Do You See What I See?

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=translating-images-from-brain-waves

Summary:
This article by Nikhil Swaminathan tells of new research developments in the mystery of decoding human thoughts and dreams, made possible by mathematical process developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. The possibilities for this new discovery, researchers are saying, are endless. They say, “We could use the decoder to investigate difference in perception across people, to study covert mental processes such as attention, and perhaps even to access the visual content of purely mental phenomena such as dreams and imagery.” Preceding tries at deciphering mental activity in tested persons required knowing what image the individual was being given. Knowing this gave scientists an idea of what pattern of activity should go with the thought. This time around, scientists used fMRIs to take note of activity in the visual parts of the brain, studying it in divided voxels, or 3-D pixels. Different voxels would respond to different parts of the picture. According to John-Dylan Haynes, a professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, the team of researchers could guess what the person was seeing by noting what certain sections of the brain were doing and thinking of what kind of information would be found in the part of the photo to which the brain was responding. When tested with increasing numbers of images, the accuracy of the algorithm naturally decreased; however, remaining above 10%, it goes far beyond the efficiency of random guesswork. This process of course does not have the capacity to determine our innermost thoughts, but it still has the potential to be able to do many things, such as translate dreams.

Response:
Wow. Even seeing the title of the article put me in shock because this shows us how far technology has come. The fact that scientists can actually come up with a method of telling a person what he or she is thinking is truly astounding. I wonder what this kind of development can assist in studying aside from dreams, attention, and perception. It will be amazing to see what kind of future developments come from this. Perhaps someday science will be able to tell us our innermost thoughts and secrets.