Computers may one day be able to read minds

Daily Mail : Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been developing a computer program that can decode brain activity and put it into words, writes Tamara Cohen for the Daily Mail. To monitor information from the temporal lobe, where sounds are processed, the scientists inserted electrodes into the brains of 15 patients whose skulls had been cut open for an epilepsy treatment. As the patients listened to a person speaking, the computer analyzed how the brain processed the words they heard. It was able to translate the spoken words into patterns of electrical activity and then translate them back into the original sounds, or something very similar. Brian Pasley, coauthor of a paper published in PLoS Biology, said that with more work, brain recordings could allow scientists to “synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking.” Such technology could benefit people whose speech has been affected by stroke or degenerative disease.