"Mind reading" scans
show that, to our brains, a sparse line drawing of a street scene is almost as
recognizable as a detailed color photograph.
(May 18, 2011) Researchers call it mind reading. One at a
time, they show a volunteer – who's resting in an MRI scanner – a series of
photos of beaches, city streets, forests, highways, mountains and offices. The
subject looks at the photos, but says nothing.
The researchers, however, can
usually tell which photo the volunteer is watching at any given moment, aided
by sophisticated software that interprets the signals coming from the scan.
They glean clues not only by noting what part of the brain is especially
active, but also by analyzing the patterns created by the firing neurons. They
call it decoding.
Now, psychologists and computer
scientists at Stanford, Ohio State University and the University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign have taken mind reading a step further, with potential impact
on how both computers and the visually impaired make sense of the world they
see.