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I’m sure USC’s Speech Articulation group gained all sorts of important phonological insights from these videos of an opera singer and a beatboxer doing their respective things in an MRI machine. Here’s the insight I gained: tongues are gross.
It wasn’t supposed to happen—not yet at least—but it did: This past June, a judge in the Indian state of Maharashtra convicted a woman of killing her ex-fiance, citing as proof an EEG scan showing “experiential knowledge” of the crime. Many people do think there’s something to this, that an EEG or MRI scan of the noggin can depict lies and truth if read correctly, but in the US it’s agreed that this is experimental science at best, and snake-oil sales at worst.
You have probably heard stories about patient injuries or death occurring when someone introduces a heavy metal object into the same room as an MRI machine. Obviously, we are talking about some seriously powerful magnets here. However, the US$10 million magnet currently under construction at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida is expected to reach 100 tesla when finished—about 67 times more powerful than a typical MRI machine.
What’s that monkey thinking about when he’s mushing down that banana or tossing faeces at you? Well, you’re looking at it–this is a map of where a macaque’s thoughts live. It’s made possible by new 3D visualisation algorithms developed by neuroscientists at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston which render a brain’s billions of individual neuron connections in full-colour 3D, with each visible strand representing several tens of thousands of the too-small-to-image neural pathways. It’s all done by simply applying new processing to existing MRI scan data, and thankfully, it works on human brains too. galleryPost('dsiscan', 5, '');
Computer science is definitely reaching the danger zone when actual words can be spotted using MRI scans. In the image above, researchers from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh predict what the words “celery” and “airplane” look like when someone thinks of them, and then they compare the prediction to actual brain scans, with frightening similarity. The study was “calibrated” with nine students, each thinking of 58 different words. Tom Mitchell, one of the lead researchers, told Reuters the goal is to determine how the brain organises information, but how do we know Dr. Mitchell won’t abuse this newfound power by, say, winning a billion dollars on Jeopardy? We don’t, is my point. [Reuters]
Are you one of the millions of Americans living without health insurance? If so, then you know how expensive hospital visits are, especially for fancy tests like MRIs. But hey, don’t worry. If you need an MRI, you can always just use this makeshift MRI that was built using a cardboard tube, coils of wire, and other items that you can pick up at your local hardware store. The thing is, it really works.
Researchers at the University of California have apparently found a way to read our minds. In an article published in the journal Nature, the researchers wrote that they have found that they can use MRI brain scans to determine which of a range of images a person is looking at. The article notes that the effect is analogous to the ‘pick a card, any card’ trick; using the MRI scans they could determine which card the person is looking at.
