Posted on 03/28/2014 12:44:30 PM PDT by RoosterRedux
Think mind reading is science fiction?
Think again.
Scientists have used brain scanners to detect and reconstruct the faces that people are thinking of, according to a a study accepted for publication this month in the journal NeuroImage.
In the study, scientists hooked participants up to an fMRI brain scanner – which determines activity in different parts of the brain by measuring blood flow – and showed them images of faces. Then, using only the brain scans, the scientists were able to create images of the faces the people were looking at.
“It is mind reading,” said Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley who co-authored the study with professor Marvin M. Chun from Yale and Brice A. Kuhl from New York University.
The study says it is the first to try to reconstruct faces from thoughts. The photos above are the actual photos and reconstructions done in the lab.
While the reconstructions based on 30 brain readings are blurry, they approximate the true images. They got the skin color right in all of them, and 24 out of 30 reconstructions correctly detected the presence or absence of a smile.
The brain readings were worse at determining gender and hair color: About two-thirds of the reconstructions clearly detected the gender, and only half got hair color correct.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I hope they don’t use those in place of a police sketch - the first photos look nothing alike
Women have been reading men’s minds forever.
...and women EXPECT men to be able to read theirs.
Women have no idea what men are thinking. They can’t read men as well as they think because most of us learn to nod our heads yes, stay quiet, and say we’re sorry as often as possible.
On the other hand, woment certainly THINK that men should be able to read THEIR minds and that inability gets us into trouble as well.
The Mel Gibson movie What Women Want was a pretty funny take on what might happen if a guy could suddenly read the spaghetti coding that seems to be a woman’s mind.
Oh Yeah . . Then read Nancy Pelosi’s mind!
You have to know a priori what they are thinking of. This is not mind reading; it is merely electrical correlation to memories.
I’m surprised it took this long, but I’d be very surprised if it works with actual *thoughts* as opposed to stimuli. IOW, they could put headphones on the person and use that to figure out what the brain signals do when confronted with a given pattern (the sonic equiv. of this vision test), but they wouldn’t get it clear, because the listener could be daydreaming about a first date when the same song was playing (for example). Thanks RoosterRedux.
Phoebe Cates, at the pool, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Probe my mind at any random time and that’s what’s likely to be serving as a place holder in lieu of actual thought.
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