Mind-reading

The terrible truth

Technology can now see what people are thinking. Be afraid

Oct 29th 2011 | from the print edition DOUGLAS ADAMS, the late lamented author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, dreamed up many comic creations. One of his greatest was the Babel fish. This interstellar ichthyoid neatly disposed of a problem all science-fiction authors have: how to let alien species talk to one another. It did so by acting as a mind-reader that translated thoughts between different races and cultures. Universal communication did not, unfortunately, lead to universal harmony. As Adams put it, The poor Babel fish has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. For the moment, mind-reading is still science fiction. But that may not be true for much longer. Several lines of inquiry (see article) are converging on the idea that the neurological activity of the brain can be decoded directly, and peoples thoughts revealed without being spoken.
Just imagine the potential benefits. Such a development would allow both the fit and the disabled to operate machines merely by choosing what they want those machines to do. It would permit the profoundly handicappedthose paralysed by conditions such as motor-neuron disease and cerebral palsyto communicate more easily than is now possible even with the text-based speech engines used by the likes of Stephen Hawking. It might unlock the mental prisons of people apparently in comas, who nevertheless show some signs of neural activity. For the able-bodied, it could allow workers to dictate documents silently to computers simply by thinking about what they want to say. The most profound implication, however, is that it would abolish the ability to lie.

Who could object to that? Thou shalt not bear false witness. Tell the truth, and shame the Devil. Transparency, management-speak for honesty, is put forward as the answer to most of todays ills. But the truth of the matterhonestlyis that this would lead to disaster, for lying is at the heart of civilisation.

People are not the only creatures who lie. Species from squids to chimpanzees have been caught doing it from time to time. But only Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. Call it diplomacy, public relations or simple good manners: lying is one of the things that makes the world go round.

Minds matter

The occasional untruth makes domestic life possible (Of course your bum doesnt look big in that), is essential in the office (Dont worry, everybodys behind you on this one), and forms a crucial part of parenting (It didnt matter that you forgot your words and your costume fell off. You were wonderful). Politics might be more entertaining without lies The prime minister has my full support would be translated as, If that half-wit persists in this insane course well all be out on our earsbut a party system would be hard to sustain without the semblance of loyalty that dishonesty permits.

The truly scary prospect, however, is the effect mind-reading would have on relations between the state and the individual. In a world in which the authorities could divine peoples thoughts, speaking truth to power would no longer be brave: it would be unavoidable.

Information technology already means that physical privacy has become a scarce commodity. Websites track your interests and purchases. Mobile phones give away your location. Video cameras record what you are up to. Lose mental privacy as well, and there really will be nowhere to hide.

Reading the brain

Mind-goggling

It is now possible to scan someones brain and get a reasonable idea of what is going through his mind
IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a threedimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the

scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do. That is interesting and useful. Mind-reading of this sort will allow the disabled to lead more normal lives, and the able-bodied to extend their range of possibilities still further. But there is another kind of mind-reading, too: determining, by scanning the brain, what someone is actually thinking about. This sort of mind-reading is less advanced than the machine-controlling type, but it is coming, as three recently published papers make clear. One is an attempt to study dreaming. A second can reconstruct a moving image of what an observer is looking at. And a third can tell what someone is thinking about. First, dreams. To study them, Martin Dresler, of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, and his colleagues recruited a group of what are known as lucid dreamers. They report their results in this weeks Current Biology. A lucid dream is one in which the person doing the dreaming is aware that he is dreaming, and can control his actions almost as if he were awake. Most people have lucid dreams occasionally. A few, though, have them oftenand some have become good at manipulating the process. Dr Dresler co-opted six self-professed practitioners of the art for his experiment. He asked them to perform, in their dreams, a simple action whose neurological traces in a brain scan are well understood. This action was to clench either their right or their left hand into a fist. The test would be to see if Dr Dreslers brain scanner could reliably tell the difference. Once a volunteer had dozed off and begun dreaming, he was to shift his eyes from left to right twice, to show he was ready to begin the experiment. (Unlike other parts of the body, which become limp in the phase of sleep during which dreams occur, the eyes continue to twitch. Indeed, this phase is known as rapid-eye-movement sleep.) After this signal, he clenched his left hand in his dream ten times, and then his right hand. (His real hands, of course, remained motionless.) He indicated the end of each set of clenches by turning his eyes as before. A trial was deemed a success if at least four sets of alternate clenches were performed in this way. At first, only one participant managed to meet these exacting criteria, though he did so on two occasions. Dr Dresler speculated that the reason was his chosen brain scanner. He was using a functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. This is the best sort of scanner, but it makes a terrible racket and so is not conducive to dreamy slumber. Replacing fMRI with a slightly less accurate technique called near-infra-red spectroscopy produced two further successful trials involving a different volunteer. Both techniques were able to see the brain acting to clench a volunteers fist in his dream in exactly the way that it does when ordering fist-clenching in reality. This might not seem a big deal, but it is the first time science has proved what was hitherto mere speculation: that the brain, when dreaming, behaves like the brain when awake. In principle, then, it might be possible to read dreams as they are happening, and thus perhaps solve one of the great mysteries of biology: what, exactly, is dreaming for?

Though it may seem a stretch to suggest that the mind of a dreamer could be read in this way, it is not. For the second paper of the trio, published in Current Biology in September, shows that it is now possible to make a surprisingly accurate reconstruction, in full motion and glorious Technicolor, of exactly what is passing through an awake persons mind. This study was done by Jack Gallant of the University of California, Berkeley. In the name of science, three members of Dr Gallants team each endured two sessions of fMRI while watching assorted film trailers. The researchers chose to experiment on themselves, rather than calling for volunteers, because the experiment required them to sit perfectly still in an fMRI machine for long periods. Two hours of being bombarded with excerpts from such treats as the remake of The Pink Panther, they decided, would be too brutal a procedure to visit on innocent outsiders. Which will be the critics choice?(photo) Psychodrama Unlike Dr Dresler, who focused on the sensorimotor cortex, which controls movement, Dr Gallant and his team looked at the visual cortex. Their method depended on the brute power of modern computing. They compared the film trailers frame by frame with fMRI images recorded as those trailers were being watched, and looked for correlations between the two. They then fed their computer 5,000 hours of clips from YouTube, a video-sharing website, and asked it to predict, based on the correlations they had discovered, what the matching fMRI pattern would look like. Having done that, they each endured a further two hours in the machine, watching a new set of trailers. The computer looked at the reactions of their visual cortices and picked, for each clip, the 100 bits of YouTube footage whose corresponding hypothetical fMRI pattern best matched the real one. It then melded these clips together to produce an estimate of what the real clip looked like. As the pictures above show, the result was often a recognisable simulacrum of the original. It also moved (watch at gallantlab.org) in the same way as the clip it was based on. The third study, published in August in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience by Francisco Pereira and his colleagues at Princeton university, used a technique similar to Dr Gallants to perform an equally impressive trick. Rather than recreating images, Dr Pereira was able to determine what topics people were pondering. To do this, he reexamined data collected during an experiment conducted in 2008, in which nine volunteers had been shown labelled pictures of 60 objects, and then had their brains scanned as they were asked to imagine those same objects. Dr Pereira divided the data in two. He used half to generate his hypothesis and half to test it. Though his pattern-detection algorithms could not distinguish exactly which objects the volunteers had seen, they managed a task that was only slightly less demanding. They

could work out what type of object something was. In other words, they could not distinguish a carrot from a stick of celery, but could say that it was a vegetable. The similarity to Dr Gallants study came from the way the categories were established. This was done by pillaging another huge website, Wikipedia, to find out how the names of objects tend to cluster together in the online encyclopedias articles. Dr Pereira found that they appear to cluster in similar ways in the brain, and to produce enough shared neural characteristics there for the clustering to be detectable. Mind-reading, then, has become a reality. It is crude. The results would not stand up in courtyet. But, as the Franck report said of Americas first atom bomb, the thing does work.