Are There Any Machines That Can Read Minds

March 02, 2022 Post a Comment

When magnetic resonance imaging came into mutual use in the 1980s, it made the man brain visible in ways it had never been before. For the first time, nosotros could encounter the soft brain tissue of a living subject, at a level of item that could be observed previously only in autopsies. For doctors trying to help patients whose brains were damaged or diseased, MRI provided an invaluable snapshot of their condition.

By the 1990s, researchers had begun to measure changes in brain regions past using "functional" MRI. The technique detects oxygenated blood flow, revealing brain activity, not only brain structure. For cerebral neuroscientists, who study mental processes, fMRI was a godsend: It made information technology possible to identify which parts of the brain react to, say, faces, words or smells. It was a window through which to run across the encephalon making sense of the external earth. All of a sudden we could watch human thought rippling across the rainbow-colored regions of brain scans.

Today, fMRI has been joined by newer tools, some yet in development, that would allow scientists to track our mental states with ever greater precision. Researchers are generating enormous quantities of brain scan information, and they are analyzing these sets of "big data" with the latest computational techniques, peculiarly machine learning, a subfield of AI that specializes in finding subtle, hard-to discover patterns.

What does all of this amount to? The kickoff of a revolution. Scientists are kickoff to unravel the question of how our fabric brains form our intangible minds. Though primarily motivated by medical and therapeutic goals, this inquiry may take the greatest practical touch in areas such as product marketing, reckoner interfaces and criminal justice. Ultimately, it may help to answer fundamental questions nigh consciousness and complimentary volition, or even atomic number 82 the way to preserving the knowledge and memories of individuals long after their bodies accept failed.

"Information technology appears that how our brains work isn't equally unique to us as individuals every bit we might like to recollect."

Some mental functions, such as experiencing fear or recognizing individual faces, appear to involve specialized sections of the encephalon and are therefore relatively straightforward to discover. But others are more than distributed, activating many different parts of the brain simultaneously; fMRI can discover these correlated activations, and automobile learning tin roll upward the patterns into surprisingly specific descriptions of what a subject is thinking or doing. Information technology's similar going from identifying private letters to reading words and sentences.

In fact, sensing what words or word categories yous are thinking about is one of the more impressive results of modern cognitive neuroscience. Jack Gallant and his collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley, accept produced a remarkably detailed map of which sections of the encephalon react to different words and semantic concepts. In a 2016 newspaper in the journal Nature, they described an experiment in which 7 volunteers listened to two hours of stories from "The Moth Radio Hour," a popular storytelling podcast, while their heads rested in the custom-formed cradle of an fMRI automobile.

'Read' a Heed

This interactive site shows how unlike parts of the brain responded to listening to "The Moth Radio Hr" podcast.

In an image from the work of Jack Gallant's squad at U.C. Berkeley, words representing various concepts are overlaid on areas of the cerebral cortex where they provoke the strongest responses; they are color-coded past the category of ideas they express.
Photo: Alex Huth/The Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley

The researchers recorded changes in blood menstruum to each of tens of thousands of "voxels"—the units in a three-dimensional filigree of locations in the brain. They and then grouped the words spoken in the stories into 985 categories, each representing some common semantic dimension. (For example, the words "month" and "week" fall into the same category.) By correlating the brain activity with the words used to tell the stories, they were able to produce a detailed map revealing where these words and concepts were processed in the brain.

If you had to study each individual's brain reactions to "read their minds," the feat would be remarkable but too idiosyncratic to accept practical value. It appears, nevertheless, that people's brains organize and process the same information in similar ways. In a 2011 paper published in the journal Trends in Cerebral Sciences, Russell Poldrack (now at Stanford University) and collaborators were able to predict with high accuracy which of a set of mental tasks an individual was engaged in, based solely on studies performed on other people. These tasks included, for example, asking examination subjects to play a hazard-taking game, where they scored points each time they pumped more air into a virtual airship (by pressing a push button) but lost all their points if the airship burst. In another job, each test field of study had to decide whether certain words rhymed.

Looking solely at their encephalon scans, the researchers were able to correctly identify which of eight such different tasks new subjects were performing about 80% of the time. It appears that how our brains piece of work isn't as unique to us as individuals as nosotros might similar to think.

With improved imaging technology, information technology may become possible to "eavesdrop" on a person's internal dialogue, to the extent that they are thinking in words. "It'southward a question of when, not if," Dr. Gallant said. Other researchers are having similar success in determining what you may be looking at, whether you remember visiting a particular place or what decision you lot have made.

"If the kinks tin can be worked out, crimes of the hereafter may be solved by a 'reverse lineup' to determine if a doubtable recognizes the victim. "

Remarkable as these results are, they are likely to stake in comparing to what may be on the horizon with new or improved tools. Emerging techniques, such every bit functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), may essentially expand potential uses. Human tissue, including os, is largely transparent to infrared lite, at least to a depth of a few centimeters. By shining infrared low-cal into your skull and measuring the corporeality reflected, researchers are able to quantify changes in blood flow.

This technique has several advantages over fMRI: It's faster, cheaper and more portable, and so subjects' brains can be measured while they are engaged in mutual activities like exercising, interacting with other people and playing games. On the down side, current fNIRS devices provide lower resolution and point bigotry than fMRI, and are bars to measuring only the outer layers of the brain. Several companies already offer commercial fNIRS devices, including Hitachi, Biopac Systems and NIRX, and the technology is being tested in labs at Harvard, Yale and Stanford.

Are we developing the tools for sci-fi-style mind reading? Not quite, simply close plenty for sure commercial purposes and before long peradventure for legal proceedings.

Newer fNIRS headgear tin can record encephalon activity while subjects are moving.
Photograph: NIRx Medical Technologies

Consider lie detection. At least two companies—No Prevarication MRI and Cephos—take tried to commercialize encephalon imaging systems that purport to tell whether a person believes he or she is telling the truth, by comparing a subject's differing reactions to innocuous versus "loaded" questions. Their claims haven't been independently validated and have received considerable criticism from the inquiry customs; and so far, courts have declined to have their results as prove.

Some other arroyo to assessing a suspect's guilt or innocence is to determine whether he or she is acquainted with some unique aspect of a crime, such equally its location, a particular weapon or the victim's face up. Several studies have shown that the brain's reaction to familiar stimuli differs in measurable ways from unfamiliar ones. Anthony Wagner and his collaborators at the Stanford Memory Lab found that they could discover whether subjects believed they were familiar with a particular person's face with 80% or better accuracy, under controlled weather condition, though they noted in later research that subjects tin intentionally fool the program. And so—if the kinks tin be worked out—crimes of the hereafter may exist solved by a "reverse lineup" to determine if a suspect recognizes the victim.

Though the current good consensus is that these techniques are not still reliable plenty for use in law enforcement, data of this kind could revolutionize criminal proceedings. We may not be able to play back a accused'south recollection of a crime as though it were a video, but determining whether they have memories of the law-breaking scene or the victim may play equally crucial a role in futurity trials as Deoxyribonucleic acid evidence does today. Needless to say, the use of such technology would raise a range of ethical and constitutional issues.

"It may go possible to 'eavesdrop' on a person's internal dialogue."

In civil proceedings, judges and juries struggle to set up damage awards to compensate a victim for pain and suffering—psychological states that defy easy measurement. Insurance companies hire investigators to ascertain whether a claimant is actually injure or is faking it. In the future, these questions may be informed by encephalon imaging tests that show considerable promise for determining whether someone is subjectively feeling pain.

Consider the controversial diagnosis of fibromyalgia, a status that causes widespread discomfort throughout the body, with no known physical origin. Is the condition real or imaginary? Brain imaging studies establish that areas of the encephalon that conceptualize hurting were significantly more active in fibromyalgia patients than in a control grouping when the subjects were imminently expecting to be hit by a beam from a heat laser. Non surprisingly, these patients also reported higher levels of pain from the beam than good for you subjects. In other words, they indeed appear to be more sensitive to painful stimuli than other people.

The new technologies may return moot the argue over torture and its supposed efficacy. "Enhanced interrogation" would go a affair of the past if investigators could straight query a suspected terrorist'south mind to reveal co-conspirators and targets. The world will take to decide whether such methods meet human-rights standards, specially since disciplinarian governments would well-nigh certainly apply them to try to identify destructive thoughts or exposure to prohibited ideas or materials.

A similar revolution may occur in end-of-life questions. Studies of patients in vegetative states suggest that, in some cases, their brains react to spoken requests much as wakeful people do, even if they are unable to respond. One such patient's brain activity was indistinguishable from healthy volunteers when she was asked to imagine playing tennis or moving around her home. Another recent written report predicted with great accuracy which unresponsive patients would improve over a half-dozen-month period and which would remain unchanged.

Brain monitoring could besides get more routine in employment. Selected high-speed train drivers and other workers in China already wear encephalon monitoring devices while on duty to detect fatigue and lark. The South Communist china Forenoon Post reports that some employees and government workers in China are required to wear sensors curtained in prophylactic helmets or uniforms to detect depression, anxiety or rage. Ane manager at a logistics company stated that "Information technology has significantly reduced the number of mistakes made past our workers."

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Consumer applications may be equally transformative, creating new markets and industries. Someday it may be possible to larn to some level of precision whether your spouse really loves y'all, finds you bonny or is having an affair. Future prenuptial agreements might require a visit to a encephalon-browse center at the local mall to answer some very personal questions. Insurers or employers might require applicants to undergo a test to determine if they've lied on their applications.

Today's brain scanning technologies provide relatively crude resolution in space and time, averaging measurements over hundreds or thousands of neurons. What gets cognitive neuroscientists excited is the possibility that improved devices will offer greater detail and accuracy, mayhap even down to the individual neuron level. This would open up up all sorts of new applications and uses.

We currently control computers and electronics through physical contact and, more recently, with our voices. In the future, we may be able to operate these gadgets with our thoughts. Imagine wearing an unobtrusive device that allows y'all to think "turn up the heat" or "unlock the front door," dictate text into a document without speaking or silently send a message to a friend.

The new technologies may somewhen brand it possible to turn your heed into the ultimate intellectual holding, an heirloom to exist passed on to posterity. While today's imaging techniques require a live subject, the twenty-four hour period may come when a detailed map of your brain, downward to the neurons and synapses, is a standard part of autopsies, making your knowledge and experience available through analysis or simulation software after you are gone.

Will hereafter CEOs exist able to consult a long deceased merely still revered company founder? Volition a person'due south descendants be able to find out where grandpa hid the coin? More greatly, if your memories and personality are somehow preserved in a figurer, will this alter what it ways to be dead?

The coming wave of cognitive technology raises deep questions about the nature of our minds, consciousness and complimentary will. But the revolution will arrive slowly. Incremental progress volition effect in applications, products and markets that volition exist as hard to predict equally social media was at the infancy of the internet. Simply i thing is certain: Our legal arrangement, institutions, rights and customs will struggle to adapt to a world in which our most intimate thoughts may be subject to a search warrant or become a thing of public record.

Dr. Kaplan is a tech entrepreneur and a lecturer and research chapter at Stanford University, where he teaches most the social and economic impact of artificial intelligence. Henry T. Greely, a professor at Stanford Law School and president of the International Neuroethics Society, contributed to this article.

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Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-machines-that-will-read-your-mind-11554476156