Brain decoding: Reading minds By scanning blobs of brain activity, scientists may be able to decode people's thoughts, their dreams and even their intentions. · Kerri Smith1 23 October 2013
" See how scientists decode vision, dreamscapes and hidden mental states from brain activity. Jack Gallant perches on the edge of a swivel chair in his lab at the University of California, Berkeley, fixated on the screen of a computer that is trying to decode someone's thoughts. · Deep-learning computers close in on artificial intelligence On the left-hand side of the screen is a reel of film clips that Gallant showed to a study participant during a brain scan. And on the right side of the screen, the computer program uses only the details of that scan to guess what the participant was watching at the time. Anne Hathaway's face appears in a clip from the film Bride Wars, engaged in heated conversation with Kate Hudson. The algorithm confidently labels them with the words 'woman' and 'talk', in large type. Although companies are starting to pursue brain decoding for a few applications, such as market research and lie detection, scientists are far more interested in using this process to learn about the brain itself. Gallant's group and others are trying to find out what underlies those different brain patterns and want to work out the codes and algorithms the brain uses to make sense of the world around it. “you can do basically anything with this”. . Russell Poldrack, an fMRI specialist at the University of Texas at Austin, says that decoding allows researchers to test existing theories from psychology that predict how people's brains perform tasks. “There are lots of ways that go ,,” he says. In early studies1, 2 scientists were able to show that they could get enough information from these patterns to tell what category of object someone was looking at — scissors, bottles and shoes, for example. “We were quite surprised it worked as well as it did,” says Jim Haxby at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who led the first decoding study in 2001.
you can't stop yourself can yoiu Dumbo..EVAN states..listening to me waste my time trying to convey myt "special problem" as i don't wish to be part of this Experiemnt....anymore EXPERIENCE Dumbo not EXPERIMENT! I try to ignore the sound and the visual of a severed finger near my morning coffee..oh the things they can "show " you. .are perhaps worse than the things one hears. . and still my "condition" of being Igor'ed up and "apped" by The Team is treated to no fanfare ,no legulation no help but the "trying' eyes of another shrink ..more and more so i want OUT of this The Interface has turned personal..Milgram-ish in it's intention although i do not think anyone consciously willed IT that way I am a RUINER of Progress.they once called me ..Urban Astronaut... YES ,"EVAN graphs' back when you were a SPORT instead of an ever growing liability... >The same is true for dreams. Kamitani and his team published their attempts at dream decoding in Science earlier this year6. They let participants fall asleep in the scanner and then woke them periodically, asking them to recall what they had seen. The team tried first to reconstruct the actual visual information in dreams, but eventually resorted to word categories. Their program was able to predict with 60% accuracy what categories of objects, such as cars, text, men or women, featured in people's dreams. Decoders are generally built on individual brains, unless they're computing something relatively simple such as a binary choice — whether someone was looking at picture A or B. But several groups are now working on building one-size-fits-all models. “Everyone's brain is a little bit different,” says Haxby, who is leading one such effort. At the moment, he says, “you just can't line up these patterns of activity well enough”. Standardization is necessary for many of the talked-about applications of brain decoding — those that would involve reading someone's hidden or unconscious thoughts. Haynes says that he was recently approached by a representative from the car company Daimler asking whether one could decode hidden consumer preferences of test subjects for market research. Companies looking to serve law enforcement have also taken notice.
No Lie MRI in San Diego, California, for example, is using techniques related to decoding to claim that it can use a brain scan to distinguish a lie from a truth. Law scholar Hank Greely at Stanford University in California, has written in the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (Oxford University Press, 2011) that the legal system could benefit from better ways of detecting lies, checking the reliability of memories, or even revealing the biases of jurors and judges. “People have a fear of it, but if it's used in the right way it's enormously liberating.” Brain data, he says, are no different from other types of evidence. “I don't see why we should privilege people's thoughts over their words,” he says. 1. Haxby, J. V. et al. Science 293, 2425–2430 (2001). 2. Cox, D. D. & Savoy, R. L. et al. NeuroImage 19, 261–270 (2003). 3. Haynes, J.-D. & Rees, G. Nature Neurosci. 8, 686–691 (2005).
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