Scientists 'Read Thoughts' Using Brain Scans 147
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."
Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Evoking thoughts sounds neigh on impossible - but I don't think that's necessary. All they have to is get the subject to make various statements, and discriminate between those the subject considers true and false - in other words, just like a polygraph.
But if, unlike a polygraph, a brain scan could result in an accurate lie detector, we
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:1)
If you can trick people into getting an MRI
Better hope they don't have any metal in their bodies though, otherwise, oops...
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:1)
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:1)
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:2)
You're missing the point: which is to make stupid people think that minds can be read remotely via technology.
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:2)
Re:Seriously, Seriously... What am I thinking? (Score:1)
Just place the pictures 6 feet apart and see which way your subject's head turns..duuuh
Obligatory Simpsons... (Score:5, Funny)
I bet the CIA want ones real bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I bet the CIA want ones real bad... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I bet the CIA want ones real bad... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Tin Foil won't help (Score:2)
Re:Tin Foil won't help (Score:1)
Re:Tin Foil won't help (Score:1)
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)
Re:I bet the CIA want ones real bad... (Score:2)
Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Bah. (Score:2)
MUWAHAHAHA! (Score:3, Funny)
And so it begins... (Score:2)
(My prediction, less than 30 years - you saw it here, folks)
Re:And so it begins... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And so it begins... (Score:1)
So we just edged a bit closer to the mark.
Re:And so it begins... (Score:1)
Re:And so it begins... (Score:1)
Re:And so it begins... (Score:2)
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)
Re:Rumor: New Mind Interface from Apple (Score:1)
Re:Rumor: New Mind Interface from Apple (Score:1)
Re:Rumor: New Mind Interface from Apple (Score:2, Funny)
Women (Score:2)
Re:Rumor: New Mind Interface from Apple (Score:1)
Re:Rumor: New Mind Interface from Apple (Score:1)
err... (Score:1)
Re:err... (Score:2)
I'm English, and I knew that (even before I studied at UC Davis)
Re:err... (Score:2)
Hey, it's Slashdot. You can't expect half the readers to RTFA, why expect it of the submitter?
Re:err... (Score:3, Funny)
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)
Re:Build Your Own Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (Score:1)
Re:Build Your Own Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (Score:1)
Philosophical questions (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Philosophical questions (Score:1)
Dude, I seriously think you've got a problem if you're calling your "mind-body" for a "problem".
Neat! (Score:3, Funny)
At least I'm safe. (Score:1)
I dunno what the rest of you are gonna once Thought Police start patrolling though.
In other news (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:1)
A few problems (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A few problems (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:A few problems (Score:1)
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,
Re:A few problems (Score:2)
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
Re:A few problems (Score:2)
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...
Efferents! (Score:2)
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.
Re:A few problems (Score:1)
Re:A few problems (Score:2)
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
Re:A few problems (Score:2)
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.
Re:A few problems (Score:1)
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)
Re:Stereo? (Score:1)
Re:Stereo? (Score:2, Interesting)
Schizophrenia [wikipedia.org] has nothing to do with split personalities, you are thinking of disassociative identity disorder [wikipedia.org].
I can read thoughts too (Score:2, Funny)
Zen and the Art of Nothingness (Score:2, Offtopic)
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
Mind Reading... Think again (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mind Reading... Think again (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Very misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Very misleading (Score:2)
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?
Re:Very misleading (Score:1)
Erm, so your thoughts have nothing to do with what stimuli your brain recieves? Sounds kinda dangerous to me.
Re:Very misleading (Score:1)
Re:Very misleading (Score:2)
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
Mental imagery (Score:2)
Old news? (Score:2)
Re:Old news? (Score:1)
Nothing really new here folks (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Can they help me? (Score:2, Funny)
Not easier... (Score:2)
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...
Re:Not easier... (Score:2)
Glorified polygraph (Score:2)
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)
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.
So Much For Tinfoil (Score:2)
Re:So Much For Tinfoil (Score:1)
Re:So Much For Tinfoil (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So Much For Tinfoil (Score:2)
Why not use another human as an interface? (Score:1)
Re:Why not use another human as an interface? (Score:3, Informative)
Reclassify all Slashdot sections now... (Score:2)
- Mind control
- Amateur rocketeers
- Nigerian IT
- Tactics in software license negotiation
Re:Reclassify all Slashdot sections now... (Score:2)
Re:Reclassify all Slashdot sections now... (Score:2)
I think they should also have:
- PUI (Posting while Under the Influence)
- CABIALB (Crappy Article but I'm a lazy b*****d)
Slashdot Poll: What Am I Thinking About Right Now? (Score:3, Funny)
a) Breasts
b) Breasts running Linux
c) A Beowolf cluster of breasts
d) Cowboy Neal's breasts
e) Other breasts (Specify)
Re:Slashdot Poll: What Am I Thinking About Right N (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot Poll: What Am I Thinking About Right N (Score:3, Funny)
Missing option: breasts covered in hot grits!
One problem (Score:3, Funny)
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!
They got it backwards... (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:Sodium Pentathol aka Truth Serum Works Today (Score:2)
Hate Crime laws are stupid.
I feel sorry for the scientists... (Score:1)
obligatory sw quote (Score:2)
This is not the mind you are looking for!
Questions from a non-scientist (Score:2)
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