The mind-reading technique opens up interesting possibilities in, for example, treatment of mental illnesses, help for physically disabled people and crime fighting.
However, not all experts are equally enthusiastic. Namely, it is only the imagination that sets limits to how authorities and companies can abuse access to our innermost secrets.
Scientists follow a thought
Thoughts are hard to pin down, but neurologists define a thought as electrical and chemical activity in the brain’s neurons and the complex networks that connect them.
In 2018, there was a breakthrough for the neurological understanding of thoughts. Then the experienced neurologist Avgusta Shestyuk at the University of California in Berkeley succeeded chart a thought’s path through the brain.
Avgusta Shestyuk placed 16 subjects in an fMRI scanner, which measured blood flow in the brain. In this way, she could see which parts of the brain were using oxygen and were therefore active.
While the subjects were in the scanner, they were told one word and then had to say another word with the opposite meaning.
Using the scanner, Avgusta Shestyuk was able to follow the stream of thought from the auditory center, where the sound was registered, through the frontal lobes, which decoded the meaning of the word, and on to the speech center, which allowed the opposite word to be pronounced.
After three seconds the thought died out and no longer gave rise to any brain activity.
A brand new study from the year 2023 has taken an important step further and decoded the very content of subjects’ thoughts.
Behind the new study is computer scientist Alexander Huth at the University of Texas at Austin in the USA. He used a method very similar to the artificial intelligence in language models such as ChatGPT.
Together with his colleagues, he used an fMRI scanner to measure the brain activity of seven subjects while they listened to 82 podcasts of 5–15 minutes in length.
The researchers’ starting point was that each sentence that the subjects listened to and thought about would give rise to a pattern of activity in different parts of the brain that reflected the meaning of the thought and the feelings it evoked in the listener.
After a total of 16 hours of listening, the researchers taught an artificial intelligence to find a connection between the sentences and the activity in the brain. It allowed the computer to predict which sentence a subject had heard when a certain brain activity was recorded.
When the subjects later listened to other podcasts, the artificial intelligence was able to reproduce with surprisingly high precision their thoughts and thus the sentences they heard just by analyzing the brain waves.
Headset treats adhd
Brain scanners like the one used in the experiment with the pods are expensive and space-consuming, but when the brain is working, it also emits weak electrical waves, which can be recorded via electrodes on the head, so-called EEG.
The simplest devices that read “thoughts” in this way look like a pair of headphones. They can be bought online for a few thousand kroner.
The technology is already used to, for example, teach children with ADHD to control their brain waves by playing a special “thought-controlled” game on an iPad. Studies have shown that children become significantly better at concentrating after playing for a few weeks.
The EEG technique only provides an approximate picture of brain activity, as each electrode records the activity of a relatively large part of the brain, which may contain millions of nerve cells. However, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, wants to go much further than that. He wants to operate on a large number of small electrodes in the brain.
In 2019, Musk’s company Neuralink presented a kind of advanced sewing machine, which literally sews electrodes into the brain. Ninety-six ultra-thin cables with a total of 3,000 electrodes are placed next to each other, so that they cover a two by two centimeter section of the cerebral cortex.
Because each electrode is placed close to a single nerve cell, every signal it emits can be recorded.
In the early summer of 2023, Neuralink received the green light from the US FDA to begin clinical studies to test Neuralink on humans. According to Elon Musk, the plan is to be able to cure diseases such as post-traumatic stress disorder. He imagines that the electrodes can register when a traumatic memory appears and dampen the anxiety by a gentle shock to the brain’s fear center.
In the long term, however, Elon Musk’s vision is much bigger than that. He imagines that in the future all people will be able to use the electrodes to improve memory.
“I think in the future we will be able to store and play back memories and eventually maybe download them into a new body,” Musk said during a Neuralink event in 2020.
Police read suspects’ minds
Not everyone is equally enthusiastic about such visions. One of the critics is Nita Farahany, professor of law at Duke University in the United States. She is an expert on the ethical and legal issues surrounding new technology and fears that sooner or later the technology will be used to hack people’s brains and read their innermost thoughts.
The American company Brainwave Science has actually developed a tool that can almost do just that.
The iCognative headset uses EEG to record the so-called P300 brain waves that occur when the brain makes decisions. It is something that is already used by the police today.
For example, if a suspect is shown images of the victim, the crime scene, or the murder weapon, the presence of P300 brain waves can indicate whether he or she recognizes them, which could point to him or her as guilty of the crime.
Among others, the CIA and FBI have tested the technique and found that the advanced lie detector is largely flawless and impossible to deceive.
The mind reading technology could mean that significantly more crimes can be solved, which would make society safer. But Nita Farahany also points to the risks associated with the technology.
She fears that it will be used as an interrogation tool by authoritarian regimes or for brain monitoring in workplaces, so that the manager can, for example, check whether the employees are focused on their tasks or whether they are sitting and daydreaming in the desk chair.
Perhaps the reading of our thoughts can even go further. According to the company behind iCognative, the headset can not only reveal our memories, but also our intentions.
One fine day, maybe the boss will tap you on the shoulder and tell you to forget about those plans you have to stay home tomorrow.
2023-12-02 06:11:14
#thinking #artificial #intelligence #answer
