Mind Reading

[Marlow]

Is anyone else watching 60 Minutes? I'm blown away. I've always thought that actual mind-reading was impossible, because the organic material of our individual brains was so different that a machine (or another human) could not differentiate ideas in someone else's minds. But this machine did it. A girl thought of a hammer, they did an FMRI and the computer analyzed the readouts and said, "hammer"! The whole thing was very rudimentary, but the science itself works. In the future Big Brother may be doing more than Watching. :shock:

[Pego]

I did not watch 60 minutes, but I am highly skeptical. The cortical topography is not that well mapped. Anatomically pretty well, physiologically not quite .

[DrJay]

The Amazing Kreskin was actually inside the computer box.

[kuha]

I did see it. Very interesting...except that the scientist's prediction that they'd have devices to "read" complex thoughts in the brain in just a few years (did he say 5 or 6?) was wildly overstated...