Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260226-how-ai-can-read-your-thoughts

by ggm • 5 months ago

45 47 5 months ago

vlovich123• 5 months ago

Prediction: even if this requires surgery, unlocking inner thought will be used in criminal proceedings to establish guilt or attempt to be used to prove innocence. It will definitely be used unethically in military/intelligence interrogations until the law catches up.

red75prime2• 5 months ago

"Hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password" XKCD 538

devmor• 5 months ago

We normally do not accept people being hit with wrenches (or a contextual contemporary) in criminal justice trials.

ksaj8• 5 months ago

I'm not sure if this would be able to detect the difference between truthful thoughts about actual memories, and intrusive thoughts that could give the entirely wrong impression.

Yet, they still do use lie detectors, even though the things they detect can be faked, or triggered out of personal alarm or offense. So it is entirely possible, regardless.

polytely• 5 months ago

torture not being that effective has never stopped the US government before

slfnflctd• 5 months ago

Intrusive thoughts is a big one. Most people report some variation of this phenomenon (myself included), and are often horrified by the thoughts or images their own mind produces, very much wanting them to go away. To be judged by that is unthinkably wrong.

pmontra• 5 months ago

My first dystopic thought was immigration counters at airports /s

AreShoesFeet0002• 5 months ago

The worst: ads.

magackame• 5 months ago

Noooo. Makes me wonder how much money do you need to buy up all the ad slots in the world and replace them with blanks.

y-curious• 5 months ago

Yeah why do that when the government can just “get” someone’s google search history?

dr_dshiv• 5 months ago

I have a PhD student working on EEG audio decoding. We are presently focused on a simpler subtopic: the detection of consonance and dissonance in the brain as it listens to music.

kennyloginz• 5 months ago

Sounds awesome!

volemo4• 5 months ago

Could you link some of your works? I’m very curious about reliability of EEG in terms of consistency between sessions.

Lerc4• 5 months ago

It does make me wonder how advanced remote sensing devices are now. With more advanced hardware, can you remotely capture EEG level signals with any accuracy?

As an aside, I briefly read that as the detection of cognitive dissonance. Which I think would be a much more difficult topic.

ksaj8• 5 months ago

They don't seem to mention if it is elective. An all or nothing mechanism might spell out words that the patient really didn't intend on others seeing (like "Ugh, that guy again! I can't stand the way he...")

It is pretty difficult to control your inner dialog against spontaneous and triggered thoughts.

Tade0• 5 months ago

I wanted to comment this HN entry with "people with intrusive thoughts sweating profusely" or something similar, but in truth are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever?

I for one don't fight them, regardless how horrible they would be spoken out aloud, because so far I haven't seen any evidence of anyone reading my mind.

I also made a point of explaining to my child that her thoughts are hers and hers alone, so she can think whatever she likes.

I would rather not have to backtrack on any of this.

throwaway2902• 5 months ago

are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever?

There are people with no internal monologue whatsoever.

trocado• 5 months ago

"Mental content" seems way to broad for what is rather the sensorimotor part of speech.

jml7c5• 5 months ago

As I understand it, the big challenge with brain electrodes is that because they are implanted in a big jiggly piece of jelly, they shift out of position and/or cause localized scarring. The practical effect is that the brain-electrode interface "wears out" after a while, and you can't get useful data. Has this been solved, or are implants still temporary?

voidUpdate2• 5 months ago

"It wasn't perfect, but 60% of the words were judged intelligible by testers"

I don't understand this part. Are they trying to pull the audio of the words out of the brain or something? I'd think it would be easier to use a dictionary of words, and use some machine learning to try and pull out the most likely next word from the brain activity, in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible

bryanrasmussen• 5 months ago

in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible

what percentage of the words would be correct though?

voidUpdate2• 5 months ago

No idea, but the words themselves would be intelligible. The only way I can think that they could be generating unintelligible words is if theyre building them from tokens/letters, or generating audio directly

YeGoblynQueenne2• 5 months ago

> The answer to whether the tech could identify inner speech was a tentative "yes". For a task involving imagining a sentence, the researchers were able to achieve an accuracy rate of up to 74% in real time. For the tasks designed to prompt spontaneous inner speech, accuracy was reduced but still above chance.

Did a number go missing from this sentence? One accuracy rate was "74%", the other was "reduced but still above chance". Why leave things vague? All that accomplishes is that it makes me distrust the factuality of the article.

vivzkestrel• 5 months ago

this is like the landline telephone of brain reading tech, imagine what happens when we get an iphone 16 max for the same that works without implants

Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity

Related Stories