Brain-reading
Advances in research have made this possible by using human neuroimaging to decode a person's conscious experience based on non-invasive measurements of an individual's brain activity.
In 2024 -2025, professor of neuropsychology Barbara Sahakian qualified, "A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty.
The researchers applied a new model, about how moving object information is processed in human brains, while volunteers watched clips from several videos.
[11][12] In 2024, a study demonstrated that images imagined in the mind, without visual stimulation, can be reconstructed from fMRI brain signals utilizing machine learning and generative AI technology.
This technique involves the interpretation of the local change in the concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin in the brain, although the relationship between this blood flow and neural activity is not yet completely understood.
[21] These include proposed ways to control video games via brain waves and "neuro-marketing" to determine someone's thoughts about a new product or advertisement.
[citation needed] Emotiv Systems, an Australian electronics company, has demonstrated a headset that can be trained to recognize a user's thought patterns for different commands.
Tan Le demonstrated the headset's ability to manipulate virtual objects on screen, and discussed various future applications for such brain-computer interface devices, from powering wheel chairs to replacing the mouse and keyboard.
[25] 16 December 2015, a study conducted by Toshimasa Yamazaki at Kyushu Institute of Technology found that during a rock-paper-scissors game a computer was able to determine the choice made by the subjects before they moved their hand.
[29][30] Statistical analysis of EEG brainwaves has been claimed to allow the recognition of phonemes,[31] and (in 1999) at a 60% to 75% level color and visual shape words.
[33] The research team conducted their studies on the superior temporal gyrus, a region of the brain that is involved in higher order neural processing to make semantic sense from auditory information.
[34] The research team used a computer model to analyze various parts of the brain that might be involved in neural firing while processing auditory signals.
Using the computational model, scientists were able to identify the brain activity involved in processing auditory information when subjects were presented with recording of individual words.
[36] This data is even more striking in light of other research suggesting that the decision to move, and possibly the ability to cancel that movement at the last second,[37] may be the results of unconscious processing.
[24] In 2013 a project led by University of California Berkeley professor John Chuang published findings on the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication as a substitute for passwords.
Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta predicts that this question will be decided by a Supreme Court case.
In 2008 an Indian woman was convicted of murder after an EEG of her brain allegedly revealed that she was familiar with the circumstances surrounding the poisoning of her ex-fiancé.
[51] The Economist cautioned people to be "afraid" of the future impact, and some ethicists argue that privacy laws should protect private thoughts.
Legal scholar Hank Greely argues that the court systems could benefit from such technology, and neuroethicist Julian Savulescu states that brain data is not fundamentally different from other types of evidence.
[54] In a 2020 study, AI using implanted electrodes could correctly transcribe a sentence read aloud from a fifty-sentence test set 97% of the time, given 40 minutes of training data per participant.
[50] Donald Marks, founder and chief science officer of MMT, is working on playing back thoughts individuals have after they have already been recorded.
[50][54] The episode Black Hole of American medical drama House, which aired on 15 March 2010, featured an experimental "cognitive imaging" device that supposedly allowed seeing into a patient's subconscious mind.
