Scientists "Blowing Roses"

An article from The Guardian tells how Scientists are learning to read people's minds through the use of brain scans. 77 percent accuracy rate. They can't do it, though, without their big fat magnets and by making you sit very very still. Astrologers can just bring a Scorpio Rising along and ask them what's on your mind. Could this be some amazing symptom of all the outer planets in the outermost signs? Once Uranus moves into Aries are we going to enter a Flowers for Algernon phase?

Here's link to the article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/30/mindread?gusrc=rss&feed=technologyfull

and part of the article (found at kottke.org):

"The paper establishes for the first time that one can predict the pattern of neural activity associated with thinking about many different nouns, from the verbs that co-occur with that noun," said Mitchell. "It can't yet decode arbitrary thoughts, but it does well on a multiple-choice test with two choices."

The team scanned the brains of 9 volunteers using functional MRI as they viewed 58 nouns such as body parts, vehicles and vegetables. The scanning technique detects increases in blood flow in the brain when different regions are activated.

The team then categorised the nouns using an electronic database of texts that contained more than a trillion words. They were looking for how often each of the nouns appeared together with simple verbs such as push, run, fear and open.

Next they matched this pattern of co-occurrence with the brain scan patterns and found that the brain does something similar. "The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it," said Prof Marcel Just, who led the study.

To test the model, the researchers showed the volunteers two new nouns which were also subjected to the same textual analysis. The model then predicted what it expected the brain scans for those nouns to look like.

By comparing these with the real scans it guessed which of the nouns the person was really looking at. The model was correct 77% of the time, significantly better than chance.

"Philosophers, psychologists, linguists and others have debated for centuries how the brain organises and represents meaning. But they were hampered in debating these issues because they lacked experimental data," said Mitchell.
"[We have] established for the first time a direct connection between how a word is used in a large collection of typical language, and the neural activity the brain uses to represent the word's meaning."