Beyond bananas: Scientists harness 'mind reading' technology to decode complex thoughts

From MedicalXpress.

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This latest research led by CMU's Marcel Just builds on the pioneering use of machine learning algorithms with brain imaging technology to "mind read." The findings indicate that the mind's building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are formed by the brain's various sub-systems and are not word-based. Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

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This latest research led by CMU's Marcel Just builds on the pioneering use of machine learning algorithms with brain imaging technology to "mind read." The findings indicate that the mind's building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are formed by the brain's various sub-systems and are not word-based. Published in Human Brain Mapping and funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the study offers new evidence that the neural dimensions of concept representation are universal across people and languages.

"One of the big advances of the human brain was the ability to combine individual concepts into complex thoughts, to think not just of 'bananas,' but 'I like to eat bananas in evening with my friends,'" said Just, the D.O. Hebb University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. "We have finally developed a way to see thoughts of that complexity in the fMRI signal. The discovery of this correspondence between thoughts and brain activation patterns tells us what the thoughts are built of."

Previous work by Just and his team showed that thoughts of familiar objects, like bananas or hammers, evoke activation patterns that involve the neural systems that we use to deal with those objects. For example, how you interact with a banana involves how you hold it, how you bite it and what it looks like.

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