Chen, a doctoral student at the National University of Singapore, is part of a team of researchers that has shown they can decode human brain scans to tell what a person is picturing in their mind, according to a paper released in November.
Their team, made up of researchers from the National University of Singapore, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Stanford University, did this by using brain scans of participants as they looked at more than 1,000 pictures — a red firetruck, a gray building, a giraffe eating leaves — while inside a function
onal magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The researchers then trained a machine learning algorithm to identify the patterns of brain activity associated with each picture.
Once the algorithm was trained, the researchers asked the participants to look at a new set of pictures, which the algorithm had not seen before. Using the fMRI scans of the participants’ brain activity, the algorithm was able to predict with 90% accuracy which of the new pictures the participants were looking at.
This research is significant because it suggests that it is possible to read people’s minds to a certain extent by analyzing their brain activity. However, it is important to note that this study is still in its early stages and has limitations. For example, the participants in the study had to be inside an fMRI machine, which is expensive and impractical for everyday use. Additionally, the researchers were only able to predict which of a limited set of pictures the participants were looking at, and it is not clear if the same method could be used to decode more complex thoughts or emotions.
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