Slog
News & ArtsWednesday, February 1, 2012
Science Toward the End of the Self
Posted by Charles Mudede on Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 8:26 AM
That private conversation in your head will one day be open to the public.
Scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobe — the seat of the auditory system — as a person listens to normal conversation. Based on this correlation between sound and brain activity, they then were able to predict the words the person had heard solely from the temporal lobe activity.Those who want to protect their thoughts might have to wear tin foil on their heads.
"This research is based on sounds a person actually hears, but to use it for reconstructing imagined conversations, these principles would have to apply to someone's internal verbalizations," cautioned first author Brian N. Pasley, a post-doctoral researcher in the center. "There is some evidence that hearing the sound and imagining the sound activate similar areas of the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device...[Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience,] predicts that this success can be extended to imagined, internal verbalizations, because scientific studies have shown that when people are asked to imagine speaking a word, similar brain regions are activated as when the person actually utters the word.
3
Right, Charles. That's really gonna happen. Don't believe the giant egos of some of those scientists. Didn't you learn from the Human Genome Project?
4
After the Stranger finishes their production run of Stranger™ Occupy™ The Revolution™ Organic™ Bandannas™ (dark green on black for the downlow, ya know), they should really consider Stranger™ Tin Foil Berets™ (accented with French glitter).
6
Charles's paranoia notwithstanding, the potential applications of this technology are awesome. An interface monitoring sounds imagined by the brain could produce thought-to-speech for people like Roger Ebert. It could also possibly be used to analyze (and treat) certain medical conditions that cause problems with auditory processing in the brain.
8
An interesting potential, from my perspective, is that once we've accurately correlated words to specific neural activity, we can then account for those signals and move on to mapping related associations bound up with the ideas packaged within the words.
Future comparisons of emotions and non-linguistic imagery bound together round the same words --and whether they are linked to correlations or processed differently in the different brains of differing individuals-- will prove to be quite revealing.
Future comparisons of emotions and non-linguistic imagery bound together round the same words --and whether they are linked to correlations or processed differently in the different brains of differing individuals-- will prove to be quite revealing.
9
I'd love to know if words with the same meaning light up the same parts of the brain for people born into different languages and cultures.
10
That is cool, because someday we'll be able to detect crimes before they happen... Somebody just thinking about boosting some Twinkies from 7-11 will be, uh, discouraged from doing so...
(Minority Report, anyone?)
(Minority Report, anyone?)
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