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.'"
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.
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 :)
Re:Now they want to understand what they read. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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).
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.