“There are lots of other ways the government can tell what we’re thinking.” “I just don’t think it’s time to start worrying,” she says. She also doubts that it would be worth the time or cost to train a decoder for an individual for any purpose other than restoring communication abilities. For starters, fMRI scanners are not portable, making it difficult to scan someone’s brain without their cooperation. “I think it’s a big wake-up call for policymakers and the public.”īut Adina Roskies, a science philosopher at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire, says that the technology is too difficult to use - and too inaccurate - to pose a threat at present. “I’m not calling for panic, but the development of sophisticated, non-invasive technologies like this one seems to be closer on the horizon than we expected,” says bioethicist Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Neuroethicists are split on whether the latest advance represents a threat to mental privacy. “It’s impressive to see someone pull it off.”‘ ‘Wake-up call’ Huth thinks that it will become even more difficult to develop a universal decoder as researchers create more detailed maps of individuals’ brains.ĭetermining how the brain creates meaning from language is enormously difficult, says Francisco Pereira, a neuroscientist at the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The encoded map also differed between individuals, meaning that the researchers could not create one decoder that worked on everyone. When participants thought of a different story while listening to a recorded story, the decoder could not determine the words they were hearing. The researchers also found that it was easy to trick the technology. But many of the sentences it produced were inaccurate. And it did a fairly accurate job of describing what people were seeing in the films. The decoder generated sentences that got the gist of what the person was thinking: the phrase ‘I don’t have my driver’s license yet’, for instance, was decoded as ‘she has not even started to learn to drive yet’. The video below shows the sentences produced from brain recordings taken while a study participant watched a clip from the animated film Sintel, about a girl caring for a baby dragon. Using a combination of the patterns they had previously encoded for each individual and algorithms that determine how a sentence is likely to be constructed on the basis of other words in it, the researchers attempted to decode this new brain activity. Next, the researchers recorded the participants’ fMRI activity while they listened to a story, imagined telling a story or watched a film that contained no dialogue. By measuring the blood flow through the volunteers’ brains and integrating this information with details of the stories they were listening to and the LLM’s ability to understand how words relate to one another, the researchers developed an encoded map of how each individual’s brain responds to different words and phrases. In a study published in Nature Neuroscience on 1 May, the researchers got 3 volunteers to lie in an fMRI scanner and recorded the individuals’ brain activity while they listened to 16 hours of podcasts each 1. To understand the actual meaning behind the thought, computer scientists Alexander Huth and Jerry Tang at the University of Texas at Austin and their colleagues combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-invasive means of measuring brain activity, with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms called large language models (LLMs), which underlie tools such as ChatGPT and are trained to predict the next word in a piece of text. Most existing thought-to-speech technologies use brain implants that monitor activity in a person’s motor cortex and predict the words that the lips are trying to form. But how close is the technology - which is currently only moderately accurate - to achieving true mind-reading? And how can policymakers ensure that such developments are not misused? Researchers have developed the first non-invasive method of determining the gist of imagined speech, presenting a possible communication outlet for people who cannot talk. The little voice inside your head can now be decoded by a brain scanner - at least some of the time. The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to decode people’s thoughts.
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