Reading Brains
From: Communications of the ACM - 03/2014 - page 12
By: Erica Klarreich

The first steps have been taken toward enabling a computer to perceive one's
thoughts.

Mind reading has traditionally been the domain of mystics and science fiction
writers. Increasingly, however, it is becoming the province of serious
science.

A new study from the laboratory of Marcel van Gerven of Radboud University
Nijmegen in the Netherlands demonstrates it is possible to figure out what
people are looking at by scanning their brains. When volunteers looked at
handwritten letters, a computer model was able to produce fuzzy images of the
letters they were seeing, based only on the volunteers' brain activity.

The new work - which builds on an earlier mathematical model by Bertrand
Thirion of the Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control in
Gif-sur-Yvette, France - establishes a simple, elegant brain-decoding
algorithm, says Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of
California, Berkeley. Such decoding algorithms eventually could be used to
create more sophisticated brain-machine interfaces, he says, to allow
neurologically impaired people to manipulate computers and machinery with
their thoughts.

Read the entire article at:
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/3/172519-reading-brains/fulltext

Links:
Marcel van Gerven
https://sites.google.com/site/coconelab/marcel-van-gerven

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
http://www.ru.nl/donders

Linear reconstruction of perceived images from human brain activity
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811913007994