Loading ...
Berkeley scientists just unveiled a machine that can read your brain.
No kidding? In “Nature” magazine this week, a group of the university’s neuroscientists published an article about a new scanner system that can gauge what you’re seeing by deciphering activity levels in your brain. According to the article, the machine unscrambles and then matches the brain waves in your head to the images that are being presented to you for viewing.
Jack Gallant, the head of the study, tells the inquisitive student to “imagine that we begin with a large set of photographs chosen at random. You secretly select just one of these and look at it while we measure your brain activity. Given the set of possible photographs and the measurements of your brain activity, the decoder attempts to identify which specific photograph you saw.”
Previous systems have performed similar tasks in the past, but this technology beats out the flabby have-beens because it’s got the capability to detect unprecedented detail. It used to be that machines could barely tell that those are, in fact, trees you see in front of you as you saunter down Sproul Plaza, late to your third class of the day, but now the machines can actually see the trees to be the freakish-looking things they are, with branches that’re genetically modified to look like Cheeto puffs to boot.
In the future, scientists think that a more refined version of the technology can be used to like, totally read people’s thoughts. We don’t know whether to quake in our boots or start plotting the downfalls of our bitterest enemies. Seriously.
Image: M.R.W.HH at Wikimedia Commons
How dream of reading someone’s mind may soon become a reality [The Indepedent]
Brain Scanner Can Tell What You’re Looking At [Wired]
Comments:
No comments yet.
