Scientists can now "decode" people's thoughts without even touching their heads.
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Past Methods
Scientists were able to use this to decodethe semantic meaning of people's thoughts, although they cannot make a literal translation. During the experiment, the team scanned the brains of one woman and two men in their 20s and 30s. Each participant listened to a total of 16 hours of various podcasts and radio shows over several sessions in the scanner. The researchers then fed those scans to a computer algorithm that compared the patterns in the audio with the patterns in the recorded brain activity. The algorithm can then take the fMRI recording and create a story based on its content, and that story will match the original podcast or radio show “pretty well.”
In the long term, the research team aims to refine this technology so that it can be used in brain-computer interfaces.