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OnlineMarch 12, 2009

Now scientists can virtually read our minds, UCL study shows

Mark Henderson, Science Editor

A mind-reading experiment by British scientists has shown that a
person’s thoughts can be decoded from a brain scan, offering new
insights into the formation of memory.

Researchers can tell where a person is “standing” in a virtual reality
room purely by looking at patterns of activity in the brain, the study
at University College London has found.

The findings indicate that it is possible to read at least a small
part of people’s minds using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), and open a new window on the way the brain learns and
constructs memories.

“With this kind of research, we are approaching the realm of mind-
reading,” said Eleanor Maguire, a leader of the study.
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Can a machine read your mind?


SOME but not the entire memntal activity; only earlies established
pattrs on simple thought can be linked again
SO MUCH FOR THE BRAIN CONTROLLERS! WHAT FOR YOU DOING IT IN THE FIRST
PLACDE?


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Her colleague Demis Hassabis said: “You can predict where someone is
standing by reading the patterns in their brain activity. You can
track what is purely an internal thought.”

While the research could shed light on disorders that involve changes
to brain structure or memory loss, such as amnesia, dementia and
stroke, it does not suggest that MRI mind-reading could soon be used
to detect lies or reveal thoughts without their consent.

The procedure works only with the co-operation of its subjects, who
must repeat the virtual reality game again and again in the scanner to
calibrate the computer algorithm that matches brain activity to
particular thoughts. It can also detect only very simple thoughts.

“We can rest easy in terms of issues surrounding mind-reading,”
Professor Maguire said. “While technically we were able to predict
somebody’s spatial memory from their brain activity, there was nothing
intrusive about what we did.

“This analysis technique requires the person to be co-operative with
us, to train the algorithm we use on many instances of a particular
memory. It’s not that we can put somebody in a brain scanner and we
can suddenly read their thoughts. It’s quite an involved process.

“Its far away from having social, ethical and forensic implications.
In the future it will be interesting to see how these techniques
develop.”

Dr Hassabis said: “It would be impossible to use the technique to
detect whether somebody is lying or not, because they could easily
fool the system just by lying during the training sessions. The
current techniques are a long way away from doing those kinds of
things, though in the future they may become more possible. It might
be useful to start having those kinds of ethical discussions in the
near future in preparation.”

In the study, published in the journal Current Biology, volunteers
were asked to navigate around four places in a virtual reality room.
At the same time, the fMRI scanner recorded activity in the
hippocampus, the part of the brain that deals with navigation, many
memories and imagining the future.

Previous research led by Professor Maguire has found that a part of
the hippocampus is enlarged in London taxi drivers, reflecting the
memories for locations they form when learning “the knowledge”.

As the subjects started to form memories for each of the four spots, a
computer algorithm gradually became capable of identifying them
according to patterns of brain activity.

This suggests that the hippocampus lays down memories in a structured
and predictable fashion, which challenges standard thinking. Studies
with rats had suggested that there is no structure to the way the
hippocampus forms and stores memories.

Professor Maguire said: “fMRI scanners enable us to see the bigger
picture of what is happening in people's brains. By looking at
activity over tens of thousands of neurons, we can see that there must
be a functional structure — a pattern — to how these memories are
encoded. Otherwise, our experiment simply would not have been possible
to do.”

Dr Hassabis said: “Understanding how we as humans record our memories
is critical to helping us learn how information is processed in the
hippocampus and how our memories are eroded by diseases such as
Alzheimer’s.

“It’s also a small step towards the idea of mind reading, because just
by looking at neural activity, we are able to say what someone is
thinking.”


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STINKS BUSHLAND LIES.


FMRI DOES NOTHING LIKE THAT.