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Former Oculus Exec Predicts Telepathy Within 10 Years (cnet.com)
Mary Lou Jepsen is a former MIT professor with 100 patents and a former engineering executive at Facebook, Oculus, Intel, and Google[x] (now called X) -- and "she hopes to make communicating telepathically happen relatively soon." An anonymous reader quotes CNET:
Last year Jepsen left her job heading up display technology for the Oculus virtual reality arm of Facebook to develop new imaging technologies to help cure diseases. Shortly thereafter she founded Openwater, which is developing a device that puts the capabilities of a huge MRI machine into a lightweight wearable form. According to the startup's website, "Openwater is creating a device that can enable us to see inside our brains or bodies in great detail. With this comes the promise of new abilities to diagnose and treat disease and well beyond -- communicating with thought alone."
This week Jepsen went further and suggested a timeframe for such capabilities becoming reality. "I don't think this is going to take decades," she told CNBC. "I think we're talking about less than a decade, probably eight years until telepathy"... Jepsen, who has also spent time at Google X, MIT and Intel, says the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain. "Literally a thinking cap," Jepsen explains... The idea is that communicating by thought alone could be much faster and even allow us to become more competitive with the artificial intelligence that is supposedly coming for everyone's jobs very soon.
Jepsen tells CNBC, "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down."
This week Jepsen went further and suggested a timeframe for such capabilities becoming reality. "I don't think this is going to take decades," she told CNBC. "I think we're talking about less than a decade, probably eight years until telepathy"... Jepsen, who has also spent time at Google X, MIT and Intel, says the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain. "Literally a thinking cap," Jepsen explains... The idea is that communicating by thought alone could be much faster and even allow us to become more competitive with the artificial intelligence that is supposedly coming for everyone's jobs very soon.
Jepsen tells CNBC, "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down."
Theranos, unfortunately.
If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down
So, it currently takes a huge freakin' MRI to just be able to read the brain's thoughts*. And to the best of my knowledge, no one has figured out a way of inputting a thought into the brain electronically. And she thinks she can accomplish both with a device the size of a cap in eight years? Good luck with that.
* Even "Reading the brain's thoughts" is quite a stretch from what an MRI actually does. We just see on a screen what parts of the brain light up like a Christmas tree, then interpret what the brain is doing based on our current mapping of brain-functions. But, if you were to "think" the message, "Please buy diapers on your way home from work today," an MRI today at best will show that your prefrontal cortex lights up, indicating you are task-managing, as well as your amygdala, indicating a sense of emotional frustration. Other areas will light up as well, but whether these areas mean diapers, work, cheese, rutabagas, or who knows what is still anybody's guess.
Given the state of the art in this field: the current state of neuroscience and related advances in neurosurgery (fields I work in), I'd say there is zero chance of this happening in 8 years. Scalp electrodes give messy and very coarse signals. You get good signals from electrodes embedded in brains, but they're very localised and electrodes degrade fairly quickly and need to be removed.
soylentnews.org
the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain.
MRI is an acronym for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. How is that the same as IR? Most MRI's are 1.5 Tesla. and the preferred MRI scanners for neuro are 3 T. If that could be shrunken down to something that could be put in a ski cap, it would be truly impressive. But you really don't want to be walking around with a 3T magnetic field around your head. Not unless you want to have your skull bashed in by any ferrous objects you may encounter.
From the "That's today" we can read your mind link ...
Here's the actual study, "Predicting the Brain Activation Pattern Associated With the Propositional Content of a Sentence: Modeling Neural Representations of Events and States"
http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu/reprin...
I've only skimmed it. This would take me quite a while to decode. But you should have a look at it; this is way cool. But it isn't what Dr Jepson is claiming. not at all.
What they're seeing is the patterns generated in the brain when reading sentences. Not thinking about things, but reading.
They record all the parts of the brain that light up during the reading given to the people in the fMRI. They discovered that these patterns are nearly the same for the people who participated. So, knowing these patterns, they can tell what sentence you had just read.
But where it gets interesting is that it's not just the sentence decode part of the brain, they're seeing the other parts where the concept representations are. I think.
From the article:
The main contribution of this article is the integrated, computational account of the relation between the semantic content of a sentence and the brain activation pattern evoked by the reading of the sentence.
The initial success of the modeling using neurally plausible features suggests that the building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are shaped by neural systems rather than by lexicographic considerations. This approach predicts that the neural dimensions of concept representation might be universal across languages, as studies are beginning to suggest [Yang et al., 2017]. In this perspective, the concepts in each language would be underpinned by some subset of a universal set of NPSFs
NPSF is neurally plausible semantic features. Hope that helps.
and in the limitations section,
"The study was also limited to the processing of visually presented sentences, and the neural signature at the end of the reading of a sentence contained the representations of all of the component concepts in the sentence. If the sentences were presented in the auditory modality, it is possible the neural signature at the end of the listening to a sentence might not be the optimal decoding window for all of the component concepts in the sentence. "
It's not easy to create. This foirmer professor/former Oculus exec/former whatever is talking out of her ass.
For one thing, functional MRI is nowhere near as magically effective as she suggests. It's possible to 'read' the thoughts of dead fish in these machines. Results require extensive postprocessing and context-aware interpretation by trained personnel.
For another, these machines are among the most sophisticated devices this side of a CERN facility. They carry seven-figure price tags. They require helium-cooled superconducting magnets, high-energy RF excitation with industrial-scale power requirements, sensitive receivers with lots of signal processing power, and last but not least, long integration times. You almost need a nuclear physicist on staff just to keep one running.
This type of hardware is not going to be featured in the next-generation iPhone. It's dictated by hard physical constraints that cannot be worked around with any known technology.
I will eat an entire Apple store if FMRI or anything like it becomes accessible at the consumer level within 50 years, much less 10.
You are correct about the MRI part of things and the need for sophisticated experimental design in which a single task may take two minutes of concentrated motionlessness on the part of the subject.
There is, however, a technology called fNIRS (functional near infrared spectroscopy) which works on a similar principle as fMRI (changes in blood oxygenation related to function) which only requires the ability to send and detect light through the skull. This is what I believe they're referring to. fNIRS has better temporal resolution than fMRI but its spatial resolution is way worse. Also, the light can't penetrate as deeply (fMRI can image the entire volume).
While telepathy is far, some of the mentioned things are within the realm of possibility, albeit mostly with cooperating subjects and carefully designed, task specific experiments.