Scientists Invent a Mind Reading Machine That Can Decode Your Thoughts

By: | July 10th, 2016

Image courtesy Saad Faruque/Flickr

The human brain is the most complex part of our body. It’s a three-pound mass of jelly-like material, but we use it every moment of our lives; it has many secrets which we don’t like to share with anybody.

But things are going to change soon as scientists are working towards reading our thoughts and putting them on a screen for everyone to see.

Neuroscientists Brice Kuhl and Hongmi Lee from the University of Oregon have used an fMRI machine to read a person’s mind.

Kuhl recently said, “We can take someone’s memory — which is typically something internal and private — and we can pull it out from their brains.”

How they managed to do this:

Researchers selected twenty-three volunteers. Volunteers were hooked up to an fMRI machine, and when the machine was on, the participants were shown the images of hundreds of faces.

In this first phase, an AI program collected the information about the patterns of brain activity from the participants and also the mathematical description of each face the participant was viewing. Here are some of the results:

Image courtesy The Journal of Neuroscience

Image courtesy The Journal of Neuroscience

In the second phase of the test, participants, who were still in the MRI machine, were shown photos of brand new faces. However, the computer program couldn’t see these faces, and it had to figure out what the faces looked like on the basis of participants’ brain activity.

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

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