Using light to "read minds"
Researchers at the University of Toronto used near-infrared light shined on a person's brain to "read" the subject's mind and determine which of two drinks they prefer. By reading images of the brain, they decoded the person's drink preference with 80 percent accuracy. According to the biomedical engineers, the technique could someday enable people who are "locked in" to communicate using their minds. Or create a 21st century Pepsi Challenge. From Live Science:
In the beginning of the study, nine adult volunteers rated eight drinks on a scale of one to five."New Device Reads Mind" (LiveScience), "Decoding subjective preference from single-trial near-infrared spectroscopy signals" (Journal of Neural Engineering)
Then, wearing a headband fitted with fiber optics that emit light into the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, the subjects were shown two drinks on a computer monitor, one after the other, and asked to make a mental decision about which they liked more.
"When your brain is active, the oxygen in your blood increases and depending on the concentration, it absorbs more or less light," Luu said. "In some people, their brains are more active when they don't like something, and in some people they're more active when they do like something."
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I'm sure in about 200 years or so they could come up with a really sweet wheelchair with a light on it the locked in person can blink once for yes and twice for no.
Heisenberg has a more mundane implication. One I may even bother contacting these researchers about. IR or near to that range has another label. HEAT wavelengths.. As in if you are introducing enough photons = energy to make a two way trip any depth into a brain- you are introducing heat. Yes, it's improbable to consider. But, dare I pun- it's something to not lightly dismiss.
Share and enjoy.
#2: They were using near-infrared, i.e. not heat. IR radiation spans about three orders of magnitude change in wavelength (about 750nm to 1mm). Incidentally, visible light only takes up from 400 to 700 nm of the spectrum.
See wikipedia for more.
...although no one knows quite why it does this, because then it invariably provides a liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
@5 You win.
A study of nine people with an 80% success rate? That isn't exactly statistically significant.
Trepanation FTW!
#7 That's 80% average classification accuracy based on single trial data. That means that for any given trial, their classifier has an 80% chance of accurately predicting your preference. It's not only statistically significant, it's pretty damn impressive! Many machine learning experiments are happy with 55-60% classification accuracy.
And this is obviously better than asking, because the "subject" (aka, "the subjected one") might lie.
fNIRS rocks! (Although this is not really news...)
But I wonder why people think this has to do anything with 'reading minds'... deconding preference from single trial? That is impressive! But you read the brain, not the mind! (Not in a dualist sense, but still...(
#1 that should be possible already...
#7 significance is not guesswork... (pun intended) #9 is right, that IS impressive
#10 for 'lie detector' application look at http://www.biomed.drexel.edu/fnir/Contents/deception/ :)