PopSci put out an article today about modern day mind readers.
If a few very smart neuroscientists are right, with enough number crunching and a powerful brain scanner, science can pluck pictures—and maybe one day even thoughts— directly from your brain
Pattern matching
Since the 1950s when people were shoving blunt electrodes directly into brain tissue through skull bone cut-outs, we’ve known that there are some curiously common patterns generated by all of our brains when anyone looked at, say, a picture of a banana. They even found if a person thought about the picture they were previously looking at, the same patterns were observed. Today’s fMRI machines are capable of so much more than those crude experiments, and there is talk of putting together a very large database that correlates these patterns to images and even concepts.
At the same time, people are aiming to be able to directly read the brain… without having to match patterns in a database. That idea is illustrated in the video, where a team from Japan is working on scanning the visual cortex to try and read and reconstitute images seen by the eyes and processed by the brain.
Tags: health, privacy
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on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Life in general.
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