London: In a key breakthrough, scientists have developed a "psychic" computer which can read people's minds by scanning their brain activity and reproducing images of what they are seeing or even remembering.
An international team has been able to convert into
crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a
person is watching or recalling -- the research shows that it
is possible to "decode" signals in the brain by moving scenes.
According to the scientists, the breakthrough raises
the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people
who are unable to speak to communicate via visualisation of
their thoughts; recording people's dreams; or allowing police
to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.
For their research, the scientists used the functional
magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan the brains of
two patients as they watched videos.
Subsequently, the computer, which was specially
programmed, was used to search for links between configuration
of shapes, colours and movements in the videos, and patterns
of activity in the patients' visual cortex.
It was later fed more than 200 days' worth of YouTube
Internet clips and asked to predict which areas of the brain
the clips would stimulate if people were watching them.
Finally, the software was used to monitor the two
patients' brains as they watched a new film and to reproduce
what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone,
'The Sunday Times' reported.
Remarkably, the so-called psychic computer was able
to display continuous footage of the films they were watching
-- albeit with blurred images.
"Some scenes decode better than others. We can decode
talking heads really well. But a camera panning quickly across
a scene confuses the algorithm. You can use a device like this
to do some pretty cool things.
"At the moment when you see something and want to
describe it to someone you have to use words or draw it and it
doesn't work very well. You could use this technology to
transmit the image to someone.
"It might be useful for artists or to allow you to
recover an eyewitness' memory of a crime," team leader Jack
Gallant of California University said.
Bureau Report