At Yale University, researchers recently used a brain scanner to identify which face someone was looking at – just from their brain activity. At the University of California-Berkeley, scientists are moving beyond “reading” simple thoughts to predicting what someone will think next.
And at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just has a vision that will make Google Glass seem very last century. Instead of using your eye to direct a cursor – finding a phone number for a car repair shop, for instance – he fantasizes about a device that will dial the shop by interpreting your thoughts about the car (minus the expletives).
Mind-reading technology isn’t yet where the sci-fi thrillers predict it will go, but researchers like Just aren’t ruling out such a future.
“In principle, our thoughts could someday be readable,” said Just, who directs the school’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. “I don’t think we have to worry about this in the next five to 10 years, but it’s interesting to think about. What if all of our thoughts were public?”
He can imagine a terrifying version of that future, where officials read minds in order to gain control over them. But he prefers to envision a more positive one, with mind-reading devices offering opportunities to people with disabilities – and the rest of us.
Marvin Chun, senior author on the Yale work, published last month in the journal Neuroimage, sees a more limited potential for mind reading, at least with current functional-MRI technology, which measures blood flow to infer what is happening in the brain.
“I think we can make it a little better. I don’t think we’ll be able to magically read out people’s faces a whole lot better,” he said.
Jack Gallant, a leader in the field of mind reading, also at Berkeley, said the work at Yale may not have immediate benefits, but it helps build enthusiasm for the field.
“Brain decoding tells us whether some specific type of information can be recovered from the brain,” he said. “It can also be used to build a brain-computer interface if one is so inclined.”
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