By Edward Willett This piece was originally posted
hereon Edward’s blogHassenpfeffer.
I’m a hard-line skeptic when it comes to the topic of ESP (extra-sensory perception). I don’t believe in
telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, or people bending flatware
just by looking at it.
That said, I’m pretty confident that in the near future
mind-reading will be possible. Not for us, though: for our
machines.
In fact, machines can already read our minds, to a limited
extent.
Just recently, Ambient Corporation demonstrated a
neckband that translates thought into speech…sort of.
It takes some training to use, and requires “a level above
thinking,” according to Michael Callahand, inventor of the Audeo with fellow
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researcher Thomas
Coleman and co-founder with Coleman of the Ambient Corporation.
Rather than broadcasting a person’s thoughts, it picks up on
nerve signals deliberately, but soundlessly, sent to the vocal
cords, and relays those signals wirelessly to a computer, which
then converts them into words spoken by a computerized voice.
The current system only recognizes about 150 words and phrases,
but an improved version is supposed to be out by the end of the
year that doesn’t have a vocabulary limit, because instead of
recognizing specific words and phrases, it will identify the
distinct bits of sound, called phonemes, that we use to construct
complete words.
(cont.)
A person wearing a neckband can still talk normally: the system
can differentiate between when the wearer wants to talk silently
and when he wants to talk out loud.
There’s more use for something like this than simply allowing
people to make silent phone calls while sitting in a meeting. The
phoneme-based version, although it will be slower because the user
will have to build words a phoneme at a time, will be aimed at
people who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological
disease or injury.
That’s not the only way the Audeo technology can help people
with handicaps. Just last fall, Callahan and Coleman demonstrated
the use of the neckband
to guide a motorized wheelchair. It could also be used to allow
people with serious muscle control problems to operate a computer
or other equipment.
Even though I’m not telepathic, I can sense what you’re thinking
at this point: “That’s not mind-reading. They’re picking up those
signals from well outside the brain.”
How about this, then? Researchers at the University of
California in Berkeley have developed a system that uses functional
MRI data to decode
information from the visual cortex They first measured visual
cortex activity in people looking at more than a thousand
photographs. Using the data, they were able to program a computer
to understand how each person’s visual cortex processes
information.
When the participants were then shown a random set of more than
100 previously unseen photographs, the researchers were able to
accurately identify which image was being viewed just by looking at
the brain scans.
New Scientist magazine quotes John-Dylan Haynes of the Max
Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig,
Germany, as saying that the research hints that scientists may one
day be able to access dreams, memories and imagery from people’s
brains (assuming, that is, that dreams are processed in a way
analogous to visual stimuli, which is uncertain).
Heck, even our cars are learning to
read our minds. A team from the Technical University of Berlin
discovered they could improve reaction times by as much as 100
milliseconds in real driving conditions by monitoring drivers’
brains and reducing distractions during periods of high brain
activity.
That may not sound very impressive, but it’s enough to reduce
braking distance by nearly three metres when you’re travelling at
100 kilometres per hour.
A car with such a device installed might know to switch off
unnecessary information systems when it senses the driver is
distracted—say, turning off the radio when the driver’s busy
talking to a passenger. (Admittedly, they’re going to have to come
up with a better interface than EEG
sensors stuck all over the driver’s scalp. You think it’s hard to
get people to wear seatbelts…)
The phrase “I know what you’re thinking” has thus far only been
addressed by one human to another, and only in a metaphorical
sense.
