Scientists explore possibilities of mind reading

I think we're on the verge of a few breakthroughs that can drastically change how things will look 30-50 years from now. When you look at advances in genetics, synthetic biology, quantum computing, nanotechnology, 3-D printing and more, future civilizations could have future technology that makes I-Pads and I-Phones look like those first big cell phones look to us.

At Yale University, researchers recently used a brain scanner to identify which face someone was looking at — just from their brain activity. At the University of California-Berkeley, scientists are moving beyond "reading" simple thoughts to predicting what someone will think next.

And at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just has a vision that will make Google Glass seem very last century. Instead of using your eye to direct a cursor — finding a phone number for a car repair shop, for instance — he fantasizes about a device that will dial the shop by interpreting your thoughts about the car (minus the expletives).

"In principle, our thoughts could someday be readable," said Just, who directs the school's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. "I don't think we have to worry about this in the next 5-10 years, but it's interesting to think about. What if all of our thoughts were public?"

He can imagine a terrifying version of that future, where officials read minds in order to gain control over them. But he prefers to envision a more positive one, with mind reading devices offering opportunities to people with disabilities — and the rest of us.

www.usatoday.com...

Here's more about the experiment:

In his experiment, an undergraduate working in his lab developed a mathematical model to allow a computer to recognize different parts of faces. Then, by scanning the brains of volunteers as they looked at different faces, the researchers trained the computer to interpret how each volunteer's brain responded to different faces. Lastly, the volunteers were asked to look at new faces while in a brain scanner — and the computer could distinguish which of two faces they were observing. It was correct about 60-70% of the time.

"This will allow us to study things we haven't studied before about people's internal representation of faces and memories and imagination and dreams — all of which are represented in some of the same areas we use to reconstruct faces," said Alan Cowen, who led the research as a Yale undergraduate and is now a graduate student researcher at Berkeley.

You add in AI, advances in physics and simulated realities and Kurzweil's singularity might be closer than we think.

a reply to: neoholographic

I definitely think that quantum computing will blow everything out of the water. As soon as that gets developed, 2014 will almost literally look like the stone age. I kid you not. That should roughly be in 5 years.

As slow as I am about tech now, it's nice to know in 5 yraes I'll be so far out in the tall weeds I'll need S&R
LOL

Have you heard of the Kozyrev mirrors?



The translation is poor, but you soon get used to it.
If you go to youtubby....via the one above, you'll find other follow up vids.

Fascinating stuff.

Rainbows
Jane

a reply to: neoholographic

Does anybody see anything great about violating the privacy of our minds? Anyone? Wasn't there a sliders episode about "Thought Police"? I'd link you a tube vidya if I knew the name.

Anyways, say the OP has thought about beating his/her loudmouthed boss to death with his/her shoe? Officers stop a crime before it happens.

All people think about unsound things, and if this is true, people just want to capitalized on finding sinister in us all. The Mind is the last bastion of inner peace "most of us" have, I'd hope people wouldn't play around with pandoras box, or in our case, boxes?

a reply to: QuantumDeath

That's the first thing that came to mind. This has the potential for serious misuse.

It's frightening to think of my thoughts being heard. What goes on in someone's head is private. Just because someone thinks about something doesn't mean they'll act on it.

All I want is a device that can record my dreams, and save them for me to watch later. I don't want to share, tweet, or post the dreams but I'm sure if such a device were to exist those features would be some of the first to get added to it.

a reply to: WolfSong13

Dreams can't be recorded they occur outside your body

a reply to: ScottProphhit

Care to elaborate on this?

Talked about a month ago.
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Pretty cool.

People were shown various faces superimposed on synthetic faces and their MRI patterns were observed. When shown other faces the patterns were compared to the "training face" patterns and a computer program produced the reconstruction. More of a composite, really.

www.sciencedirect.com...


The thing is, without the computer being "trained" for an individual observer, it wouldn't work.

“There’s a wide variation in how people’s brains work under a scanner – some people have better brains for fMRI – and so if you were to pick a participant at random it might be that their reconstructions are really good, or it might be that their reconstructions are really poor, which is why we averaged across all the participants,” Cowen said.

www.foxnews.com...

Also, how would that be possible? I don't know what I will be thinking, so how someone who has nothing but my brainwaves, could predict something that is depending on so many different contributing affects, like environmental stimuli, feelings, inspiration...; and also my brain reacts according to my experience, someone who doesn't have that catalog my brain goes looking for patterns, they don't stand a chance.