6 MIND-READING TECH PROJECTS THAT MIGHT FREAK YOU OUT

6 Mind-Reading Tech Projects That Might Freak You Out
By Chandra Steele, PC Magazine, 16 May 2014.

The National Security Agency (NSA) may be monitoring all our communications, but at least our thoughts are safe. Right?

That might not be the case for much longer, as scientists are already capable of rudimentary thought-reading. Researchers have gone from bottling brains in formaldehyde and plumbing the psyche with psychology to machinery like CT scans and MRIs.

Now that researchers are fluent with the physical structure and chemical workings of the brain, they are after answers to the bigger mysteries. What's behind our intentions? What makes some people psychopaths? What do other people's dreams look like?

To do this, researchers need to observe the brain in action, something they can do with a functional MRI (fMRI), which measures brain activity by picking up on the magnetic properties of haemoglobin that vary with blood oxygenation. Scientists have made some startling breakthroughs in reproducing our thoughts on a screen and delving into what motivates us to do the things we do. Creepy or awesome? Check out below and judge for yourself.

1. Dreaming

It’s not Inception-level yet but Yukiyasu Kamitani (pictured above) and his team at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, have been able to tap into the dream state of research subjects.

Image: The Asahi Shimbun

Sleepy subjects were put into an fMRI machine and woken up just as they were drifting off. They then reported what they had been dreaming about. A database was created from the information and using machine-learning algorithm and a visual-imagery decoder, scientists were able to identify what the subjects were dreaming about in subsequent scans.

2. Imagination

Imagination is a function of the brain that’s very active during childhood, a time when you’re also learning the alphabet. Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands put the two together. They had study participants imagine forming letters and recorded the patterns their brains made while they did. Using that information and an algorithm that translates it into pixels, they were able to reconstruct the actual images that participants saw.

3. Intentions

Minority Report come to life? Pre-thought was captured using fMRI by John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany and a team he led from University College London and Oxford University. Researchers gave subjects a choice of actions and by studying the patterns of prefrontal cortex activity before they took the action were able to decode what they were about to do.

4. Guilt

You cannot tell a lie. Or, at least, in the future you might not be able to. There are a few companies marketing the use of fMRI as a lie detector that can measure intent, prior knowledge, and deception with a 90 percent accuracy rate. As with polygraph tests, however, there are downsides. A person who merely thinks about what it would have been like to commit a crime could end up implicating themselves with fMRI.

5. Shopping

Marketing is a never-ending quest to delve into the psyche of consumers. From questionnaires and focus groups to taste tests, a lot of effort goes into targeting audiences. But they’re all based on self-reporting. That is until fMRI opened up the possibility of looking at how consumers really react to products. Neurosense has consumers speak their minds without saying a word. The company uses fMRI to assess their feelings about products, packaging, advertising, and even smell.

6. Memory

Recalling a face can sometimes be a difficult task. So think about how difficult it was for scientists at Yale to reconstruct faces from just those recollections. After showing subjects a range of faces and mapping their brain activity while viewing them, they created a database. They then showed the subjects new faces and were able to construct them just through brain activity.

[Source: PC Magazine. Edited.]