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Biotech Science

Scientists 'Read Thoughts' Using Brain Scans 147

Posted by CmdrTaco from the my-wife-says-she-can-do-that-naturally dept.
Bruce_of_the_Cosmos writes "Researchers at University College London and University College Los Angeles say that the can 'read' thoughts using fMRI brain scans. While a subject's attention switched between two images, scientists could monitor activity in the visual cortex and accurately determine, among other things, which image the patient was looking at."
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Scientists 'Read Thoughts' Using Brain Scans More

Scientists 'Read Thoughts' Using Brain Scans

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  • *Scan* WRONG! I was thinking about the implosion of a star, not explosion! HAHA

  • Obligatory Simpsons... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:48AM (#13264015)
    Homer: "I know you can read *my* thoughts, scientists! Meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow."

  • I bet the CIA want ones real bad... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fallen Kell ( 165468 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:50AM (#13264022)
    I predict a hughe cash infushion in the near future for this research project from our great government in the name of anti-terrorism.

    • Re:I bet the CIA want ones real bad... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They already have this, why do you think I wear tin foil hats. Them and the circus midgets. And the Gray Aliens. And the people who live under the stairs in mom's basement. It's my basement damn it!!
      • "And the Gray Aliens"

        No no no... GAY aliens! [deadmilkmen.com] They're in it with the queers! They're building landing strips for gay Martians! I swear to God! You know what, Stuart? I like you. You're not like the other people here in the trailer park.
      • fMRI uses powerful magnetic fields (> 1 Tesla) to generate a signal. So your tin foil cap won't help. But on the bright side, with current technology it take a super-cooled machine weighing several tons to do the job.
        • Tinfoil would help because any metal will cause magnetic field (and signal) inhomogineities, which manifest themselves as pretty big artifacts in the image. MRI is dependent on both magnetism and RF.
        • Also, if it's an MRI made by General Electric (the current Signa Excite branded 1.5 and 3.0T series especially), you don't have to worry much anyway... since most of them are defective heaps!

          Heh. It's the nature of MRI to be extremely sensitive. Considering you're measuring the bulk magnetization of a very small number of protons, it's amazing the technology even works! So far I've been pretty happy with the performance of the Excite 3T, though it doesn't mean we didn't have any problems getting there. O

    • Duh... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FhnuZoag ( 875558 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @12:23PM (#13264165)
      Well, duh. Guess why they decided to describe this project using such language. In reality, they are probably aiming for a more general understanding of the brain. But that military grant is certainly tempting...
    • Huge influx of cash or not, there's a hell of a difference between working out which of two pre-selected pictures a subject is looking at, and working out what they're actually thinking...

  • Bah. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:50AM (#13264025)


    There's an even easier method for determining whether a guy is looking at teh porn or teh still life painting.

    Unless of course he has friut fetish.

  • MUWAHAHAHA! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spodlink05 ( 850651 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:51AM (#13264027)
    This should make /. moderation much easier *evil cackle*
  • Does anyone else get the feeling that incredible leaps forward in signal reception and processing technology have all been leading toward just such a development? Wi-Max direct to brain, anyone?
    (My prediction, less than 30 years - you saw it here, folks)

    • Re:And so it begins... (Score:5, Funny)

      by FLAGGR ( 800770 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:56AM (#13264051)
      When it happens, Aug 7th 2035, everyone will remember RM6f9, slashdot UID 825298, was the person that predicted this. You shall go down in history young sir.
    • the title is misleading. they can see what you see. your brains sees. did you hear of the blind person who got himself an eye and can see with it? it doesnt have to be bad.
    • Funny. I recall an interview with a so-called "futurologist" in a computer magazine about 20 years ago who said that in the future, computers would directly interface with our brains and who, when asked how long this would take, said the technology'd be there in about 30 years.

      There seems to be something magical about "30 years"; it's short enough to whet people's appetites, but long enough so that technical feasability does not have be considered - it's long enough to claim that there simply will be new di

  • Rumor: New Mind Interface from Apple (Score:4, Funny)

    by catmistake ( 814204 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:53AM (#13264034) Journal
    But it only has one button...
  • Should that be University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)? that's what i was thinking at least.
    • Yes. If the submitter (obviously English) actually RTFA, he would notice it actually says University of California, Los Angeles.

      I'm English, and I knew that (even before I studied at UC Davis)
      • If the submitter... actually RTFA


        Hey, it's Slashdot. You can't expect half the readers to RTFA, why expect it of the submitter?

    • Re:err... (Score:3, Funny)

      by joe_bruin ( 266648 )
      Hi, I'm Joe Bruin.

      We at the University of California, Los Angeles have been able to read your thoughts for a while now. Previous to this story, we've been doing it by pumping sleeping gas into your classroom once a week, and taking MRIs of your brain while you're out (though for 8am classes, we don't bother with the gas). We particularly enjoy reading the minds of some of the North Campus girls. Those chicks are wild.

      Also, we invented the Internet.

      Thank you for using URSA, go number one Bruins.
      Joe

  • Build Your Own Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (Score:5, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @11:55AM (#13264041)
    Instructions here [zapatopi.net]

  • Philosophical questions (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder how far this can go to answer the question of the mind-body problem.
    • " I wonder how far this can go to answer the question of the mind-body problem."

      Dude, I seriously think you've got a problem if you're calling your "mind-body" for a "problem". :P

  • Neat! (Score:3, Funny)

    by CosmeticLobotamy ( 155360 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @12:05PM (#13264094)
    But you need to science-up the description, there. This sort of thing leads to those "NASA spent millions on device that tells which picture a person is looking at by scanning their brain, Russia looked over their shoulder," space-pen jokes.
  • Thanks to my Tin Foil Deflector Beanie.

    I dunno what the rest of you are gonna once Thought Police start patrolling though.

  • In other news (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @12:06PM (#13264102)
    Alcoa stock skyrockets. Wall Street stunned.

  • A few problems (Score:5, Informative)

    by cortex ( 168860 ) <neuraleng@gmail.com> on Sunday August 07, 2005 @12:09PM (#13264116)
    The time course of fMRI is currently way too slow for use in neuroprosthetics. As for reading thoughts -- the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought. The mind reading, neuroprosthetic spin is just that, spin. The really importart finding in these studies is the correlation of fMRI signals with electrical activity in the brain. fMRI measures increases in blood flow which has been suggested to be caused by increases in electrical activity in the brain - these studies provide evidence to suport this hypothesis. Scientist that study the electical signals in the brain directly (like me) have routinely critized fMRI studies because until now in was unclear how the results related to signal processing in the brain. There is still one major short coming of fMRI. Imagine that 50% of the neurons in an area of the brain increase their electrical activity while 50% equaly decrease their activity. This would result in a large change in signal processing but no change in blood flow and therefore would not show up in a fMRI scan. That said, fMRI is a powerful tool for understanding neural function, particularly in human who for some reason object to letting you stick electrodes into their brains. These new studies make in an even more useful tool.

    • Re:A few problems (Score:3, Insightful)

      by NoData ( 9132 )
      The time course of fMRI is currently way too slow for use in neuroprosthetic

      How about the problem of carrying around a liquid-helium cooled 3 tesla magnet and RF coil on your head? That kinda cramps the prosthetic angle.

      As for reading thoughts -- the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought.

      I have no idea what this means. You never hear or see anything consciously?
      • Even if you grant some advanced room tempeture super coductivity technology, the hemodynamic response (the increase in blood flow) is to slow for use in neuroprosthetics.

        The primary cortical areas are involved in low level signal processing - not consciousness. High level thoughts and awareness are processed in tertiary cortical areas like pre-frontal cortex. Damage to the primary cortical areas results in deafness or blindness, but you have awareness and can think. Damage to the tertiary cortical areas,
        • The key part of "neuroprosthetic" is "prosthetic". I don't think we'll ever see MR used in a prosthetic context.

          As for mind reading, I think signal to noise ratio is a lot more problematic than temporal resolution. BOLD response lags neural activity, by what 6-8 seconds? That'd still be pretty good to read somebody's mind at an 8 second latency. You can do better than that with sophisticated deconvolution methods in tightly controlled experiments. But THATs the real problem. It's the amount of signal
          • I totally agree with this.

            But just to make the point stronger, if you took out their V1 they would certainly lose visual consciousness. If anything, the case of blindsight underscores the importance of V1 in consciousness - visual information reaching higher visual areas through other paths does not have the same conscious feel to it. Not that consciousness is "located" there or anything, but it is still an important part of the whole system...

        • What about all those efferent projections from higher levels to primary areas? It seems quite plausible that they work to fine-tune sensory perception to the demands of a particular high-level task.

          If fMRI can resolve the effects those efferents have on primary cortex ... it could be sensing high-level activity.

    • You know it would be nice if the people that reported about these types of stories where as smart as you... how does mapping blood flow responces from external environmental events translate into reading a person's mind and what they are thinking given the events they are watching/hearing/smelling/etc? Can I pick your brain and ask you what you think would be the technical requirements to do such a thing? You mentioned two methods, blood flow and electrical activity...would it be neccessary to map both an
    • the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought. The mind reading, neuroprosthetic spin is just that, spin

      Except the point of this study is that during binocular rivalry, both images are input to the brain, but only one is consciously perceived at any given moment. So, using fMRI, they were able to tell which one was currently perceieved (or at least, which one was perceived a few seconds ago).

      Also, I don't see
    • Shouldn't this information at least help increase our understanding and be put to use in other methods of measuring brain activity? What about the studies done with implanted sensors and using those to control computers? There must be some kind of relation right?

      I'd also suggest for fun, that anyone interested in this stuff should watch the ghost in the shell movies and the stand alone complex series. I've always thought that we as a human race are moving toward cyberization, it's only a matter of time.

    • There is still one major short coming of fMRI. Imagine that 50% of the neurons in an area of the brain increase their electrical activity while 50% equaly decrease their activity. This would result in a large change in signal processing but no change in blood flow and therefore would not show up in a fMRI scan.

      That depends on how small an area you're talking about. fMRI can get decent spatial resolution -- obviously nothing near as good as single cell electrodes, but we do studies with a voxel size of 3

  • Stereo? (Score:1, Troll)

    by Skiron ( 735617 )
    If you hook up a schizophrenic?
  • I can read thoughts too if i show you 2 images and look at where your eyes point I will be able to accurately determine where you were looking. This amazing new discovery can be yours for only 3 easy payments of 99.99
  • For a westerner, I consider myself widely read in the works of Zen. The intent of my studies was to permit the emptiness of mind that is central to Zen practices.

    My reading and practices have lead me to try many meditation methods and, after some years, I've managed to achieve the silencing of my mind. Silencing one's stream of consciousness must be only the beginning of what the advanced practioners of Zen and other eastern belief systems hint at, because, even though I can silence my mind, I most certain

  • This isn't mind reading, they seem to be far from it. This is just a crude process that still has yet to show actual results. Actual mind reading devices are probably 45-60 yrs away. There needs to be many major break throughs in understand human physiology and a better understanding of how the brain works. Unless someone shows up with a whole neural map of the brain and in detail specifics what each nerve ending and so on does, than this kinda technology has some years to go. But if someone were to come ou
    • Actual mind reading devices are probably 45-60 yrs away.

      Thank Christ for that. I pretty much expect to be dead by then, so I won't have to worry about people finding out about... uh, never mind.

      Of course, flying cars, robot servants, cold fusion and cheap space travel will also turn out to be 45-60 years away, so I guess I can't win 'em all.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Very misleading (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AutopsyReport ( 856852 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @12:37PM (#13264241)
    A very misleading article summary and a very misleading article title to boot. All they are doing is identifying the brain's reaction to different stimuli. This has absolutely nothing to do with thoughts. Not to diminish the importance of this research, but how it relates to thought-reading is beyond me.

    The researchers know what stimuli the participant is engaged with. It would be remarkable if they didn't know and could guess what general type of stimuli (fright, romance, etc.) the participant is engaged with based on the brain's varying reactions.

    • All they are doing is identifying the brain's reaction to different stimuli.

      To the degree that's true, isn't that simply restating the obvious, that the current state of modern medicine is based on the Poke it With a Stick and See What Happens method?
    • "All they are doing is identifying the brain's reaction to different stimuli. This has absolutely nothing to do with thoughts."

      Erm, so your thoughts have nothing to do with what stimuli your brain recieves? Sounds kinda dangerous to me.
    • I think you misunderstood how the study works.

      When one image is input into each eye, you get a condition known as binocular rivalry. What happens perceptually is that you see one image for a few seconds, and then your perception "flips" to the other image. Kind of like how you can see a necker cube in two ways - the perception flips back and forth between one interpretation and another.

      So while the researchers know beforehand that they are giving the subject two images, they don't know at any given
    • I wonder though, how useful this might be on polygraph-style tests. Could you use it to tell if somebody is lying?
  • I read about this.... months ago. How come its just now on Slashdot?

  • Nothing really new here folks (Score:4, Informative)

    by for_usenet ( 550217 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @12:49PM (#13264288)

    My research work (and my doctoral dissertation) involved developing technology to enable exactly these studies. The basic mechanism which these studies use was published back in 1992 by three groups almost simultaneously (Harvard-MGH, U. of Minnesota and the Medical College of WI).

    After almost 15 years, the workings of the brain that causes this phenomenon is still not completely understood. What happens when a region of the brain starts working towards a particular mental task, be it visual, auditory, memory, etc., is that blood supply to that part of the brain increases to such an extent that there is an oversupply of oxygen (via hemoglobin). The differing levels of oxy- and deoxy- hemoglobin have different enough magnetic properties that the change in relative amounts can be detected by a suitably equipped MRI scanner.

    I've been telling this joke at parties for years when people ask me what I do - much better than saying I'm an engineer developing MRI hardware and software.

    Bottom line - we've been able to do this for years. But the workings of the living brain are incredibly complex, and it'll be a little while before we get to the bottom of things. That piece on lie detectors using brain scans that came out a few months ago was based on this same technology/research. But we really don't know anywhere near enough for me to think that research was anything close to valid.

  • I can't even read my own mind. ... ... ... ...nope, still nothing.
  • ...to trace eyeball movement?
    If it was "show two images, then guess which one the subject thinks of", that would be more interesting. Or decode contents of the image.
    For now most of the "mind reading" attempts seem to receive a single bit of information...
    • It's a good question, and I know it sounds strange, but you can't actually tell what a person is "looking" at simply by tracking their eye gaze. The reason for this is that although you can be looking at one thing, you can be attending to a completely different thing and it's this second thing that you'll actuall be processing. The phenomenon is called 'visual attention'. Normally you attend to what you're looking at but you can "covertly" shift your attention to another location/object. It's called a
  • Article was fairly devoid of specific details on how they associate brain information with thoughts beyond vague notions of brain-area activity.

    While it is true that you can get some nice readings of which areas of the brain are active, and we do know some areas of the brain associate with specific motivations and actions, to say this reads thoughts is like saying police polygraphs "detect lies".

    This seems more of a tool to intimidate people into believing they won't successfully be able to lie to an interv

  • Goddamnit (Score:4, Informative)

    by NoData ( 9132 ) <<moc.oohay> <ta> <_ataDoN_>> on Sunday August 07, 2005 @12:59PM (#13264347)
    Every time someone publishes an interesting fMRI result the press call it mind reading. This is study about binocular rivalry and being able to predict which of two rivalrous stimuli are being attended just by looking at MR signal. Lots of people are working on this sort of thing. What happens is that under certain conditions, when two stimuli are presented separately to each eye, rather than combining the images, the brain maintains both separately and "switches" between which of the two are currently being attended. You have some limited ability to control which of the two you attend to, although you kind of habituate and then spontaneously switch. It's similar to viewing a Necker cube: you can switch which faces are in front or in the back of the cube. Anyway, the coolness of this study is that they could tell which of the two stimuli were being attended just by looking at the brain data (confirmed by the subjective reports of the participants in real time). It's important to note that they don't do this in real time! The MR data take a lot of post-processing and statistical analysis before they get anything out of it.

    Anyway, the novelty here is that rather than stimulus predicting what brain area should be recruited (like most MR vision studies), they say, given that this bit of brain lit up, we're going to predict what you were looking at (or in this case, attending to). This is mind-reading, but you know, only in the most academic and post-hoc sense. It's not the first time it's been done, btw. Jim Haxby has done this sort of thing with people looking at overlapping pictures of people and places.

    It's cool (to scientists) without needing to sensationalize it as mind-reading. Real mind-reading is coming, don't worry. But not for decades, if not a century. And yes, the government is interested in it (they approach brain scientists about this sort of stuff all the time). Right now they want a "better" lie detector. (By which, I suppose, means one that works at all since the polygraph is bunk). But we're a long, long way off.
  • It's mu-metal you want for that hat. A couple of refrigerator magnets wouldn't hurt, either.
    • I'm not sure about the mu-metal, but I definitely wouldn't want to have magnets near an operating MRI machine!
    • Most MRI measurements are extremely sensitive to any metal/magnetic material in the image field of view. If you had any metal near your head (a bobby pin or a paper clip, etc), it would destroy the image, assuming it didn't get pulled off by the magnet. As for tinfoil, the article doesn't say what field the magnet is, but it's probably between 3 and 7 tesla (128-300 MHz). At those frequencies, the skin dept of aluminum is small enough that you wouldn't be able to see anything through the tinfoil.
      • It's a joke, son. I'm humorously suggesting that the men in the black helicopters have developed (or stolen it from aliens) this technology to the point of not needing seven tesla magnets.
  • They are able to get the signals from a human's brain in electric form. So if they get the signals from one man and transfer them to another, the second man will have the first man's thoughts transferred into his brain. Then the second may can be used as an intermediate interface for reading the first one's thoughts.
    • What you're seeing is not the raw data.. we don't know how to get that (if 'raw data' even makes sense in this context).. you're seeing noise from the activity of the brain. It's like sticking an aerial next to a PC, recording the RF noise and playing that back next to a different PC - you aren't going to suddenly get a free copy of Quake downloaded into it...
  • I believe it is imperative that /. reclassifies all its sections now. Here are my suggestions:
    - Mind control
    - Amateur rocketeers
    - Nigerian IT
    - Tactics in software license negotiation

  • Slashdot Poll: What Am I Thinking About Right Now? (Score:3, Funny)

    by aquatone282 ( 905179 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @01:32PM (#13264539)

    a) Breasts
    b) Breasts running Linux
    c) A Beowolf cluster of breasts
    d) Cowboy Neal's breasts
    e) Other breasts (Specify)

  • One problem (Score:3, Funny)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @02:01PM (#13264664) Journal
    The mind works in a rather non linear way - preemtively sending signals through so many weird connections: which is why we can get caught out with word games that trick our answers.

    Imagine walking through the airport thinking:

    This party is going to be the bomb! When do I board the airplane?

    or worse:

    I hope not terrorists carry bombs ontot he plane and blow us up! look at all this security, why are they looking at me! (and then you start to sweat)

    You then get shot, in the head, with an elephant gun, at close range, while being rubber gloved by a man with very large hands.

    Not a nice thought. Oh man check out my word of the day!!

    To confirm you're not a script,
    please type the word in this image: implants

    random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org

    SWEET!
  • "These findings could be used to help develop or improve devices that help paralyzed people communicate through measurements of their brain activity."

    A natural extension of that would be to enable people to control prostetic limbs with their mind.

    But, I'm confused... If I had a universal mind reading machine, instead of using it to enable me to move, I would use it to frag people without lifting a finger!

  • Sodium Pentathol aka Truth Serum Works Today (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ron Bennett ( 14590 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @03:11PM (#13264935) Homepage
    Sodium pentathol aka "truth serum", and other various drugs/methods, already allows one today to determine quite well what one is thinking / knows.

    Technology may eventually the authorities, or whoever, to get an idea as to what one is looking at / possibly thinking of at a given moment from a distance; appealing to marketers, but may be of limited usefulness to authorities, since people's thoughts can be so random / common to what others are thinking - even the most law abiding people have various deep, dark thoughts, but most don't act upon them.

    In a nutshell, reading one's thoughts isn't all that useful until one acts upon them - and for many types of actions, that is impossible to trully determine for sure ahead of time due to the randomness of nature; chaos theory.

    Ron
  • who decide to try reading my mind. WHITE-COATED SCIENTIST 1: Okay, here we go. Let's see what we have her... Good Lord! WHITE-COATED SCIENTIST 2: Is he... is that... I can't watch any more.

  • This is not the mind you are looking for!

  • The title seemed a bit misleading to me. The article didn't really seem to say "we can read thoughts", but more "we can tell what image you are looking at". Hasn't this already been done?

    Someone pointed out how it was similar to a polygraph. That was one examply that came to mind. As far as the images, I can see how one image would create one specific set of physiological responses while a different image would do the same. The fact they used very similar images (stripes...just different color stripes) m

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