Computer training 'reading' gets human thoughts

A computer has been trained to 'read' people's thoughts by looking at the brain's endoscope when they think about specific words, researchers said last Thursday.

They hope their research - published in a scientific journal - could help better understand how and where the brain holds information.

This could lead to better treatments for speech disorders and learning disabilities, Tom Mitchell, who led the study of the Department of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. said.

Mitchell said in a telephone interview that: 'The problem we are trying to discover is also what people think of for centuries, which is how the brain arranges knowledge. ? '

'In the past 10 or 15 years, we have obtained this method, and so we have been able to study this issue'.

Mitchell's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging, a type of brain endoscopy that can see brain activity in real time.

They calibrated the computer by having 9 volunteer students think about 58 different words while taking photos of their brain activity.

(Photo: blog.speculist.com)

Mitchell said: 'We show people words and ask them when they see the word, think about their attributes.'

They took pictures of the brain activity of nine people thinking about 58 different words, in order to create a 'standard' image of a word.

Mitchell said: 'If I show you images of brain activity in two words, the main thing that you notice is that they are quite similar. If you look at them for a while, you may see small differences'.

Mitchell added: 'We used programming to calculate the standard brain activity for all the words someone saw. That told us the standard image when someone thought about a word, then we got that standard image out of all the images'.

Then do the test.

'After we train with 58 other words, we can say' there are 2 new words you have never met: 'Celery and Airplane'. Computers are required to choose which type of brain image corresponds to those words.

The computer performed the test when taking a picture and predicted when a person thought of the word 'Celery' and when the word assigned was 'Airplane'.

The next step is to study brain activity for phrases.

Mitchell said: 'If I say the word' rabbit 'or' fast rabbit 'or' cuddly rabbit ', those phrases have different meanings'.

'I basically want to use that as a material to study language processing in the brain.'