Scientists can now code people's thoughts without touching them.
Past mind-reading techniques used implants in the brain. There is a new method described in a report posted on September 29th.
fMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain and gives an indirect measure of brain activity because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen.
The scanning method can't capture real-time brain activity since the electrical signals released by brain cells move quickly.
Even though they couldn't produce word-for-word translations, the study authors were able to use this imperfect proxy measure to decode people's thoughts.
Alexander Huth, a senior author at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Scientist that if anyone had asked 20 years ago if this was doable, they would have laughed at them.
The brain has a network of universal language networks.
The team scanned the brains of one woman and two men in their twenties and thirties. Each participant was able to listen to 16 hours of different radio and podcasts.
The team fed the scans to a computer that compared the audio and brain activity.
Huth told The Scientist that the fMRI recording could be used to create a story based on the content of the show.
The brain activity of the participants could be used to infer what they had heard.
The use of the first and third person and the switch up of characters' pronouns were some of the mistakes made by the program. Huth said that it knows what is happening but not who is doing it.
The program was able to explain the plot of a silent movie that people watched in the scanner. The participants imagined the story they were told.
The research team wants to develop this technology so that it can be used in brain- computer interface for people who can't speak or type.
In The Scientist, you'll find more about the new decoding method.
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The original article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
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