on cognition (for example, speakers of a language which lacks temporal tense might have trouble understanding the flow and passage of time). Weak Whorfianism, on the other hand, suggests that the effects of language on thought are subtle, but not non-existent. Strong Whorfianism has essentially been discarded in modern linguistics, but weak Whorfianism is still the subject of research and interest.
One interesting example of weak Whorfianism is color recognition. Speakers of languages with names for many colors are often more-easily able to distinguish between different colors than speakers of languages with fewer color names. For instance, English has "blue," while Russian has "" and "" (dark blue and light blue, respectively). The two Russian words for "blue" have no morphemes in common; they are completely different words for two different kinds of "blue." So there is no way to directly translate "blue" into Russian. I'm unsure if any studies on linguistic relativity have dealt with Russian and English speakers specifically, but if such a study yielded results similar to other studies, it would have revealed that Russians are better at distinguishing between shades of blue than English speakers.
Another interesting aspect of the argument comes from experiential knowledge that people find difficult to think about or express in language. An example would be the experience some people have after emptiness meditation.
Emptiness meditation involves stopping all conscious thought, as best you can. It could entail either shutting down the language centers of the brain, or shutting down the frontal cortex, I'm not sure, but after doing so what people often report is described as "understanding". A thought process that is outside of language, and in that way, outside of reality from the perspective of the subject. (This is why these experiences are often described as "transcendent").
What I find interesting is that the process involves a method of thinking purely without language, but is described as "not thinking" or "stopping thought". So tied language is to our thoughts.
One possibility I've heard before is that through essentially shutting down the frontal cortex, or at least having a different region of the brain "lead", the subconscious (not in the Freudian sense, but the non-thinking brain that is talked about in books like "The Power of Now" or "Blink") is allowed to both direct and utilize areas of the brain that it commonly does not. This experience could be perceived as either "true self", as some people report, or "conversation with God", as others do, as the process would be perceived differently depending on the person involved.
FanFictionRecs.net
If you haven't see this documentary yet, I highly recommend it - it's especially apt in the context of this article; maybe the neuro-interface augmentations really are coming faster than we'd think?
(the game is great, too, by the way)
Anyway, I'm signing up for proper eye augmentations as soon as those are available. Then we'll see...