Experiment Allows Scientists to Identify Which of Three Seven Second Video Clips Test Subjects Are Thinking About
March 15th, 2010Thought reading machine?
You definitely wouldn’t know it from reading many of the headlines that have been written about this story, but the answer is no, it’s not a thought reading machine. Eleanor Maguire, one of the researchers, said, “We are not at the point of being able to put people in a scanner and read their thoughts.”
On a more mundane level, I haven’t been able to glean from reports if they are able to train their algorithm on one or more subjects and then use it effectively on other subjects. If that’s the case, the news is more interesting than if identifying the stimuli requires the system to be trained on a per individual basis. This article mentions “similarities” between the scans of different participants.
Thankfully, any Legion of Doom thought reading device remains safely in the maybe-in-twenty-years box for now—along with the personal teleporter and the Mr. Fusion.
Although, even after twenty years, I doubt that the Legion of Doom will have a brain scanner that’s more effective at determining what people are thinking than what’s already available by monitoring activity on Google, Facebook and the myriad other online services that have convinced increasing numbers of people to turn their brains inside out in order to think inside the machine… Oh, wait… *chuckle*
Via: Independent:
For the study, 10 volunteers were shown three short film clips, lasting seven seconds each. They showed different actresses performing three tasks – posting a letter, throwing a coffee cup in a bin, and getting on a bike. The volunteers were then placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and asked to recall each clip in turn. This was repeated many times and the scans were analysed to detect patterns in the brain activity associated with each clip. In the final stage of the experiment the volunteers were returned to the scanner and asked to recall the clips at random. The researchers found they were able to tell which clip they were thinking about from the pattern of their brain activity.
Although patterns in individual volunteers’ brains varied from one another, they showed remarkable similarities in the parts of the hippocampus that were active. The findings are published in Current Biology. “We have documented for the first time that traces of individual rich episodic memories are detectable and distinguishable in the hippocampus. Now that we have shown it is possible to directly access information about individual episodic memories in vivo and noninvasively, this offers new opportunities to examine important properties of episodic memory,” the researchers conclude.
