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Former Oculus Exec Predicts Telepathy Within 10 Years (cnet.com) 202

Posted by EditorDavid from the I-knew-you-were-going-to-say-that dept.
Mary Lou Jepsen is a former MIT professor with 100 patents and a former engineering executive at Facebook, Oculus, Intel, and Google[x] (now called X) -- and "she hopes to make communicating telepathically happen relatively soon." An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Last year Jepsen left her job heading up display technology for the Oculus virtual reality arm of Facebook to develop new imaging technologies to help cure diseases. Shortly thereafter she founded Openwater, which is developing a device that puts the capabilities of a huge MRI machine into a lightweight wearable form. According to the startup's website, "Openwater is creating a device that can enable us to see inside our brains or bodies in great detail. With this comes the promise of new abilities to diagnose and treat disease and well beyond -- communicating with thought alone."

This week Jepsen went further and suggested a timeframe for such capabilities becoming reality. "I don't think this is going to take decades," she told CNBC. "I think we're talking about less than a decade, probably eight years until telepathy"... Jepsen, who has also spent time at Google X, MIT and Intel, says the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain. "Literally a thinking cap," Jepsen explains... The idea is that communicating by thought alone could be much faster and even allow us to become more competitive with the artificial intelligence that is supposedly coming for everyone's jobs very soon.
Jepsen tells CNBC, "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down."
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Former Oculus Exec Predicts Telepathy Within 10 Years More

Former Oculus Exec Predicts Telepathy Within 10 Years

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  • Most people will be deaf and dumb. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09, 2017 @04:29PM (#54774955)

    Telepathy will, after all, require thoughts.

  • New low for privacy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by seoras ( 147590 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @04:30PM (#54774959)

    Sounds great until you realise what a device like this could do in the wrong hands.

    • Sounds great until you realise what a device like this could do in the wrong hands.

      Yeah, like most governments.

      There are so many slippery slopes with this that it's probably better than any water park in existence currently. If possible, it will make court proceedings much simpler. But then why not just make everyone have to wear this at all times. Then it can report you to the authorities when you are about to commit a crime. What about hate speech? We can at long last have the thought police. The possibles for misuse are staggering. But I'm sure once this would become acceptable in s

      • Re:New low for privacy (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @08:45PM (#54775913)

        Indeed. Fortunately, there is no way that she can do what she claims. This is most likely an attempt to get funding by empty promises that are not quite obviously empty. There are enough proto-fascists in government employ that would love to have these capabilities.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Fortunately, there is no way that she can do what she claims. This is most likely an attempt to get funding by empty promises that are not quite obviously empty.

          The money men are always falling for the tricks of the egg heads from MIT and elsewhere. I suppose we all do what we can. They give us banking and financial crises and we cheat them out of their money by promising them pseudo-scientific nonsense to get them to "invest" in our startups. It's a tidy arrangement while it lasts.

        • Re:New low for privacy (Score:4, Insightful)

          by gnick ( 1211984 ) on Monday July 10, 2017 @08:41AM (#54777841) Homepage

          Agreed. These are empty fantasy claims being made to solicit funding. You'll see a quicker return on investment betting on fusion reactors. FTS:

          If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of.

          I gotta call bullshit. I just straight up don't believe that. You might be able to tell me that I'm thinking about music, but I'd be blown away if you could tell me it's Vera Lynn. I think this ability is being exaggerated at least.

          • Of course it's bullshit. I'm betting she means if she asks you to think of "either Gangster Rap or Classical Music" she can tell which 80% of the time. I guarantee that if I'm thinking of a band that my brother played with 40 years ago in high school that existed for only a few months, there is no fucking way she can name it!

      • Yeah, like most corporations.

        We already know that Facebook wants to know what you "like". Why wait for you to explicitly tell it?

        You know the skeezy line ... "There's something I could say to make you sleep with me... Let's just pretend I've already said it!"

        Instead it'll be the skeezy corporation "There's something I could say to make you pay me... and... ah, there it is!" *dynamic advertising*
        Then... *YOU EMPTIES WALLET*

    • mary, i can see where you are a "former" associate of MIT. i was one of their sysadmins for 6 years. enjoy mcdonalds flipping burgers.
    • One hypothetical Big Brother use case has been explored. "Listening" is not a bad movie. It has the "Primer" vibe, but for mind reading. IMDB [imdb.com]

  • Reminds me of (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @04:36PM (#54774983)

    Theranos, unfortunately.

  • MRI of my brain (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @04:42PM (#54775011)

    Won't be difficult to deduce what's on my mind [imgur.com][NSFW]

  • If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down

    So, it currently takes a huge freakin' MRI to just be able to read the brain's thoughts*. And to the best of my knowledge, no one has figured out a way of inputting a thought into the brain electronically. And she thinks she can accomplish both with a device the size of a cap in eight years? Good luck with that.

    * Even "Reading the brain's thoughts" is quite a stretch from what an MRI actually does. We just see on a screen what parts of the brain light up like a Christmas tree, then interpret what the brain is doing based on our current mapping of brain-functions. But, if you were to "think" the message, "Please buy diapers on your way home from work today," an MRI today at best will show that your prefrontal cortex lights up, indicating you are task-managing, as well as your amygdala, indicating a sense of emotional frustration. Other areas will light up as well, but whether these areas mean diapers, work, cheese, rutabagas, or who knows what is still anybody's guess.

    • Re:Reading thoughts vs Inputting thoughts (Score:5, Informative)

      by denzacar ( 181829 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @06:39PM (#54775451) Journal

      She basically repeated what she saw on an episode of "60 minutes" [cnet.com] linked in the thought identification [wikipedia.org] article on Wikipedia.

      In reality... half of it is computer guessing which one of the ten pre-calibrated images the subject is being shown - while the other half is just bullshit mixed with wishful thinking.
      Then she "expanded" on that.

      For now, it's impossible to force someone to have his or her brain scanned, because the subject has to lie still and cooperate, but that could change.

      "There are some other technologies that are being developed that may be able to be used covertly and even remotely.
      So, for example, they're trying to develop now a beam of light that would be projected onto your forehead.
      It would go a couple of millimeters into your frontal cortex, and then receptors would get the reflection of that light.
      And there's some studies that suggest that we could use that as a lie detection device," Wolpe said.

      If you look at it closely, that paragraph consists of nothing but woulda-couldas and maybes.
      Sprinkled with a weasel word or two.

      • Not to mention she says the beam of light would penetrate the friggin' skull forcefully enough to provide bounce back. Gotta hurt.

        • That's was actually said by "Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta" BS-ing about maybetech in that "60 minutes" story back in 2009.

          Thing is, light DOES penetrate our skulls... enough to influence our moods. [prnewswire.com]

          But if it would be possible to beam light through the skull, without damaging the tissue (which is something a few minutes in the sunlight will do) AND catch the light which bounces back...
          Forget telepathy. That's X-ray vision. See into other peoples homes and b

    • It's positron emission tomography, PET, not MRI. You need to be able to visualize nerve activity. MRI mostly shows you where water is, because it echolocates hydrogen magnetic dipoles.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by daenris ( 892027 )
        Functional MRI is able to indirectly measure brain activity via the blood oxygenation level dependent signal, so no, she's talking about MRI, specifically fMRI. Except what she's really talking about sounds like fNIRS, which is functional near infrared spectroscopy, which measures the BOLD signal using infrared diodes on the scalp. But honestly I just have to laugh at the claims. fMRI is nowhere near being able to reliably read minds and fNIRS is even more limited in terms of spatial resolution. And that's

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        It's almost certainly near infrared spectroscopy to monitor blood flow in the cortex (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2844468/).

        MRI is mostly sensitive to water, but also to things that distort magnetic fields, such as the oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin. That's the basis of functional MRI. There's no way anybody is doing meaningful functional MRI in a baseball cap any time soon though. fMRI IS the modality that the "mind reading" experiments have been done with. PET generally lacks

        • Not NIRS or fmri... Too slow (blood flow) and poorly resolved. She just mentions fmri because people know what it is from movies and the papers she references used fmri to "reconstruct" visual "thoughts". But she actually wants to access action potential information, which is 100-1000x faster than fmri and much better resolved in space (cellular resolution). It is "possible" because light is scattered and polarized by neuronal membranes when action potentials are conducted.

          BUT it's never been done outside o

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Ah. There's no real reason why you couldn't do NIRS with a portable, or even wearable machine. You *might* even be able to do high spatial resolution NIRS with some kind of solid state array emitter like an LCD. But as you point out, I don't see cell-level polarization methods working through the skull anytime soon. I didn't directly do NIRS, but one of the animal labs had a machine. I think the useful through-skull depth in human cortex was about a mm or two.

            I would think large arrays of EEG electrode

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CODiNE ( 27417 )

      But what you CAN do is read subvocalizing and turn that into speech, then send that signal wirelessly and convert it into audio impulses sent to the brain through the skin.

      This form of telepathy already exists and is used by the military for silent communication.

    • Other areas will light up as well, but whether these areas mean diapers, work, cheese, rutabagas, or who knows what is still anybody's guess.

      And even if we could improve the MRI to show finer details, it still would have to be calibrated on a single subject before we could tell what it was.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It's all corporate BS speak.

      She's talking about using infrared to monitor changes in blood flow in the cortex. That technology currently exists: it costs sub $100,000 and usually occupies a box the size of a suitcase. So in mass production you could easily make it for $1000 in something smartphone sized.

      She is not talking about doing fMRI in something the size of a baseball cap.

  • Not a chance (Score:5, Informative)

    by umafuckit ( 2980809 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @04:48PM (#54775045)
    Given the state of the art in this field: the current state of neuroscience and related advances in neurosurgery (fields I work in), I'd say there is zero chance of this happening in 8 years. Scalp electrodes give messy and very coarse signals. You get good signals from electrodes embedded in brains, but they're very localised and electrodes degrade fairly quickly and need to be removed.
    • What you're saying makes sense. This article makes me wonder about the state of brain-machine interfacing. Obviously at a very crude level, brain to hand to machine to eye to brain interfacing already exists, but the bandwidth is somewhat low. If we were to leave out possible ethical considerations for the moment, is there anything you could implant into the skull of a baby monkey say, that would allow the brain to interface in a bi-directional way with large bandwidth? Is there anything we can implant that
      • We should start by implanting an arduino with an led in the developing retina of a fetal rhesus monkey. Maybe even bling it up with pwm.

      • What you're saying makes sense. This article makes me wonder about the state of brain-machine interfacing. Obviously at a very crude level, brain to hand to machine to eye to brain interfacing already exists, but the bandwidth is somewhat low. If we were to leave out possible ethical considerations for the moment, is there anything you could implant into the skull of a baby monkey say, that would allow the brain to interface in a bi-directional way with large bandwidth? Is there anything we can implant that can be inside the skull long term without health effects with current or soon to be realized technology?

        One could debate the definition of "large" but basically there is no such device, no. I should point out, however, that cochlear implants [wikipedia.org] are technically a neural prosethsis and they have been shown to work well over years. Unidirectional, though. The Wikipedia page on briain machine interfaces [wikipedia.org] is quite compehensive. But consider an interesting key point: imagine an implant in motor cortex of a paralysed patient. We seek to use neural firing to move something like a robotic arm. Unlike the cochlear implant

      • Implants already exist, in humans, no less. Biologically speaking, if they don't need to break the skin, we're pretty good at making stuff that won't cause harm. On the input side, we already have technology to electro-stimulate the brain to prevent seizures and that technology looks very promising. Now, if you want a wire dangling down the back of your head, or a jack mounted to your skin, those can happen, but they're fraught with problems regarding infection. If we actually needed something that handled
    • Yeah, this appears to be the ignorant sentiment of a person with a doctorate in holography and optics. She either doesn't understand neuroscience at all beyond a level of armchair pop-sci, or she's making stuff up to get publicity for her company.
      • Funnily enough, holography and optics are techniques that could enable high-bandwidth reading of neural activity (they already do to a degree). Problem is that you have to express viruses in the neurons to make them fluoresce in an activity-dependent way and you need to replace the skull with glass.
        • .......................Did you just watch that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Barclay builds a thing on the holodeck to interface his mind directly to the ship's Computer?

    • They aren't using electrodes. I believe they're using IR to image blood flow [wikipedia.org] in the outer layers of the brain.

      • So it'll be slow and really low resolution. It won't work. At least it won't do anything very interesting. Anything we can't do now.

  • Nevermind though, a "<Person without any particular special knowledge> says <Spectacular, world-changing, completely unfeasible technological advancement> will happen within <a small enough number to just fall within Person's expected lifespan [wikipedia.org]> years!" headline is always good for clicks. (Especially if <Person> happens to be Elon Musk.)

  • Riiiiight (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sacrilicious ( 316896 )

    "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today

    Nutjob. If only she'd picked a halfway plausible timeframe for such abilities, she'd be off the "reality hook".

    But, since I'm a populist, I'm in favor of the consequent wealth redistribution constituted by the parting of her investors with their money.

  • Working at a place that puts screens on people's heads doesn't give you any special insight into telepathy.

  • Whether or not we eventually can communicate this way... this is mostly irrelevant with regards to AI taking human jobs, since we'll still think and perform at the same speeds we always have.

    • Yes, but as a software developer I still think 10 - 20 times faster than my hands can crank out code even with the fastest IDE.
      So a pseudo thought to keyboard interface would be quite handy.
      Same if I was a military pilot. Being able to transform thought directly into action would be quite handy.

      • Yes, but as a software developer I still think 10 - 20 times faster than my hands can crank out code even with the fastest IDE.

        Hmm... with me it's the other way around. I spend most of the time thinking about the problem and solution, and only a small bit on the actual code entry.

        • That depends on the phase I'm in.
          Of course I have thinking phases, but then I usually don't write code.

          And often I simply know what code I want and what annoys me most about "coding" is that it is so incredible slow.

  • ... transferred by radio it's not telepathy.

  • Not how MRI works... (Score:4, Informative)

    by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @05:24PM (#54775187)

    the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain.

    MRI is an acronym for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. How is that the same as IR? Most MRI's are 1.5 Tesla. and the preferred MRI scanners for neuro are 3 T. If that could be shrunken down to something that could be put in a ski cap, it would be truly impressive. But you really don't want to be walking around with a 3T magnetic field around your head. Not unless you want to have your skull bashed in by any ferrous objects you may encounter.

  • ..because this is how you end up with Cybernetically Enhanced Telepathic Navy Dolphins.

  • ... that after years of developing the product with the help of expertise, testing, and advocacy from the Open Source community, they'll sell it at the last second to Facebook and nobody will ever get to use it.

  • Vulcan? (Score:3)

    by cdwiegand ( 2267 ) <chris@wiegandfamily.com> on Sunday July 09, 2017 @05:43PM (#54775247) Homepage

    Ignoring the feasibility of this, if this were to happen mental clarity and focus training will be in high demand. Learning to focus ones thoughts, purify them for a machine to read. Makes me think of Vulcan society.

    • Ignoring the feasibility of this, if this were to happen mental clarity and focus training will be in high demand.

      This is one possible outcome. However, surely it is more likely to be that once you connect with your respected fellow humans in the new Internet of thoughts images of breasts and cocks come popping into your head.

  • My thoughts.
    My precious thoughts.
    Did I say precious? I meant vengeful! ;D

  • Imagine how much targeted advertising such a setup will enable. And the NSA must be excited too!

  • not really like that (Score:5, Informative)

    by clovis ( 4684 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @06:13PM (#54775359)

    From the "That's today" we can read your mind link ...
    Here's the actual study, "Predicting the Brain Activation Pattern Associated With the Propositional Content of a Sentence: Modeling Neural Representations of Events and States"
    http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu/reprin... [cmu.edu]

    I've only skimmed it. This would take me quite a while to decode. But you should have a look at it; this is way cool. But it isn't what Dr Jepson is claiming. not at all.
    What they're seeing is the patterns generated in the brain when reading sentences. Not thinking about things, but reading.
    They record all the parts of the brain that light up during the reading given to the people in the fMRI. They discovered that these patterns are nearly the same for the people who participated. So, knowing these patterns, they can tell what sentence you had just read.
    But where it gets interesting is that it's not just the sentence decode part of the brain, they're seeing the other parts where the concept representations are. I think.

    From the article:

    The main contribution of this article is the integrated, computational account of the relation between the semantic content of a sentence and the brain activation pattern evoked by the reading of the sentence.

    The initial success of the modeling using neurally plausible features suggests that the building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are shaped by neural systems rather than by lexicographic considerations. This approach predicts that the neural dimensions of concept representation might be universal across languages, as studies are beginning to suggest [Yang et al., 2017]. In this perspective, the concepts in each language would be underpinned by some subset of a universal set of NPSFs

    NPSF is neurally plausible semantic features. Hope that helps.

    and in the limitations section,

    "The study was also limited to the processing of visually presented sentences, and the neural signature at the end of the reading of a sentence contained the representations of all of the component concepts in the sentence. If the sentences were presented in the auditory modality, it is possible the neural signature at the end of the listening to a sentence might not be the optimal decoding window for all of the component concepts in the sentence. "

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      The initial success of the modeling using neurally plausible features suggests that the building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are shaped by neural systems rather than by lexicographic considerations. This approach predicts that the neural dimensions of concept representation might be universal across languages, as studies are beginning to suggest [Yang et al., 2017]. In this perspective, the concepts in each language would be underpinned by some subset of a universal set of NPSFs

      Not sure if this is actually stating something obvious or not. I mean when I think of "human" I got a ton of associations on what a human is and does, it seems highly plausible that we have a much more similar mental concept than the actual word we use for it. After all with the thousands of different languages we have it seems pretty clear that words are quite arbitrary as long as we agree on what they mean. I would think we're more divided by the way we think about them, that a 1D list, 2D map, 3D sculptu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by clovis ( 4684 )

        I don't know if what you saying is obvious because neuroscientist had been heatedly arguing about that until the recent invention of fMRI. Previously, all they had to go on was "what changes if this piece gets cut out". That and it seems every mammal on the planet knows what a snake is.
        Anyway, here's something similar from the paper that's related to what you're saying. Have a look at figure 4.

        The activation proles of many regions identied in the factor analysis (Fig. 4A and Supporting Information, Table S3) are consistent with previous ndings of the role of these regions in semantic knowledge representation, such as right anterior temporal lobe for semantic knowledge of people [Gesierich et al., 2012], fusiform gyrus for representing objects [Martin, 2007], parahippocampal areas for representing places [Epstein and Kanwisher, 1998], and so forth. Moreover, the response proles of several other regions suggest that reading of simple sentences that describe events and states also involve various nonlanguage-specic neural systems associated with the processing of social, affective, motor, and visual properties of events, as discussed below.

    • But what was the *dead salmon* thinking, Mary Lou?

      http://blogs.discovermagazine.... [discovermagazine.com]

  • And we've been waiting how long for those? The woman is spouting bullshit. Watch for a money grab.
  • First one would have to come up with scientific proof that telepathy even exists. Such proof is sorely lacking, after 60 years or more of anecdotal, or dubious, or just plain fake claims.

  • Yes, guaranteed! Now please sign here. (Score:3)

    by Picodon ( 4937267 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @06:53PM (#54775519)

    Developing the technologies enabling telepathy will take precisely eight years.

    Developing accurate project scheduling techniques will take at least another two thousand years.

    Evolving the capability of honest disclosure of accurate project schedules to a pressing venture capitalist will take... Huh, well, that will happen shortly after the second coming, I promise!

  • "she hopes to make communicating telepathically happen relatively soon."

    Nonverbal or non-voice communication? We already have that.

    The ability to look into people's heads against their wishes? That's not telepathy, that's Orwellian.

  • The Jetsons is actually a commercial from the future. That's how things will really look and how people will act. Everyone will live in floating sky towers far above the ground.

    If you've worked for enough groovy tech outfits you can say anything that pops into you head and will get a of exposure if it sounds futuristic enough. Ten years after we experience the Jetson future their will be bowling leagues in the Andromeda Galaxy and talking robot dogs will be taking people for a walk. Count on it.

  • Nerd: Hey let me try that thing!
    Mary Lou: sure, try this one, it's connected to mine
    Nerd: Ohhhh... wow! Hey does that really work? (looks at Mary Lou)
    Mary Lou: [SLAP!] You pervert!

  • How's the VR revolution going

    oh its not, its went the way of 3d TV/movies, and VR before it, fuck someone make another 3d TV/movie thing so VR is the next cool thing again

    my point is, this yutz could not see a birthday party coming a year in advance, now he is making predictions about more nonsense bullshit, move along

  • If the MRI can read your brain why don't we use them for police investigations and national security stuff? It seems like someone is grossly overselling what you can do with an MRI.
    • A. It would be (most likely) unconstitutional B. It would be expensive C. It would be time-consuming to calibrate

      • D. It might tell you if you were (constantly) think one of 50 pre-cataloged, pre-calibrated thought, but not if you had an "original" thought...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jandrese ( 485 )
        Traditional lie detectors are not admissible in court, but they're not unconstitutional. They are selling this as basically a lie detector that actually works.

        Expense would not be an issue if the thing actually worked as advertised, at least for the national security scenarios. If this worked everybody down in Gitmo would be strapped to it the first day they arrived. There would be units in Afganistan working nonstop.
  • I can talk to anyone on earth through the internet or a phone. Sci-fi movies are right most of the time, but the implementation differs.

  • Who says we WANT Telepathy?

    I do not; my mind is private property.

  • Telepathy and pretelepathy already exist. Ask anyone with a dog or a wife or an angry black mother figure. They know what you're thinking before you do.

  • Sounds like the Robotech thinking caps. Now all we need are big jets that transform into battloids.

    OTOH, I'm pretty sure being in an MRI scanner for long periods would have some impact on a person's health.

  • Space Corps? Telepathy? Are we (finally) living in a classic sci-fi novel?
  • "Jepsen tells CNBC, "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of"

    fMRI freaks are as bad as AI freaks. fMRI is a cult and fMRI studies are fraudulent.

  • "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say

    Yeah. "Help, let me out of this !@#$ thing!"

  • In ten years, Mary Lou Jepsen will be 63 years old. Nice career-ending exit strategy. Incredible woman, who seems to have mastered every trick.

  • Just not going to read our thoughts...
    Even if she solves the fmri in a cap problem, which itself is unlikely... Because:
    1) way too much light scatter to get back enough light and resolve even 1mm (the current limit of fmri using the best magnets 14T which themselves are dangerous as the fields impede blood flood in the brain), it is only 2D information,
    2) blood flow BOLD is too slow to encode thoughts (rise times of 100's of Ms, needs to be 100x faster),
    3) 1mm resolution is not enough, need 50um for a cort

  • I'm going to get a MIT degree in spoon-bending with minors in telepathy and time-travel. Now if you'll excuse me I've to to refuel my jetpack and get to my job on building the wall.

  • We do.

    The day we were born, the mind sciences were still young. Most people did not realize their potential. Some few did. Among those who did were the thirty-two outlaw programmers who formed the seed about which we crystalized. At that time there was a planetwide computer net, a kind of consensual mental space, through which all artificial systems interacted. It was, among other things, the primary communications medium. At any given instant hundreds of millions of people interfaced through the net, with

  • Even if an infrared device can read all your conscious thoughts, it still can't inject them as-is into another brain. It has to be tokenized. The tokens are transmitted to the recipient brain. That brain has to run the tokens through its own neural net to hopefully produce a lossy facsimile, assuming it has all the contextual clues and enough cultural touchstones in common with the sender.

    This won't be telepathy. But maybe it can produce a system of generating and parsing tokens that's faster than speech or

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