Mind Reading Made Possible

Mind Reading

A new computer algorithm can guess what you are looking at based on brain activity alone

By Christopher Intagliata

Legions
of science-fiction authors have imagined a future that includes
mind-reading technology. Although the ability to play back memories
like a movie remains a distant dream, a new study has taken a
provocative step in that direction by decoding neural signals for
images.

Neuroscientist Kendrick Kay and his colleagues at the University of
California, Berkeley, were able to successfully determine which of a
large group of never-before-seen photographs a subject was viewing
based purely on functional MRI data. By analyzing fMRI scans of viewers
as they looked at thousands of images, Kay’s team created a computer
model that uses picture elements such as angles and brightness to
predict the neural activity elicited by a novel black-and-white
photograph. Then the researchers scanned subjects while showing them
new snapshots. Most of the time Kay’s model could single out which
image the subject was viewing by matching its prediction of brain
activity to the actual activity measured by the fMRI scanner, although
very similar pictures tended to baffle the program. …more