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Science Technology

Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking 248

neurospace writes "Caltech scientists have successfully decoded movement plans from the brains of awake humans. This work has direct application to the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply using their thoughts. The lead scientist on this project will be interviewed on Sunday, March 20, on the SETI Institute's weekly radio show, 'Are We Alone?'"
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Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking

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  • Possible other uses (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bs15 ( 762456 )
    I wonder if this new science will be used to prove the guily or innocent in crimes?
    • I think we can all agree that the legal system has lots of laws in the very gray category.. the very reason we have many court systems, as interpretation is a delicate subject requiring, excuse the phrase, "a village to raise a child (law)".

      This technology may be used to further the success rate.. but prosecution will always hold the risk of damning an innocent.
    • by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:05AM (#11983376) Journal
      Only if the victim is paralyzed and you use this to let him point out the suspect.
      • It doesn't work that way. If they're paralyzed, it lets them move their wheelchair forward, slightly backward, and lets them flash a light once for yes and twice for no.

        Unless, of course, the paralyzed person is on Talos IV.
    • It already has (to some extent) http://www.brainwavescience.com/HomePage.php [brainwavescience.com]
    • by rkcallaghan ( 858110 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:08AM (#11983391)
      Oh dear please, no.

      Talk about a literal interpretation of "thoughtcrime"! I shudder to think of the outcomes if our very thoughts could be used against us. How many slashdotters have thought some nasty things about our current president?

      Besides, it says "what you are thinking" and not "anything you ever said, did, or thought."

      ~Rebecca
      • sometimes when people are being confronted by an authority figure they feel like they have to be on the defensive, which inturn can be interpreted as acting as guilty.

        hell, half the time the psycho owner of the company i work at is so suspicious of her employees that we feel guilty even when we haven't done anything wrong, just because she acts like we did. then she thinks we are guilty because we are acting that way. catch-22.

        • sometimes when people are being confronted by an authority figure they feel like they have to be on the defensive

          When was the last time a cop stopped you, gave you a bunch of flowers and told you you were a model citizen?

          Isn't it their job to make sure people are being as nice as possible to each other?
      • by vidnet ( 580068 )
        Don't think about polar bears!

        See, now you can't avoid thinking about it. Just replace "polar bears" with "the body I buried in the yard" and you can see how problematic that can be.

    • PLoS Biology had a very neat article on using fMRI in courtrooms last year, fMRI Beyond the Clinic: Will It Ever Be Ready for Prime Time? [plosjournals.org]. The first couple of paragraphs:

      Functional magnetic resonance imaging--fMRI--opens a window onto the brain at work. By tracking changes in cerebral blood flow as a subject performs a mental task, fMRI shows which brain regions "light up" when making a movement, thinking of a loved one, or telling a lie. Its ability to reveal function, not merely structure, distinguishes
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Thougts deal with perception and interpretaton, not necessarily with fact. This means that some people can be very convinced of their own innocence or guilt, wile this not being the case. I forgot the psychological term for this.

      I think you can make brain-joysticks by sensing brain activity in parts of the brain, but to interpret the miniscule complex traffic and put it all together to make sense of it, would require devices that are as intelligent and complex as the human brain itself. So I find it highly
    • by Anonymous Writer ( 746272 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:50AM (#11983497)

      I wonder if this new science will be used to prove the guily or innocent in crimes?

      TFA is about signals in the brain regarding physical movement. What does this have to do with proving innocence or guilt with crimes? "Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking" was just the title. It's not a story about scientists being able to peer into people's memories or complex thoughts.

      • TFA is about signals in the brain regarding physical movement. What does this have to do with proving innocence or guilt with crimes? "Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking" was just the title. It's not a story about scientists being able to peer into people's memories or complex thoughts.

        Well, you'd be surprised to find out that so called complex thoughts are just as much motor activations as normal muscle control. They both involve the part of the brain known as the Basal Ganglia, the seat of motor
    • Current lie detectors aren't reliable; doing one supporting that would just introduce more factors to make it unreliable.
    • Uh huh. I think the bet is: Will we see fully ambulatory paralyzed people at the mall before we see Mech Warriors in the field.

      But I wasn't aware of the show. One of the reasons to read /. I've been frequently disappointed in NPR's Science Friday since about 9/11. Seems like they air a lot of soft tech segments: "What are we going to do about the nursing shortage" and the like. This show looks promising.
  • Language (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lachlan76 ( 770870 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @04:45AM (#11983318)
    Good as this is, what I'm really waiting for is a way to tap into the language center. Imagine: an interface which can work, regardless of the language spoken by the person. No more need for translation, everything could be held in a form identified directly by the brain.

    But I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.
    • Re:Language (Score:3, Funny)

      by isorox ( 205688 )
      What's wrong with stickign a fish in your ear?
    • Re:Language (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Danger Stevens ( 869074 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:30AM (#11983448) Homepage
      The problem with that is our words for things may be confusing, but they are far more standardized than our thoughts for things.

      Words are the handles that we put on our reality. They are difficult to standardize often even within one language because of the variety of experiences that different speakers will have associated with each word.

      In computer terms it's like this:
      A Mac, a PC, and a Linux box are all using the same HTTP protocol to access websites. They have identical interactions with the exception of the User-Agent header. This is like people using words.
      If we were to plug directly into a person's brain in order to attempt to translate the meanings behind words it would be like removing the abstraction layer of a standardized http protocol and looking at the innards of each computer system. As each computer handles internal communication in wildly differing manners it would be much harder to understand what these computers were trying to do than if we experienced them only through their web browser.

      So a person using words is not unlike a wrapper or abstraction layer - it makes meaning MORE accessible, not less. Universal translators will be impossible until we have properly mapped all the different meanings in all the different brains.

      For more info, I recommend The Language War by Robin Tolmach Lakoff
      • Re:Language (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Escherial ( 806342 )
        Mod parent up; I totally agree with this. Too often people try to get at the "pure" intention behind language, without realizing that language formalizes and refines abstract thought, similar to how mathematics and physics formalize and refine intuitive, but sometimes faulty concepts about how numbers and objects work.
      • How do you know this? Babies from different countries "talk" the same up to a certain age, if everyone's thoughts were different as you assume surely they would all talk differently (even within the same country until they learnt that country's language). It could be more like a load of identical machines, only some of them are on an Ethernet network while others are using Token Ring.
        • Babies from different countries "talk" the same up to a certain age, if everyone's thoughts were different as you assume surely they would all talk differently

          Babies aren't "speaking" their thoughts. Babies don't talk. What you hear is crude vocalizations, determined primarily by the physical shape of the equipment. There are no specific thoughts attached to those noises, any more than their spasmodic leg kicking and arm waving are "walking" and "reaching". There is no universal language of thought, and n

        • Among other things, you seem to be assuming that people who use the same language map thoughts in the same way. I'm nearly certain that this is incorrect.

          I have partial and incomplete model of the ways that people map their thoughts, and it already predicts 16 different ways based on the primary data structures used to represent meaning. (It also predicts that most programmers will fall into only 4 of those groups, and primarily into two of them.) The different modes of thought yield different strengths a
    • No more diplomacy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by elgatozorbas ( 783538 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @06:15AM (#11983553)
      But I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.

      I doubt I would like to see it in my lifetime.

      While language can be a barrier between people, it also allows for a suitable wording of your ideas, for diplomacy etc. If everyone could 'read' other's real ideas, people would not necessarily get along better...

      • While language can be a barrier between people, it also allows for a suitable wording of your ideas, for diplomacy etc. If everyone could 'read' other's real ideas, people would not necessarily get along better...

        That's what the "politenessizingtude filter" is for.

        User thinks, in Elbonian: "Microsoft sucks, man!"

        Translator speaks, in English: "It is the opinion of this one that perhaps it is the case that Microsoft exceeds expectations in the domain of suckitude. You are a fine specimen of humanity

    • But is that really the way the brain works? As we know, every brain is different, and the things you learn cause actual physical pathway changes in your brain. The very act of learning a language - any language - might make that very same thing impossible. Besides, who says the brain can identify ANYTHING directly, unless you're not even using language at all, and working with sensory data. Colors, smells, et cetera.
  • by nbharatvarma ( 784546 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @04:46AM (#11983321)
    If we could find the mechanical outcome of what we think when we listen to music.
    • by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:09AM (#11983392) Journal
      If we could find the mechanical outcome of what we think when we listen to music.

      There was actually Nature paper [nature.com] a few days ago about that very topic:

      Musical imagery: Sound of silence activates auditory cortex

      Auditory imagery occurs when one mentally rehearses telephone numbers or has a song 'on the brain' -- it is the subjective experience of hearing in the absence of auditory stimulation, and is useful for investigating aspects of human cognition1. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify and characterize the neural substrates that support unprompted auditory imagery and find that auditory and visual imagery seem to obey similar basic neural principles.


      Here's a popular press article [tampabay.com].

      "We played music in the scanner (FMRI) and then we hit a virtual "mute' button," said David Kraemer, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department and author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature.

      With familiar songs, "we found that people couldn't help continuing the song in their heads, and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped," Kraemer said.

      The researchers said the findings extend previous research that showed sensory-specific memories are stored in the brain regions that first experienced those events.

      "It's fascinating that although the ear isn't actually hearing the song, the brain is perceptually hearing it," said co-author William Kelley, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.
  • Mandatory (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 19, 2005 @04:47AM (#11983326)
    We can rebuild him. We have the technology.

    We have the capability to make the world's first Bionic man.

    Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before.

    Better . . . stronger . . . faster.

    - Julio
  • uh oh.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Keruo ( 771880 )
    "two pennies of your thoughts"

    "humm"

    EWGAD *slap*

    please think of the humanity and patent this quick
  • by Anonymous Coward
    ...giant robots are much cooler and also possible with this technology. Bring me my EVA, please.
    • I would prefer a robot that did not blind the pilot with pain when it is damaged...

      Pain serves a useful "don't do that" function when it is from your body, but in a robot that can be repaired when the fight is over it is just an unneeded distraction.
  • Sex over IP ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shadowdata ( 804281 ) <billyam@linuxasia. o r g> on Saturday March 19, 2005 @04:55AM (#11983351) Homepage
    If thoughts can be decoded and translated into binary and transmitted across the net , can we have the real cybersex ????? :P
    • Re:Sex over IP ? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tsioc ( 787745 )
      that would include stimulating your brain, not just reading it... possibly more than just your brain
      • Re:Sex over IP ? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by iwan-nl ( 832236 )

        Stimulation of other parts of the body is unnesessary if/when the signals this stimulation would trigger can be sent right into the brain. The brain would not know the difference between real stimulation and recorded or emulated signals.

        Sending data right into the brain could make matrix-like simulations possible. However, it will probably take a lot of time before we have reverse engineered all of the brain's data structures.

  • It's not that hard (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Scorillo47 ( 752445 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @04:57AM (#11983356)
    You have to detect the presence of a few general classes of thoughts: up/down. left-right. With only these two dimensions you can then do anything. But this is still far from being real "thought reading".
  • Scientists may record what I am thinking, but it won't be free, and they can only pass it on to a maximum of 3 other scientists.
    However the effort required to sign up for these DRM'ed thoughts involves signing up to all sorts of "special deals", hurdles, traps - god forbid anyone actually read the license.
    The quality of these DRM'ed thoughts may also be substandard.... but hey, at least those drunk ramblings will be legit!
  • by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @04:59AM (#11983361) Journal
    In a word.
    Porn.
  • Look out! (Score:3, Funny)

    by dauthur ( 828910 ) <johannesmozart@gmail.com> on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:02AM (#11983367)
    Oh shyte, here comes the return of the tin-hat men!
  • revolution (Score:5, Funny)

    by tsioc ( 787745 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:02AM (#11983369) Homepage
    is this nintendo's "revolution"? doubt it but this open up many possibilities I would be afraid to use it for driving... I see someone attractive walking on the side of the road and the car turns towards her and runs her over! would be useful for entertainment though, in addition to helping people with physical disabilities of course...
    • it would be coded into a car navigation that if your pupils dilated, temperature rose, and your heart rate sped up along with a larger than usual degree of change in navigation (eye sight as you put it), it would error-correct itself.. at such a point, it would have algy's in there to recognize the rose, and know you must be in trouble to try and run of the rode into an object at that point.. so it would maintain course unless more stimuli were present (ie: turning the wheel.. gas and/or braking more than u
    • "I see someone attractive walking on the side of the road and the car turns towards her and runs her over!

      Or it turns toward her, and transforms in to Optimus Sexbot the robotic love machine!

      Any sex crazed 13 year old geek can tell you what happens next.

  • by imess ( 805488 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:12AM (#11983401)
  • by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:21AM (#11983425) Homepage
    This is all great, but the REAL question we are all asking: Do Tinfoil Hats block this thing?
  • by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:26AM (#11983441) Journal
    Here's a link to the actual research paper (and abstract) describing the work:

    Rizzuto, DS, Mamelak, AN, Sutherling, WW, Fineman, I and Andersen, RA (2005) Spatial selectivity in human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In press at Nature Neuroscience. [caltech.edu]

    The functional organization of lateral prefrontal cortex is not well understood, and there is debate as to whether the dorsal and ventral aspects mediate distinct spatial and non-spatial functions, respectively. We show for the first time that recordings from human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex show spatial selectivity, supporting the idea that ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in spatial processing. Our results also indicate that prefrontal cortex may be a source of control signals for neuroprosthetic applications.


    For an overview of the neural prosthetics work in Richard Andersen's lab at Caltech, this presentation [caltech.edu] is handy.
  • by dannytaggart ( 835766 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @05:41AM (#11983479) Homepage
    Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking

    They have suceeded where my girlfriend failed.
  • by zalas ( 682627 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @06:13AM (#11983551) Homepage
    Since the brain seems to adapt its structure to suit its environment (such as giving someone partial "vision" by stimulating their back with an array of little elements which correspond to the pixels on a camera), won't it mean that different people will have slightly different "wiring" for this to totally work on everyone? On the other hand, since the brain is somewhat adaptive, maybe you can get the brain to adapt or to learn to communicate with the target electrode areas...
  • Question is... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Skal Tura ( 595728 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @06:35AM (#11983587) Homepage
    Will this be able to help in other kind of inabilities?

    I'm not sure about the english name, but i think it is in english also CP inability.

    My friend born so that he is inable to correctly move his legs & arms or anything at all, because his nervous system has sustained damage. I'm not sure about the specifics, because we don't talk about it for obvious reasons.

    The thing is, his mind is capable of moving correctly etc. but his nervous system & body isn't.
    Badly spasmic etc which makes it even harder.

    He needs someone to help him with everything, he can't even goto WC by himself.
    He is fortunate enough that his hands etc. work enough to use a computer, eat by himself, even write somehow.

    But would this help him to move to more independent life?
    Those of which know better, what you think?
  • by PhreakinPenguin ( 454482 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @06:39AM (#11983594) Homepage Journal
    Rarely do I read about something that makes my jaw drop but this is one of them. All I can say is wow. I can't even imagine the possibilities that this could bring to disabled people. It's things like this that make me believe that anything is possible.
    • ......possibilities that this could bring to disabled people.

      Forget the disabled, I want it to improve my ET and Q3 performance. No more long neural transmission down my arm to the mouse.
  • Ghost in the Shell (Score:2, Interesting)

    by shaman0 ( 863791 )
    I wonder if some far day it will end up in some way similar to Ghost in the Shell?
    • It's looking that way. Scratch the AI, and scratch the braincore idea (I would imagine that the data storage would be external initially)... but it's starting to look possible.
  • My Idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @06:48AM (#11983602) Homepage Journal
    I have had an idea for years, Im not sure if it is possible technically or phsyically because I dont have a fantastic understanding of the human brain. I also have no idea whether anyone has thought of this before but here goes.

    One of the nice things about neural networks is that you dont neccesarily have to understand processes that occur during translation. I have often hypothesised that it might be possible to use the traits of a neural network to create an interface with the brain. Suppose there was a patient who had a degenerative eye condition that meant in 10yrs he or she would be completely blind. Forgetting the implications of connecting wetware to hardware for a moment- imagine if we could use a neural network to interface with the visual cortex of a patient , to learn to understand the electrical impulses on the patients visual cortex by way of matching them up with a camera mounted on the side of the head. Might it be possible for the patient to look at a tree using his real eye - the nueral network sees the tree with its camera and this way "Learns" what the patterns in the cortex represent.

    Something like this (if it is possible) would have some quite phenomenal implications - especially if it were possible to "playback" the patterns into the cortex from the camera.

    Would anyone who knows a bit more about these subjects care to discuss the possibilities of something like this?
    • Re:My Idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by argent ( 18001 ) <peter&slashdot,2006,taronga,com> on Saturday March 19, 2005 @07:40AM (#11983690) Homepage Journal
      We already have a neural network that can be used to play back patterns into the visual cortex. It's called the visual cortex. It turns out there's a straightforward mapping from the visual field to parts of the visual cortex, and they've got quite useful results using both directly implanted electrodes and external stimulation. More amazingly, the brain can actually learn to "see" through completely different pathways. One experiment involved an aray of pins on the patient's back!

      Not that it's not an interesting idea, but vision is probably too easy a problem to be worthwhile. Hearing may actually be harder.
  • ...in only 20 questions! :) http://www.20q.net/ [20q.net]
  • One step closer to the Bene Gesserit
  • by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @07:59AM (#11983738) Journal
    I bet the spooks over at homeland security are looking at this as a way to tell when somebody is lying (reliably).
  • by TractorBarry ( 788340 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @08:04AM (#11983749) Homepage
    > Scientists discover what you are thinking.

    Yup. Titties and beer. Alternatively beer and titties. It all depends on how long it's been since my last beer.

    Speaking of which it's fridge time ! No wait my g/f just went past. No she's going out, so it's definitely fridge time.
  • Time, July 1, 1974 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by argent ( 18001 ) <peter&slashdot,2006,taronga,com> on Saturday March 19, 2005 @09:17AM (#11984043) Homepage Journal
    This article reminded me of something I stuck in my scrapbook back in high school. Amazingly enough, I was able to dig around and find it...

    Mind Reading Computer

    The experiment looks like some ingenious test of mental telepathy. Seated inside a small isolation booth with wires trailing from the helmet on her head, teh subject seems deep in concentration. She does not speek or move. Near by, a white-coated scientist intently watches a TV screen. Suddenly, a little white dot hovering in the center of the screen comes to life. It sweeps to te top of the screen, then it reverses itself and comes back down. After a pause, it veers to the right, stops, moves to the left, momentarily speeds up and finally halts - almost as if it were under the control of some external intelligence.

    The article goes on to describe the work of S.R.I. researcher Lawrence Pinneo in translating thoughts to action. Googling on his name in interesting.

    Did this take 30 years to get from Stanford to Caltech?
    • http://www.whale.to/b/mindread.html [whale.to]

      I checked it because I thought you were quoting from a Heinlein story featuring a Dr. Pinneo. I thought it was in "Green Hills of Earth", but I don't have a copy here right not...so I did the web search and I don't recognize it in the table of contents. I think the name was "Life-Line" (which the web reports as Heinlein's first sale).

      There are indications that it was in the first editions(s?) of "The Man who Sold the Moon" (which,again I don't happen to have in front o
  • This is a great discovery.

    I hope they can realize the goal of being able to read (and maybe eventually send feedback signal back to) the brain to give disabled people highly functional prosthetics.

    But I also think this discovery has great uses for human augmentation. Just like people with six fingers (hexadactyly) can use all six fingers, I would imagine that with sufficient training (plus tuning of the control system), a person can "grow" extra arms. (Think Dr. Octavius in Spiderman 2...)

    But I think t
  • Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.
  • by GomezAdams ( 679726 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @10:41AM (#11984554)
    A man gets a bionic arm to replace the one he lost in an accident. He goes home with the instructions that he only has to think a command to the arm and it will perform. Later he has a call to nature. He goes into the bathroom and thinks, 'Arm, unzip my pants' and the arm does it. Then he thinks, 'Arm, take out my penis' and the arm does. Then he thinks, 'Arm, hold my penis while I pee' and the arm does that too. After he finishes he tries an experiment. 'Arm, stroke my penis' and the arm does. His unit swells and he thinks, 'Arm, jerk it off', and it did leaving him with a bloody stump.
  • After all, we know they've already taken the first steps. [slashdot.org]

    "Why the did you send me Greatest Lesbian Porn Volumes 1-69? I didn't fill out an order form for it!"

    "Sir, we show that you've signed up for Amazon's 1-Think Shopping(tm), and you clearly wanted to buy it."

  • This new insight will need another breakthru to produce results. Humans work on feedback - fitting the vPF, that prefigures action, as an output requires getting input back into the brain. We'll start with eyes, seeing the mechanical action triggered by the vPF, but that's not closely coupled enough. When we've got inputs on the somatic nerves, like proprioceptors (stretch receivers), getting position signals back into the system, all the local neural nets with motion experience will come into play. Like ot
  • by PsiPsiStar ( 95676 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @01:37PM (#11985591)
    ... without leaving my couch! Perfect!
  • Duh! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rick.C ( 626083 ) on Saturday March 19, 2005 @06:09PM (#11987260)
    Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking

    Duh!

    I, like the rest of the male half of the populace, was thinking "sex".

    Now I'm thinking "Duh!", of course, but I was thinking "sex".

    Wait! OK, now I'm thinking "sex" again.

Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking. -- Jerome Lettvin

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