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| NSA TORTURE TECHNOLOGY, NEWS and RESEARCH... |
 Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:50 pm |
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427323.500-brain-scanners-can-tell-what-youre-thinking-about.html?full=true#at
Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about
28 October 2009 by Ewen Callaway, Chicago
WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You
may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with
pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into
the human mind.
In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to
successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in
a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent
results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers
are viewing - and even make educated guesses at which event they are
remembering.
Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant,
a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley,
presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and colleague
Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a
movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity.
Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used
to read memories and future plans - and even to diagnose eating disorders.
Understandably, such developments are raising concerns about "mind reading"
technologies, which might be exploited by advertisers or oppressive
governments (see "The risks of open-mindedness"). Yet despite - or perhaps
because of - the recent progress in the field, most researchers are wary of
calling their work mind-reading. Emphasising its limitations, they call it
neural decoding.
They are quick to add that it may lead to powerful benefits, however. These
include gaining a better understanding of the brain and improved
communication with people who can't speak or write, such as stroke victims
or people with neurodegenerative diseases. There is also excitement over the
possibility of being able to visualise something highly graphical that
someone healthy, perhaps an artist, is thinking.
So how does neural decoding work? Gallant's team drew international
attention last year by showing that brain imaging could predict which of a
group of pictures someone was looking at, based on activity in their visual
cortex. But simply decoding still images alone won't do, says Nishimoto.
"Our natural visual experience is more like movies."
Nishimoto and Gallant started their most recent experiment by showing two
lab members 2 hours of video clips culled from DVD trailers, while scanning
their brains. A computer program then mapped different patterns of activity
in the visual cortex to different visual aspects of the movies such as
shape, colour and movement. The program was then fed over 200 days' worth of
YouTube clips, and used the mappings it had gathered from the DVD trailers
to predict the brain activity that each YouTube clip would produce in the
viewers.
Finally, the same two lab members watched a third, fresh set of clips which
were never seen by the computer program, while their brains were scanned.
The computer program compared these newly captured brain scans with the
patterns of predicted brain activity it had produced from the YouTube clips.
For each second of brain scan, it chose the 100 YouTube clips it considered
would produce the most similar brain activity - and then merged them. The
result was continuous, very blurry footage, corresponding to a crude "brain
read-out" of the clip that the person was watching.
In some cases, this was more successful than others. When one lab member was
watching a clip of the actor Steve Martin in a white shirt, the computer
program produced a clip that looked like a moving, human-shaped smudge, with
a white "torso", but the blob bears little resemblance to Martin, with
nothing corresponding to the moustache he was sporting.
Another clip revealed a quirk of Gallant and Nishimoto's approach: a
reconstruction of an aircraft flying directly towards the camera - and so
barely seeming to move - with a city skyline in the background omitted the
plane but produced something akin to a skyline. That's because the algorithm
is more adept at reading off brain patterns evoked by watching movement than
those produced by watching apparently stationary objects.
"It's going to get a lot better," says Gallant. The pair plan to improve the
reconstruction of movies by providing the program with additional
information about the content of the videos.
Team member Thomas Naselaris demonstrated the power of this approach on
still images at the conference. For every pixel in a set of images shown to
a viewer and used to train the program, researchers indicated whether it was
part of a human, an animal, an artificial object or a natural one. The
software could then predict where in a new set of images these classes of
objects were located, based on brain scans of the picture viewers.
Movies and pictures aren't the only things that can be discerned from brain
activity, however. A team led by Eleanor Maguire and Martin Chadwick at
University College London presented results at the Chicago meeting showing
that our memory isn't beyond the reach of brain scanners.
A brain structure called the hippocampus is critical for forming memories,
so Maguire's team focused its scanner on this area while 10 volunteers
recalled videos they had watched of different women performing three banal
tasks, such as throwing away a cup of coffee or posting a letter. When
Maguire's team got the volunteers to recall one of these three memories, the
researchers could tell which the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of
about 50 per cent.
That's well above chance, says Maguire, but it is not mind reading because
the program can't decode memories that it hasn't already been trained on.
"You can't stick somebody in a scanner and know what they're thinking."
Rather, she sees neural decoding as a way to understand how the hippocampus
and other brain regions form and recall a memory.
Maguire could tackle this by varying key aspects of the clips - the location
or the identity of the protagonist, for instance - and see how those changes
affect their ability to decode the memory. She is also keen to determine how
memory encoding changes over the weeks, months or years after memories are
first formed.
Meanwhile, decoding how people plan for the future is the hot topic for
John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in
Berlin, Germany. In work presented at the conference, he and colleague Ida
Momennejad found they could use brain scans to predict intentions in
subjects planning and performing simple tasks. What's more, by showing
people, including some with eating disorders, images of food, Haynes's team
could determine which suffered from anorexia or bulimia via brain activity
in one of the brain's "reward centres".
Another focus of neural decoding is language. Marcel Just at Carnegie Melon
University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleague Tom Mitchell
reported last year that they could predict which of two nouns - such as
"celery" and "airplane" - a subject is thinking of, at rates well above
chance. They are now working on two-word phrases.
Their ultimate goal of turning brain scans into short sentences is distant,
perhaps impossible. But as with the other decoding work, it's an idea that's
as tantalising as it is creepy.
The risks of open-mindedness
The feats of decoding brain scans to predict someone's thoughts are
undoubtedly dazzling (see main story), but "neural decoding" techniques are
also limited in how they can be applied. Right now, they only work if
someone's brain has already been scanned multiple times, and in very
specific circumstances. So can we really call this mind reading? And should
we worry about potentially creepy uses for such technology?
To some extent it's a question of semantics, but many researchers, including
neuroscientist Russell Poldrack at the University of Texas at Austin, say
it's clear that the work done to date is a far cry from what most people
think of as mind reading, such as predicting whether a terrorist has plans
to detonate a bomb on an aircraft.
Yet even if such applications are a very distant possibility, we should
start thinking about the ethical issues now, says John-Dylan Haynes at the
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.
Some companies already claim that brain scans can help to pick out liars and
determine whether an advert works or not, and there may be some truth in
such claims. Haynes says standards are needed to spell out what neural
decoding can and cannot reliably do, so as not to erode public trust in the
field.
Neuroscientist Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley,
agrees. He says that neural decoding could be a double-edged sword. If his
hopes for the technology ever come to fruition, he says, the same machine
that reads the thoughts of patients with a neurodegenerative disease may
well find more nefarious applications at some point.
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[quote]http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427323.500-brain-scanners-can-tell-what-youre-thinking-about.html?full=true#at
Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about
28 October 2009 by Ewen Callaway, Chicago
WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You
may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with
pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into
the human mind.
In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to
successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in
a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent
results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers
are viewing - and even make educated guesses at which event they are
remembering.
Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant,
a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley,
presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and colleague
Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a
movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity.
Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used
to read memories and future plans - and even to diagnose eating disorders.
Understandably, such developments are raising concerns about "mind reading"
technologies, which might be exploited by advertisers or oppressive
governments (see "The risks of open-mindedness"). Yet despite - or perhaps
because of - the recent progress in the field, most researchers are wary of
calling their work mind-reading. Emphasising its limitations, they call it
neural decoding.
They are quick to add that it may lead to powerful benefits, however. These
include gaining a better understanding of the brain and improved
communication with people who can't speak or write, such as stroke victims
or people with neurodegenerative diseases. There is also excitement over the
possibility of being able to visualise something highly graphical that
someone healthy, perhaps an artist, is thinking.
So how does neural decoding work? Gallant's team drew international
attention last year by showing that brain imaging could predict which of a
group of pictures someone was looking at, based on activity in their visual
cortex. But simply decoding still images alone won't do, says Nishimoto.
"Our natural visual experience is more like movies."
Nishimoto and Gallant started their most recent experiment by showing two
lab members 2 hours of video clips culled from DVD trailers, while scanning
their brains. A computer program then mapped different patterns of activity
in the visual cortex to different visual aspects of the movies such as
shape, colour and movement. The program was then fed over 200 days' worth of
YouTube clips, and used the mappings it had gathered from the DVD trailers
to predict the brain activity that each YouTube clip would produce in the
viewers.
Finally, the same two lab members watched a third, fresh set of clips which
were never seen by the computer program, while their brains were scanned.
The computer program compared these newly captured brain scans with the
patterns of predicted brain activity it had produced from the YouTube clips.
For each second of brain scan, it chose the 100 YouTube clips it considered
would produce the most similar brain activity - and then merged them. The
result was continuous, very blurry footage, corresponding to a crude "brain
read-out" of the clip that the person was watching.
In some cases, this was more successful than others. When one lab member was
watching a clip of the actor Steve Martin in a white shirt, the computer
program produced a clip that looked like a moving, human-shaped smudge, with
a white "torso", but the blob bears little resemblance to Martin, with
nothing corresponding to the moustache he was sporting.
Another clip revealed a quirk of Gallant and Nishimoto's approach: a
reconstruction of an aircraft flying directly towards the camera - and so
barely seeming to move - with a city skyline in the background omitted the
plane but produced something akin to a skyline. That's because the algorithm
is more adept at reading off brain patterns evoked by watching movement than
those produced by watching apparently stationary objects.
"It's going to get a lot better," says Gallant. The pair plan to improve the
reconstruction of movies by providing the program with additional
information about the content of the videos.
Team member Thomas Naselaris demonstrated the power of this approach on
still images at the conference. For every pixel in a set of images shown to
a viewer and used to train the program, researchers indicated whether it was
part of a human, an animal, an artificial object or a natural one. The
software could then predict where in a new set of images these classes of
objects were located, based on brain scans of the picture viewers.
Movies and pictures aren't the only things that can be discerned from brain
activity, however. A team led by Eleanor Maguire and Martin Chadwick at
University College London presented results at the Chicago meeting showing
that our memory isn't beyond the reach of brain scanners.
A brain structure called the hippocampus is critical for forming memories,
so Maguire's team focused its scanner on this area while 10 volunteers
recalled videos they had watched of different women performing three banal
tasks, such as throwing away a cup of coffee or posting a letter. When
Maguire's team got the volunteers to recall one of these three memories, the
researchers could tell which the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of
about 50 per cent.
That's well above chance, says Maguire, but it is not mind reading because
the program can't decode memories that it hasn't already been trained on.
"You can't stick somebody in a scanner and know what they're thinking."
Rather, she sees neural decoding as a way to understand how the hippocampus
and other brain regions form and recall a memory.
Maguire could tackle this by varying key aspects of the clips - the location
or the identity of the protagonist, for instance - and see how those changes
affect their ability to decode the memory. She is also keen to determine how
memory encoding changes over the weeks, months or years after memories are
first formed.
Meanwhile, decoding how people plan for the future is the hot topic for
John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in
Berlin, Germany. In work presented at the conference, he and colleague Ida
Momennejad found they could use brain scans to predict intentions in
subjects planning and performing simple tasks. What's more, by showing
people, including some with eating disorders, images of food, Haynes's team
could determine which suffered from anorexia or bulimia via brain activity
in one of the brain's "reward centres".
Another focus of neural decoding is language. Marcel Just at Carnegie Melon
University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleague Tom Mitchell
reported last year that they could predict which of two nouns - such as
"celery" and "airplane" - a subject is thinking of, at rates well above
chance. They are now working on two-word phrases.
Their ultimate goal of turning brain scans into short sentences is distant,
perhaps impossible. But as with the other decoding work, it's an idea that's
as tantalising as it is creepy.
The risks of open-mindedness
The feats of decoding brain scans to predict someone's thoughts are
undoubtedly dazzling (see main story), but "neural decoding" techniques are
also limited in how they can be applied. Right now, they only work if
someone's brain has already been scanned multiple times, and in very
specific circumstances. So can we really call this mind reading? And should
we worry about potentially creepy uses for such technology?
To some extent it's a question of semantics, but many researchers, including
neuroscientist Russell Poldrack at the University of Texas at Austin, say
it's clear that the work done to date is a far cry from what most people
think of as mind reading, such as predicting whether a terrorist has plans
to detonate a bomb on an aircraft.
Yet even if such applications are a very distant possibility, we should
start thinking about the ethical issues now, says John-Dylan Haynes at the
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.
Some companies already claim that brain scans can help to pick out liars and
determine whether an advert works or not, and there may be some truth in
such claims. Haynes says standards are needed to spell out what neural
decoding can and cannot reliably do, so as not to erode public trust in the
field.
Neuroscientist Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley,
agrees. He says that neural decoding could be a double-edged sword. If his
hopes for the technology ever come to fruition, he says, the same machine
that reads the thoughts of patients with a neurodegenerative disease may
well find more nefarious applications at some point.
[/quote]
Thank goodness I live across the pond. I should be safe from
the Brits here. |
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| AmerGovtPsychopathsExposer... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 2:28 am |
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"Anon" <anon at (no spam) domain.invalid> wrote in message
news:hcd8n9$ujk$1 at (no spam) news.mixmin.net...
[quote]http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427323.500-brain-scanners-can-tell-what-youre-thinking-about.html?full=true#at
Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about
28 October 2009 by Ewen Callaway, Chicago
WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You
may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with
pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into
the human mind.
In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to
successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location
in
a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most
recent
results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that
volunteers
are viewing - and even make educated guesses at which event they are
remembering.
Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack
Gallant,
a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley,
presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and
colleague
Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a
movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain
activity.
Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be
used
to read memories and future plans - and even to diagnose eating
disorders.
Understandably, such developments are raising concerns about "mind
reading"
technologies, which might be exploited by advertisers or oppressive
governments (see "The risks of open-mindedness"). Yet despite - or
perhaps
because of - the recent progress in the field, most researchers are wary
of
calling their work mind-reading. Emphasising its limitations, they call
it
neural decoding.
They are quick to add that it may lead to powerful benefits, however.
These
include gaining a better understanding of the brain and improved
communication with people who can't speak or write, such as stroke
victims
or people with neurodegenerative diseases. There is also excitement over
the
possibility of being able to visualise something highly graphical that
someone healthy, perhaps an artist, is thinking.
So how does neural decoding work? Gallant's team drew international
attention last year by showing that brain imaging could predict which of
a
group of pictures someone was looking at, based on activity in their
visual
cortex. But simply decoding still images alone won't do, says Nishimoto.
"Our natural visual experience is more like movies."
Nishimoto and Gallant started their most recent experiment by showing two
lab members 2 hours of video clips culled from DVD trailers, while
scanning
their brains. A computer program then mapped different patterns of
activity
in the visual cortex to different visual aspects of the movies such as
shape, colour and movement. The program was then fed over 200 days' worth
of
YouTube clips, and used the mappings it had gathered from the DVD
trailers
to predict the brain activity that each YouTube clip would produce in the
viewers.
Finally, the same two lab members watched a third, fresh set of clips
which
were never seen by the computer program, while their brains were scanned.
The computer program compared these newly captured brain scans with the
patterns of predicted brain activity it had produced from the YouTube
clips.
For each second of brain scan, it chose the 100 YouTube clips it
considered
would produce the most similar brain activity - and then merged them. The
result was continuous, very blurry footage, corresponding to a crude
"brain
read-out" of the clip that the person was watching.
In some cases, this was more successful than others. When one lab member
was
watching a clip of the actor Steve Martin in a white shirt, the computer
program produced a clip that looked like a moving, human-shaped smudge,
with
a white "torso", but the blob bears little resemblance to Martin, with
nothing corresponding to the moustache he was sporting.
Another clip revealed a quirk of Gallant and Nishimoto's approach: a
reconstruction of an aircraft flying directly towards the camera - and so
barely seeming to move - with a city skyline in the background omitted
the
plane but produced something akin to a skyline. That's because the
algorithm
is more adept at reading off brain patterns evoked by watching movement
than
those produced by watching apparently stationary objects.
"It's going to get a lot better," says Gallant. The pair plan to improve
the
reconstruction of movies by providing the program with additional
information about the content of the videos.
Team member Thomas Naselaris demonstrated the power of this approach on
still images at the conference. For every pixel in a set of images shown
to
a viewer and used to train the program, researchers indicated whether it
was
part of a human, an animal, an artificial object or a natural one. The
software could then predict where in a new set of images these classes of
objects were located, based on brain scans of the picture viewers.
Movies and pictures aren't the only things that can be discerned from
brain
activity, however. A team led by Eleanor Maguire and Martin Chadwick at
University College London presented results at the Chicago meeting
showing
that our memory isn't beyond the reach of brain scanners.
A brain structure called the hippocampus is critical for forming
memories,
so Maguire's team focused its scanner on this area while 10 volunteers
recalled videos they had watched of different women performing three
banal
tasks, such as throwing away a cup of coffee or posting a letter. When
Maguire's team got the volunteers to recall one of these three memories,
the
researchers could tell which the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy
of
about 50 per cent.
That's well above chance, says Maguire, but it is not mind reading
because
the program can't decode memories that it hasn't already been trained on.
"You can't stick somebody in a scanner and know what they're thinking."
Rather, she sees neural decoding as a way to understand how the
hippocampus
and other brain regions form and recall a memory.
Maguire could tackle this by varying key aspects of the clips - the
location
or the identity of the protagonist, for instance - and see how those
changes
affect their ability to decode the memory. She is also keen to determine
how
memory encoding changes over the weeks, months or years after memories
are
first formed.
Meanwhile, decoding how people plan for the future is the hot topic for
John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience
in
Berlin, Germany. In work presented at the conference, he and colleague
Ida
Momennejad found they could use brain scans to predict intentions in
subjects planning and performing simple tasks. What's more, by showing
people, including some with eating disorders, images of food, Haynes's
team
could determine which suffered from anorexia or bulimia via brain
activity
in one of the brain's "reward centres".
Another focus of neural decoding is language. Marcel Just at Carnegie
Melon
University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleague Tom Mitchell
reported last year that they could predict which of two nouns - such as
"celery" and "airplane" - a subject is thinking of, at rates well above
chance. They are now working on two-word phrases.
Their ultimate goal of turning brain scans into short sentences is
distant,
perhaps impossible. But as with the other decoding work, it's an idea
that's
as tantalising as it is creepy.
The risks of open-mindedness
The feats of decoding brain scans to predict someone's thoughts are
undoubtedly dazzling (see main story), but "neural decoding" techniques
are
also limited in how they can be applied. Right now, they only work if
someone's brain has already been scanned multiple times, and in very
specific circumstances. So can we really call this mind reading? And
should
we worry about potentially creepy uses for such technology?
To some extent it's a question of semantics, but many researchers,
including
neuroscientist Russell Poldrack at the University of Texas at Austin, say
it's clear that the work done to date is a far cry from what most people
think of as mind reading, such as predicting whether a terrorist has
plans
to detonate a bomb on an aircraft.
Yet even if such applications are a very distant possibility, we should
start thinking about the ethical issues now, says John-Dylan Haynes at
the
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.
Some companies already claim that brain scans can help to pick out liars
and
determine whether an advert works or not, and there may be some truth in
such claims. Haynes says standards are needed to spell out what neural
decoding can and cannot reliably do, so as not to erode public trust in
the
field.
Neuroscientist Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley,
agrees. He says that neural decoding could be a double-edged sword. If
his
hopes for the technology ever come to fruition, he says, the same machine
that reads the thoughts of patients with a neurodegenerative disease may
well find more nefarious applications at some point.
Thank goodness I live across the pond. I should be safe from
the Brits here.
[/quote]
You are an expert in "AmericanSpeak" then.... |
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