New technique for decoding people's thoughts can now be done from a distance - ScienceAlert

2 years ago 48

Scientists tin present "decode" people's thoughts without adjacent touching their heads, The Scientist reported.

Past mind-reading techniques relied connected implanting electrodes heavy successful peoples' brains. The caller method, described successful a study posted 29 Sept. to the preprint database bioRxiv, alternatively relies connected a noninvasive encephalon scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

fMRI tracks the travel of oxygenated humor done the brain, and due to the fact that progressive encephalon cells request much vigor and oxygen, this accusation provides an indirect measurement of encephalon activity.

By its nature, this scanning method cannot seizure real-time encephalon activity, since the electrical signals released by encephalon cells determination overmuch much rapidly than humor moves done the brain.

But remarkably, the survey authors recovered that they could inactive usage this imperfect proxy measurement to decode the semantic meaning of people's thoughts, though they couldn't nutrient word-for-word translations.

"If you had asked immoderate cognitive neuroscientist successful the satellite 20 years agone if this was doable, they would person laughed you retired of the room," elder writer Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist astatine the University of Texas astatine Austin, told The Scientist.

For the caller study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the squad scanned the brains of 1 pistillate and 2 men successful their 20s and 30s. Each subordinate listened to 16 full hours of antithetic podcasts and vigor shows implicit respective sessions successful the scanner.

The squad past fed these scans to a machine algorithm that they called a "decoder," which compared patterns successful the audio to patterns successful the recorded encephalon activity.

The algorithm could past instrumentality an fMRI signaling and make a communicative based connected its content, and that communicative would lucifer the archetypal crippled of the podcast oregon vigor amusement "pretty well," Huth told The Scientist.

In different words, the decoder could infer what communicative each subordinate had heard based connected their encephalon activity.

That said, the algorithm did marque immoderate mistakes, similar switching up characters' pronouns and the usage of the archetypal and 3rd person. It "knows what's happening beauteous accurately, but not who is doing the things," Huth said.

In further tests, the algorithm could reasonably accurately explicate the crippled of a soundless movie that the participants watched successful the scanner. It could adjacent retell a communicative that the participants imagined telling successful their heads.

In the agelong term, the probe squad aims to make this exertion truthful that it tin beryllium utilized successful brain-computer interfaces designed for radical who cannot talk oregon type.

Read much astir the caller decoder algorithm successful The Scientist.

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