2009-01-05

Mind Reading and Thought Identification

Clipped from: Scientists move a step closer to mind-reading | Science | guardian.co.uk
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Scientists move a step closer to mind-reading

Scientists have developed a method for reading a person's mind using brain scans.

Once it has been trained on an individual subject's thoughts, the computer model can analyse new brain scan images and work out which noun a person is thinking about - even with words that the model has never encountered before.

The model is based on the way nouns are associated in the brain with verbs such as see, hear, listen and taste. The research will inevitably raise fears that scientists could soon be able to read a person's mind without them realising.


Clipped from: nsf.gov - National Science Foundation (NSF) News - A Computer That Can 'Read' Your Mind - US National Science Foundation (NSF)

National Science Foundation

A Computer That Can 'Read' Your Mind


Research team's work with brain scans and computational modeling an important breakthrough in understanding the brain and developing new computational tools


Predicted fMRI images for "celery" and "airplane" show significant similarities with the observed images for each word. Red indicates areas of high activity, blue indicates low activity.

Clipped from: How Technology May Soon "Read" Your Mind, 60 Minutes: Incredible Research Lets Scientists Get A Glimpse At Your Thoughts - CBS News

CBS News

How Technology May Soon "Read" Your Mind


The technology that is transforming what once was science fiction into just plain science is a specialized use of MRI scanning called "functional MRI," fMRI for short. It makes it possible to see what's going on inside the brain while people are thinking.

"You know, every time I walk into that scanner room and I see the person's brain appear on the screen, when I see those patterns, it is just incredible, unthinkable," neuroscientist Marcel Just told Stahl.

He calls it "thought identification."


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Clipped from: May 29: Computer Model Reveals How Brain Represents Meaning - Carnegie Mellon University

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Carnegie Mellon Computer Model
Reveals How Brain Represents Meaning

Predicts Brain Activation Patterns for Thousands of Concrete Nouns



The team, led by computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, constructed the computational model by using fMRI activation patterns for 60 concrete nouns and by statistically analyzing a set of texts totaling more than a trillion words, called a text corpus. The computer model combines this information about how words are used in text to predict the activation patterns for thousands of concrete nouns contained in the text corpus with accuracies significantly greater than chance.

Related:
Scientists move a step closer to mind-reading | Science | guardian.co.uk
nsf.gov - National Science Foundation (NSF) News - A Computer That Can 'Read' Your Mind - US National Science Foundation (NSF)
How Technology May Soon "Read" Your Mind, 60 Minutes: Incredible Research Lets Scientists Get A Glimpse At Your Thoughts - CBS News
May 29: Computer Model Reveals How Brain Represents Meaning - Carnegie Mellon University
Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging
Machine Learning Department - Carnegie Mellon University