A team of scientists has managed to decode the thoughts of people at a distance. This feat was achieved with a non-invasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It provides an indirect measure of brain activity by tracking the flow of oxygenated blood, which increases when brain cells are active.
According to the report on this experiment, published on September 29th, on the preprint platform bioRxiv, the scientists found that they could use this indirect measure to decode the semantic meaning of people’s thoughts. With this, you can know what they are thinking without the need to translate word by word. “If you had asked any cognitive neuroscientist in the world 20 years ago if this was feasible, they would have laughed at you”, lead study author Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Scientist.
How was the experiment to read minds at a distance?
The team used fMRI to scan the brains of 1 woman and 2 men in their 20s and 30s. Each volunteer listened to 16 hours of different podcasts and radio shows during various sessions. The researchers then fed these scans into a computer algorithm they called a “decoder”, which compared the patterns in the audio with the patterns in recorded brain activity.
After that, the algorithm was able to generate a history based on the content of the fMRI recordings. To the team’s surprise, the story matched the original plot of the podcast or radio show “pretty well”, Huth said. Even so, the algorithm made small errors. For example, he changed the pronouns of the characters and the use of the first and third person. “He knows what is happening quite precisely, but not who is doing things”, said the neuroscientist.
They then ran additional tests, in which the algorithm was able to accurately explain the plot of a silent movie that the participants watched while in the scanner. In this way, he was able to tell a story that the participants imagined in their minds.
The long-term goal of the authors is to develop this technology for use in physical interfaces aimed at people who cannot speak or write.
