This Computer Program Can Read Your Thoughts
Welcome to the future where computers read your mind and Artificial Intelligence is on the cards. A new computer program developed by a team of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle can decode your thoughts with the help of electrodes.
This program requires electrodes to be implanted in the mind of the subject. Based on the chemical changes that thoughts lead to, these electrodes would convey electrical signs which can then be read to decipher a person’s thoughts. The entire decoding process takes no more than a few milliseconds after an image is seen by the subject.
“Clinically, you could think of our result as a proof of concept toward building a communication mechanism for patients who are paralyzed or have had a stroke and are completely locked in,”says Rajesh Rao, a neuro-scientist at the University of Washington.
Any development in communication of this kind between a human and a machine is a huge leap -it could be of immense use for people who cannot speak or have any kind of trouble conveying their thoughts. This specific program, however, is not the first of its kind. There have been similar developments in the past where researchers recorded brain waves of viewers in the form of movie clips people were watching at the time.
Professor Xavier uses Cerebro, a computer, to amplify his powers of telepathy in X-Men. Could complex communication between computers and humans be here in the real world as well?
In this experiment conducted by Rajesh Rao’s team, a difference was observed between neural patterns when people saw images of houses and images of faces. Additionally, there were also different kinds of brain signals the computer required to decode the thoughts. Both these sets of patterns work in unison to help researchers understand the responses of the human mind, and decoding them in real time, better. More research in the field can help neuroscientists map the entire brain and its responses one day,
