Can we read brains at an airport to know who’s going to bomb a plane?

Can your thoughts be read with neurotechnology? When is measuring the brain like reading the mind? How close or far are we from being able to know if you’re thinking about some particular thing you did or intend to do? What’s hype and what’s real? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into mind reading: what it means, where we are now, and whether your thoughts could ever be readable with new technologies.

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More Information:
Airhart, M. (2023). Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s Minds. Retrieved from https://news.utexas.edu/2023/05/01/brain-activity-decoder-can-reveal-stories-in-peoples-minds/

Willett FR, Kunz EM, Fan C, Avansino DT, Wilson GH, Choi EY. … & Henderson, J. M. (2023). A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis. Nature, 1-6.

Metzger SL, Littlejohn KT, Silva AB, Moses DA, Seaton MP, Wang R, … & Chang EF (2023). A high-performance neuroprosthesis for speech decoding and avatar control. Nature, 1-10.

Eagleman DM (2020). Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. New York: Pantheon.

Bellier L, Llorens A, Marciano D, Gunduz A, Schalk G, Brunner P, Knight RT. Music can be reconstructed from human auditory cortex activity using nonlinear decoding models. PLoS biology. 2023 Aug 15;21(8):e3002176.

Illustration from Ludovic Bellier illustrating the idea of their 2023 paper:

We recorded the neural activity of 29 intracranial patients (middle panel) listening to the classic Pink Floyd song Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 (left panel, excerpt of the original song spectrogram). Using nonlinear models, we could successfully reconstruct a recognizable song from these direct cortical recordings (right panel, reconstructed spectrogram). [Ludovic Bellier, PhD (CC-BY 4.0)]

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