On 12-Dec-08, at 3:26 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote: > On Dec 11, 2008, at 9:15 PM, Michael Luscombe wrote: > >> First thought: awesome. >> >> Second thought: uh oh, I'll have to start working on thinking about >> something other than Natalie Portman. >> >> Just enough to get you thinking: http://tinyurl.com/5nlmbt > > This has widely been touted as "mind reading" but it's not, it's more > like tapping the video feed from the eye to the brain. They're > reconstructing what you're seeing, not what you're thinking. > > Think Geordi's glasses, not reading the minds of prisoners.
-- Yes and no. They are simply interpreted images out of the brain, but if you read how they did it, there are a lot of possibilities there. First they hooked up the sensors and recorded blood flow in the brain as many, many images were shown to the subjects. This gave them a kind of dictionary of brain patterns to use to interpret the data they got from fixed images. There was a similar experiment years ago with an owl, where they could actually play back music that the owl had heard earlier from a live feed of sensors on his brain. It was quite noisy (crackly) but impressive. I'm curious about how these patterns match from person to person, or even species to species. Using a baseline of brain activity as a rosetta stone, you might be able to take a snapshot of one person's brain an interpret it correctly, but will that same rosetta stone work with a different person? How about animals? how does the interpretation differ? Is there some sort of baseline path, or alphabet, for which we can read mental disorders from the mistakes? It would move the task of diagnosing mental disorders from cognitive to evidence-based. It could change the legal system as we know it. How long before the system is externally manipulating blood flow in the brain to produce mental states, rather than specific images? Aside from the scary implications, how therapeutic could that be? For example, predicting epileptic seizures and pushing blood away from that area of the brain? I have no idea if that would work, I'm just speculating. For all intents and purposes, the Jeordi visor was meant to stimulate the optic nerves by induction, and had nothing to do with the brain. Correct me if I'm wrong. -- Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "StrataList-OT" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/StrataList-OT?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
