Within The Black

Using fMRI, scientists decoded what people were hearing and thinking. Scientists can now "decode" people's thoughts without even touching their heads, The Scientist reported (opens in new tab).

Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples' brains. The new method, described in a report posted Sept. 29 to the preprint database bioRxiv, instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique (opens in new tab) called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain, and because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen, this information provides an indirect measure of brain activity.

By its nature, this scanning method cannot capture real-time brain activity, since the electrical signals released by brain cells move much more quickly than blood moves through the brain. But remarkably, the study authors found that they could still use this imperfect proxy measure to decode the semantic meaning of people's thoughts, although they couldn't produce word-for-word translations. https://www.livescience.com/algorithm-m ... -from-fmri

This is scary and amazing at the same time. It's scary when you think about what the government would or could do with this type of technology. But, on the other hand, it's amazing just how far technology has come over the years.