|
|
"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." The ambitious experiment was taken a stage further, expanding the set of novel images from 120 to up to 1,000. The first volunteer took this test, and accuracy declined, but only slightly, from 92 percent to 82 percent. "Our estimates suggest that even with a set of one billion images -- roughly the number of images indexed by Google on the Internet -- the decoder would correctly identify the image about 20 percent of the time," said Gallant. The researchers say the device cannot "read minds," the common term for unscrambling thoughts. It cannot even reconstruct an image, only identify an image that was taken from a known set, they point out. All the same, the potential is enormous, they believe. Doctors could use the technique to diagnose brain areas damaged by a stroke or dementia, determine the outcome of drug treatment or stem-cell therapy and fling open a door into the strange world of dreams. And, according to one futuristic scenario, paraplegic patients, by thinking of a series of images whose fMRI patterns are recognised by computer, may one day be able to operate machines by remote control. Even so, brain-reading is hedged with potential controversy. Within 30 or 50 years, advances could raise fears about breach of privacy and authoritarian abuse of the kind that dog biotechnology today, the authors say. "No-one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, covertly, or without complete informed consent," they say. Related Links: |
advertisement
Put Discovery News on Your Site!
|
