Scientists use brain scans, AI to ‘decode’ thoughts
- US researchers translated brain activity into words using an fMRI scanner and a neural network language model
- Team’s language decoder was able to grasp ‘gist’ of what three research participants heard or thought
Scientists said they have found a way to use brain scans and artificial intelligence modelling to transcribe “the gist” of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step towards mind-reading.
While the main goal of the language decoder is to help people who have lost the ability to communicate, the US scientists acknowledged that the technology raised questions about “mental privacy”.
Aiming to assuage such fears, they ran tests showing that their decoder could not be used on anyone who had not allowed it to be trained on their brain activity over long hours inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.
Previous research has shown that a brain implant can enable people who can no longer speak or type to spell out words or even sentences.
These “brain-computer interfaces” focus on the part of the brain that controls the mouth when it tries to form words.
Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of a new study, said that his team’s language decoder “works at a very different level”.