Israel · United Kingdom · MIT Technology Review
Advances like this inevitably raise questions about mental privacy
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“If you’d asked me that 10 years ago, I’d have laughed a lot,” says Sprague.
Key facts
- It’s something like $600 to $1,000 an hour.” Tools like this one could speed up research, he says
- The move to EEG would be a “game changer,” says Marcello Ienca, a neuroscientist and philosopher at the Technical University of Munich, Germany
- The results seem impressive,” says Tommy Sprague, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara
- The results are not especially specific—in typical fMRI scanners, each highlighted “voxel” of activity covers around three cubic millimeters, containing around 16,000 neurons
Summary
A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at by analyzing your brain scans—and re-create that image with remarkable precision. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each pair is what the user saw—and its right-hand counterpart is what the model reconstructed from the brain scan. Michal Irani, who developed the tool with her colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, hopes her “mind-reading” tool will ultimately reveal more about how the brain works, and could perhaps be used to help locked-in people communicate, or allow scientists to re-create the content of dreams. Judy Illes, a neuroethicist and professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, who was not involved in the research, describes the work as “magnificent.” “The idea to help people with neurologic conditions … therapeutically is tremendously exciting,” she says.