World's first 'thought images' seen on screen

Great for paranoid partners

Paranoid partner records partner's brain activity, where they dream of shagging partners brother/sister/mother/father/best friend/woman from the checkout at Tescos/Nigella/Nigel/Angelina/Brad etc.

Either get woken up violently, or get some serious evils over breakfast, eventually leading to all out war and divorce.

I'm sure it'll be misused by the advertisers

...but more interestingly, how long until someone figures out how to use transcranial magnetic stimulation (or some such) to reverse the process?

"Who are the brain police?"

Aahh ah ahahahaaa, aahh ah ahahahaaa

What will you do if we let you go home,

And the plastics all melted,

And so is the chrome?

Who are the brain police?

- Frank Zappa, Mothers of Invention, album "Freak Out", 1966.

(lyrics found at http://www.lyricsfreak.com)

Taking apart Humpty Dumpty

"Last night I dreamed of you and I put it on YouTube."

"A penny for your thoughts!"

"Here, have to whole recording."

@more like-AC

Well if I was to delve into and see the thought processes of the average Londoner or any UK facebook dwelling, iPhone/iPod owning, Eastender/X factor/reality TV watching, girl/boy band appreciating, Daily Mail reading, form over function citizen..

Then "London's burning with boredom now" comes to mind.

Scary tech yes, I fear for my son and his potential/future children, I am a middle aged bloke. I will be dead before this technology is fully mastered, whence a "minority report" reality with adverts directly beamed into one's minds eye will be the new utopia/dystopia. The time of human individuality and freedom will truly be over.

Cool.

Obviously early days but it is a step in the direction of direct brain/computer interface. I want a direct brain/computer interface.

As for the nay-sayers, I do get the point, but we could say the same things about other technologies: knives, nuclear fission techniques, and so on. We figured out how to use them mostly responsibly.

Maybe it's just me,

but generally I find my thoughts tend to be very hard to represent as just an image, they're generally more a mismash of, well, thoughts. I doubt any technology, no matter how advanced, could ever capture what I was thinking. Even if it could, it would be almost impossible to present the captured information in any meaningful way. Maybe reconstructing the image my eyes are seeing, but nothing more than that.

Uhuh

Are you sure they didn't just throw up images of random naked women and find to their amazement that this was precisely what their male test subjects were thinking about?

Smell the money

From the vague article, this is my guess at what the experiment was like, but modified for use on Register readers:

First wire up a Register reader. Have a computer show them the following pictures repeatedly in a random order: The Register logo, Tux, Apple's logo, Microsoft's Logo, an Intel Inside sticker and the Paris thumbnail. Wait until each image gives a consistent response. Get a second computer to display a guess of the image that the first computer is showing from the name of the Register reader and the electrode output.

The next step is to vague up a description of the experiment until journalists will misinterpret it as reading images from inside brains. Use the resulting confusion to get investment from Jacqui Smith and all the other confused thought-police wannabes.

For those of you who do not read Japanese, this will give you a clue about where I am coming from. The longest word for neuron that I found was shinkeisaibou, which is written 神経細胞 (if you have a kanji font installed). Each of the four letters has several meanings, and each letter is made of meaningful components.

神 shin: gods; mind; soul. Left component: salute; bow; ceremony; thanks; remuneration. Right component: have the honor to; sign of the monkey; 3-5PM; ninth sign of Chinese zodiac.

経 kei: sutra; longitude; pass thru; expire; warp. Left component: thread. Top right: or; again; furthermore; on the other hand. Bottom right: soil; earth; ground; Turkey.

細 sai: dainty; get thin; taper; slender; narrow. Left component: thread. Right component: rice field.

胞 hou: placenta; sac; sheath. Left component: moon. Right component:wrap; pack up; cover; conceal.

These letters are going to cause different responses all over the brain unrelated to the shape of the letter just like the logos will cause a conditioned response in a prejudiced fanboy/Register reader.

Let's hope..

That the NSBLP (National Socialist British Labour Party) will be out of power by the time this becomes viable. (Assuming GB doesn't make himself "Prime Feurer for life).

So...

If I have a dream about participating in extreme porn, do I go to prison for recording it?

I TOLD YOU MY TINFOIL HAT WOULD COME IN HANDY AND YOU ALL LAUGHED AT ME.

WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?

Tinfoil hat?

Just because you are paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

Re:I'm sure it'll be misused by the advertisers

This dream was brought to you by Lightspeed Briefs....

Imagined image or seen image?

Captured from the visual cortex sounds as if it was recording live sight, rather than a vivid imagination. This has far more use both for recording vision (The Plods get thier own Black box without a headcam..) and also for artificial eyes feeding the cortex data...

Did they discern what the subject THOUGHT or what they SAW?

The optical cortex is on the surface atthe back of the brain and functional MRI scans have been able to distinguish whether the subject is being shown a vertical or horizontal line for a few years now. This sounds similar, rather than a true "thought reading" process.

G.I.Joe

This was in an old G.I. Joe comic, but it's application in the comic made more sense if certain time constraints held.

The problem with this, is that the pattern the brain produces for a particular item will change over time. Asking someone to think of a car and then comparing that to the same image down the road will result in different images.

Roll on

CCBV

What took them so long?

I recall seeing a TV program, it must have been at least 20 years ago, in which electrodes inserted into a cat's brain were shown being triggered by straight lines in the cat's visual field. I've never forgotten that cat - it was sitting up, staring blankly ahead at a whiteboard, motionless, unblinking, (unyawning), like an Egptian mummy guardian wotsit. The neuroscience was par for the course, but the cat's catatonia was truly awesome.

I don't think the spooks will be investing in the neuroscience any time soon.

old news...

they've been able to read thoughts for a while, i recall seeing a TV program where thought was used to control a robotic arm (badly admittedly) years ago

while the use in the article is slightly different, the general principle is the same but this is actually a much better use of the technology, to assist paralysed people/artificial libs/etc

and once we've dealt with all the cripples we can then turn our attention to the really important part - controlling a computer through thought, think how quickly you could type if you didn't have to move your fingers and press keys! and the increased working speed might mean it stops being considered acceptable for so-called programmers to release the sort of bloatware crap that most software is these days