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I’d like to know how good the results are getting in this area, and how general across people/technologies etc. How close are we to the point that someone can put an arbitrary individual in some kind of tomography machine and say what they are thinking without pre-training or priming?
Marcel Just et al do a lot of this. It for sure leads to fun press releases, e.g. CMU Scientists Harness “Mind Reading” Technology to Decode Complex Thoughts but I need time to see details to understand how much progress they are making towards the science-fiction version. (Wang, Cherkassky, and Just 2017)
Researchers watch video images people are seeing decoded from their fMRI brain scans in near-real-time. If you want to have a crack at thsi yourself, you might check out Katja Seeliger’s mind reading datasets.
More intrusively, in rats… Real-time readouts of location memory:
by recording the electrical activity of groups of neurons in key areas of the brain they could read a rat’s thoughts of where it was, both after it actually ran the maze and also later when it would dream of running the maze in its sleep
But: could a neuroscientist even understand a microprocessor? (Jonas and Kording 2017) What hope is there of brains?
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Jonas, Eric, and Konrad Paul Kording. 2017. “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?” PLOS Computational Biology 13 (1): e1005268. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268.
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Wang, Jing, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, and Marcel Adam Just. 2017. “Predicting the Brain Activation Pattern Associated with the Propositional Content of a Sentence: Modeling Neural Representations of Events and States: Modeling Neural Representations of Events and States.” Human Brain Mapping, June. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.23692.