The most discouraging story of the work is a report in The Economist of the progress scientists have made in using machines to read minds. According to a report in the Public Library of Science, scientists at the University of Minnesota have found that by taping electrodes to the scalp, a volunteer can pilot a virtual helicopter through a virtual three-dimensional sky, merely by thinking. Additionally, an article in Current Biology details how researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich have made progress in using machines to read dreams. Finally, as reported in Current Biology, scientists at Berkeley detail how they have been able to actually read what is going through a person’s head.
No kidding: the had volunteers sit in fMRI machines while watching film trailers, and recorded images off the visual cortex, and then looked for correlations between those images and the trailers. They then fed 5000 hours of clips from YouTube into the computer, and asked it to predict what the matching fMRI pattern would look like. “Having done that, they each endured a further two hours in the machine, watching a new set of trailers. The computer looked at the reactions of their visual cortices and picked, for each clip, the 100 bits of YouTube footage whose corresponding hypothetical fMRI pattern best matched the real one. It then melded these clips together to produce an estimate of what the real clip looked like. As the pictures above show, the result was often a recognisable simulacrum of the original. It also moved (watch at gallantlab.org) in the same way as the clip it was based on.” (I dunno, call me a skeptic, but the image of Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau is not really a recognizable simulacrum of the other other, at least not as much as would, say, a picture of a baggy faced Leonoid Brezhnev, minus his hedgerow of eyebrows, wearing a black Megadeath T-shirt.)
Finally, researchers at Princeton University, have been sort of able to tell what people have been thinking about. Using brain scans taken during an experiment in 2008 in which subjects were asked to imagine objects that they had just seen in pictures, the scientists applied pattern-detection algorithms to try and re-identify the objects. “Dr Pereira divided the data in two. He used half to generate his hypothesis and half to test it. Though his could not distinguish exactly which objects the volunteers had seen, they managed a task that was only slightly less demanding. They could work out what type of object something was. In other words, they could not distinguish a carrot from a stick of celery, but could say that it was a vegetable.”
Impressed? Yeah, I guess, although I’m none too excited. I know that this is research will break through all kinds of barriers, and that before long we will further liberate the intellect of geniuses like Steven Hawking and read into the minds of coma victims and probably talk to our dogs. ( I mean really talk, like the way we seldom do with people.) But I for one don’t much want everyone to be able to read my mind. As Bob Dylan said, “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” Or in my case, just scoff. But think about all the nasty, inappropriate, seditious, selfish, ugly thoughts that pass through your head in a day, the 5000 times a year men not always appropriately think about sex, the number of times we nod our heads when our bosses take an uninformed interest in our projects or bite our tongues when our spouses talk about–oh, take your pick. Sometimes I feel that the only reliable amusement left to me are my own thoughts. I would not want to lose that.
Plus there’s the public angle. More and more, we are being scanned by CCTV cameras, erected to prevent terrorism, successful mostly in catching indiscreet teens and furtive petty criminals. But the scanners are becoming more sophisticated: they can overhear speech, perform facial recognition, and spot postures and gaits consistent with someone hiding something beneath their clothing. How long before a scanner can be mounted on a street corner or in Grand Central Station, put there putatively to find terrorists thinking about bombing, and instead having to wade through millions of musings involving lust, envy, self-pity.
Halt the research now.