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Machines that can read hoi polloi ’s minds are have close to realness : scientist have revealed they can now apply encephalon scan to scan letters and image player are viewing .
The results come from two subject field , both detail in the journal NeuroImage , that suggest machines could be taught to peer inside the mind to " see " film of what people see in near real time .
Even so , the researchers say the true donation of such field are in advancingthe reason of the brain .
" It ’s really dainty to say that we can discern image based on brain data , but I believe the potentials of the study are more fundamental — for instance , understanding the dynamics of percept , " said Marieke van de Nieuwenhuijzen , carbon monoxide gas - writer of one of the studies .
genius
In the first discipline , research worker used operational magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI ) to record the activity of the visual pallium , the encephalon region that processes visual entropy , while study participant were viewing a series of handwritten characters : B , R , A , I , N and S. [ See Mind - Reading Images from the Brain Scans ]
By eat piece of this information into mathematical manakin over and over again , the researchers were able to " instruct " the machine which radiation diagram of activity corresponded with which missive a mortal was view .
The trained model was then tested on the rest of the data point — that is , it had to reconstruct the letter of the alphabet from theactivity of the brain . And it did so with strikingly in high spirits quality .
" We retrace the someone pixels of which perceived letters consist , " said study investigator Marcel van Gerven , a neuroscientist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands .
track the entropy
In the 2nd written report , van de Nieuwenhuijzen and her colleague set out to see the time lapse of visual informationpropagating across the brain — a mental process that take place in a small fraction of a bit .
The investigator used magnetoencephalography ( MEG ) to commemorate the great unwashed ’s brain activity while they catch images of nerve , scenes , bodies and cock .
The data was then used to instruct a mathematical framework how to distinguish between patterns of brain activity occurring about 100 msec after the image was stage to the bailiwick participants . The example could then tell apart , with high accuracy , whether the image the study participant pick up was a face , a consistency or an object .
one thousand thousand detects small change inmagnetic field in the brainthat are caused by neurons ' electric activity . Unlike fMRI , it can specialise between alteration in brain activity pass just a few milliseconds apart .
Therefore , the investigator were able-bodied to nail when the perceived visual data hit the first processing post in the brain and how that info evolved from there over time .
" We relegate to which stimulus category a perceive input belong , and we can go after the spatiotemporal dynamics of the involvement of different brain region when perceive dissimilar input categories , " van Gerven said .
realize the brain
The mind - reading study could lead to a better understanding of how the brain " sees " the world . [ Inside the Einstein : A Photo Journey Through Time ]
The human visual system consists of several discrete visual area arrange in a highly interconnected and superimposed mesh . Scientists have been trying to build model that key out and anticipate how the Einstein will react as we see the reality .
" There ’s been an ongoing attempt to seek to understand what it is about the ocular humankind that repel activeness in different optic sphere of the brain , " said Thomas Naselaris , a neuroscientist at the Medical University of South Carolina who was n’t involve in either study .
optic reconstructionis a way of testing the unlike offer models about how the brainiac encodes visual information , and it can be done using various algorithms .
" The studies are sophisticated and elegant , " Naselaris said . " They are well - done exploration of what algorithms are most efficient for reconstructing optical data . That seems to be the real procession and the material part . "
Next , the researchers will consider other brain processes , such asmemory , to see how retaining something in judgement develops over time in the learning ability .
" Our next goal is to tail these dynamics in more item and examine these dynamic during working memory maintenance , " van Gerven said .
