Here we go towards science Fiction a little but it does seem that science fiction is quickly becoming reality from many point of views. Now we found out that a computer is capable to read our minds by simply looking at scans of their brains while thinking about some words. The scientists responsible think that this can lead to us understanding how the brain stores information and more importantly, where. According to Tom Mitchell (Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University and the same individual that helped to lead the study) this discovery can aid in the treatment of various learning disabilities and language disorders. He stated that:

“The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge? It is only in the last 10 or 15 years that we have this way that we can study this question.”

The team of scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is basically a brain scan but one that can see real-time brain activity. 9 volunteers were used. They though of 58 different words and the computer was calibrated by using this technology and their brain activity. Tim Mitchell added:

“We gave instructions to people where we would tell them, ‘We are going to show you words and we would like you, when you see this word, to think about its properties,’ If I show you the brain images for two words, the main thing you notice is that they look pretty much alike. If you look at them for a while you might see subtle differences. We have the program calculate the mean brain activity over all of the words that somebody has looked at. That gives us the average when somebody thinks about a word, and then we subtract that average out from all those images. After we train on the other 58 words, we can say ‘Here are two new words you have not seen, celery and airplane.’”

The computer was then asked to choose which of the brain images presented corresponded to the given word. As expected, the computer chose well and predicted when the individual was thinking about celery and when about airplane. Further research will be conducted but so far the results are positive. Who knows, maybe in the future computers will be able to read our minds completely! Isn’t that a scary thought?