Published in News

Scientists can print out your thoughts

by on01 September 2011


Should not take long
Boffins at Princeton Universe are getting close to working out a way to get a hard copy of your thoughts. Princeton scientists show that it is possible to generate text about the mental content seen in brain images.

Princeton boffins have for the first time matched images of brain activity with categories of words related to the concepts a person is thinking about. The results could lead to a better understanding of how people consider meaning and context when reading or thinking. It is still far away from getting close to mind reading. Besides most blokes are supposed to think about sex every 30 seconds which would prevent the brain coming up with a coherent sex sentence. Sorry I mean sentence, boobies.

According Frontiers in Human Neuroscience  which we get for the spot the brain cell competition, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be used to identify areas of the brain activated when study participants thought about physical objects such as a carrot, a horse or a house. The researchers then generated a list of topics related to those objects and used the fMRI images to determine the brain activity that words within each topic shared. For instance, thoughts about "eye" and "foot" produced similar neural stirrings as other words related to body parts.

Once the boffins knew the brain activity a topic sparked, they were able to use fMRI images alone to predict the subjects and words a person likely thought about during the scan.
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