You already know what’s going on in my mind, but what if you could see exactly what I’m thinking about? Might not be long before you can, because there have been some minor successes in thought decoding technology.
I say “thought decoding” instead of “mind reading”, because what researchers are working on is a way to decode and analyse brain activity in order to predict the thought, or more precisely, the image in a person’s mind. So far they’ve had limited success using small sample sizes of YouTube videos and thorough scans to study brain activity in order to assume which videos would produce what sort of activity.
The research is freaky with a heaping serving of awesome, and I can’t wait until mindcasts are the newest trend. [New Scientist]
pan.sapiens
Saturday, October 31, 2009 at 1:38 AMIn theorey, determining what someone is looking at by way of a brain scan should be easy, due to the retinotopic oranisation of the “V1″ area of the visual cortex. It’s a LONG qway from reading someones thoughts, though (reading their perceptions would be closer, but even that would be overstaing things). It would be easier and more practical just to look at what the person was looking at, though. Then you would know what they were seeing, any you wouldn’t need a brain scanner thingy.
Alex
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 6:23 PMThere are some things we’re better off not knowing. And by ‘some’, I mean ‘pretty much 99% of what anyone is thinking’.