Scientists Use fMRI To (Sort of) Read Minds 57
NigelTheFrog writes "Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers' hippocampuses. From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly where they were in a virtual reality landscape. 'Specific parts of each participant's hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn "predict" new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person's pattern of brain activity.'"
First post (Score:3, Funny)
Practical applications (Score:2)
Employers are already looking into early-stage prototypes they can fit on their employees to predict their position and movement within buildings. This will save them time and money since they will never again have to ask, "where did Tom go?"
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Someone after you obviously did.
Re:Practical applications (Score:4, Interesting)
Employers are already looking into early-stage prototypes they can fit on their employees to predict their position and movement within buildings. This will save them time and money since they will never again have to ask, "where did Tom go?"
Unfortunately those early tests have shown a slight decrease in productivity after every computer within 10 feet of the 3 Tesla magnetic field failed to boot. There was also a serious setback when one of the testers forgot to remove the prototype before taking a train home and derailed it.
Volunteer? (Score:3, Funny)
How can a hippopotamus give consent?
Re:Volunteer? (Score:5, Funny)
The paw the ground once for yes, and eat you for no.
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"By entering this trap you are regarded as agreeing to get MRI brain scans...
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Now they want to understand what they read. (Score:4, Insightful)
The difficulty is trying to make head or tail out of what is read. Until the technology can tell the difference between: "I wonder what's her IQ"" and "Dose she swallow?" it's like scanning pages of Japanese text and handing it to someone who speaks only English.
These guys have taken another step towards translating that data into useful information. I say they should keep it up, maybe in a few decades we can won't just hook up a machine that tells us if you are lying, we will hook up a machine that tells us where you hid the body.
After that the next step is full mind download.
At least uploading stuff into someone else's brain isn't difficult. Hell. I just did it to you.
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"Dose she swallow?"
Alas, some doses are bigger than others.
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At least uploading stuff into someone else's brain isn't difficult. Hell. I just did it to you.
But that process is slow and unreliable, and requires a working system to receive it. Kind of like TCP/IP as opposed to drive cloning.
Re:Now they want to understand what they read. (Score:5, Insightful)
Electricity can be measured in excruciatingly fine detail so reading minds has been possible for some time now.
Perhaps you could explain how that's so. Seems to me that while the study is interesting enough, the results are sufficiently crude to dismiss any notion of "reading minds". Put another way, we're still at the "poke it with a stick and see what happens" stage of inquiry. Carefully calibrated poking, perhaps, but not much more.
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we won't just hook up a machine that tells us if you are lying, we will hook up a machine that tells us where you hid the body.
Hey! I haven't even finished implementing the file system...
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Where is the evidence that our ability to read the mind will continue to be accurate and detailed? For all we know, it may be possible to read the bigger things, but it may be a case of diminishing returns, where the ability to precisely and reliably read a person's complex train of thought might simply not be possible. When you start talking about full mind downloads, you're making some major assumptions about the nature of the mind that the evidence at the moment simply doesn't suggest. I'm not saying it
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Thoughts are just electrical signals flowing throgh your brain
Cool idea. If you could provide some solid evidence for it, you'll have solved many very complicated problems.
plural (Score:3, Informative)
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I don't think so. The word is of Greek derivation, not Latin, so it should be hippocampodus or something like that.
But really, it's annoying when people use the '-i' suffix for a plural when there is no basis to.
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Not England (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously, if you have a campus full of hippos, you're in the US.
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Here in the US we call it the "freshman fifteen" [wikipedia.org]. Or how we referred to it when I was in college: "dorm butt" (and "dorm gut")
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So THAT is the ultimate question that belongs to the ultimate answer (42)!
Shit. Now we must build a third computer that explains to us, why the Matrix is 42...
Improved learning (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if this kind of thing can be used to train people to better remember locations. If it could see how I respond, maybe it could help me train to use my brain more effectively. For example, train myself to make a specific kind of association I'm not used to making. Or better yet, the computer model could just do the thinking for me :)
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Scientists know enough about the brain today that we are can design procedures that target-train a cognitive processes and see results in the neural tissues responsible for those cognitve processes.
An example with working memory. If you commit to doing the n-back test 20 minutes daily, and gradually increase difficulty, you will not only see improveme
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Related Work (Score:5, Interesting)
Tom Mitchell et al. have done some work on differentiating memory recall of nouns. Hearing him give a talk on the subject really made me rethink some things. To what extent are different human brains structured similarly? It seems as though two people thinking about a given noun (e.g. a hammer) really have similarities in their fMRI patterns.
Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529141354.htm [sciencedaily.com]
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1191 [sciencemag.org]
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These studies are actually about as unrelated as you can get. Both are trying to decode a parameter from fMRI BOLD response (as do hundreds of other studies), but they are looking at very different brain areas and different tasks. There are hundreds of rodent electrophysiology studies showing that specific hippocampal cells respond when the rodent is in a specific position in its cage. There is even a study showing spatially selective cells in the human hippocampus ( Ekstrom et al., 2003 [nature.com]).
The really remarkab
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I'm pretty sure this research doesn't say that. A separate computational model was computed for each individual subject. The successful ability to predict which noun they were thinking about is for that individual person only.
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You're right that the links I pointed to don't say that. However, the presentation I attended included some results for tests in which a model trained on one person were used to determine which noun was being considered by another person. They achieved fairly high accuracy in these tests as well. (Of course the accuracy was slightly lower than when using a model trained for the subject.)
When featured on an episode of 60 minutes, they tried using an existing model on one of the reporters and happened to a
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I believe you if it was in the presentation, but in general that is *much* harder problem since you can't really get voxel to voxel correspondence when registering brains across people.
Tin foil hat (Score:1)
Where is my Tin foil hat!!??
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Re:Tin foil hat (Score:4, Informative)
Well it would be simillar to that. aluminum is not magnetic so you wouldn't notice anything when getting into the machine, but as soon as the scan started, the ultrafast sweeping of the gradient magnet's fields that's needed to perform echo sequences with the time resolution relevant to fMRI would create HUGE ohmic heating in the conductive metal and severely burn you, if not light your hair on fire.
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Well it would be simillar to that. aluminum is not magnetic so you wouldn't notice anything when getting into the machine, but as soon as the scan started, the ultrafast sweeping of the gradient magnet's fields that's needed to perform echo sequences with the time resolution relevant to fMRI would create HUGE ohmic heating in the conductive metal and severely burn you, if not light your hair on fire.
Actually you should be more concerned with the RF pulse generating electrical currents in a conductive loop than anything. The gradients are pretty trivial in comparison.
Attention Comrades of the Untied Kingdom! (Score:5, Insightful)
We are please to announce that new mind reading technology will now be installed into all 5 million cctv cameras, airports, public houses, and anywhere else we want to.
Thank you for your continued obedience (or else).
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Oh yeah, MRI doesn't work very well if you're more than a few feet from the magnet core
Oh yeah yeah hold still while we scan your thoughts (wiggle wiggle)
actually, it is a little like mind reading (Score:2)
I gave the original article a good solid skim. There are some truly interesting things in it, few having much to do with mind reading, even at a superficial level. The authors have presented some interesting evidence concerning how space is represented in the medial temporal lobe. The mind reading, such as it is, is not a parlor trick to make headlines. It's a demonstration that the activity in a given region is sufficient to predict a specific mental state, namely knowledge of spatial location.
Of cours
Brain reading (Score:4, Funny)
Shouldn't that be brain reading, rather than mind reading?
old news (Score:2, Informative)
Another Yawner (Score:2)
Cognitive map. That's the concept that your brain places you (and your position/posture) in the space you perceive. It has been localized to the hippocampus for decades. It has even been reliably recorded from rat brains that were replaying a learned maze while the rat was dreaming.
The only news here is that this study used fMRI to show what's been shown many times many ways.