Computer Can Read People’s Mind Word Images

Joke: Two computers got married. They had a baby computer. What was the baby computer’s first word?

“Data…”

Reality: A computer has now been “trained” to read peoples’ word images — which could be a boon to political consultants wanting to get into voters’ heads. And you think politicians pander a lot NOW..?

A computer has been trained to “read” people’s minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers said on Thursday.

They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information.

This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped lead the study.

“The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge?” Mitchell said in a telephone interview.

How did they do it?

This way:

The scientists developed a computer system which can accurately forecast what activity patterns will be created in our brains by certain words.

They “trained” the machine to recognise the unique images created by thinking of 60 nouns associated with senses, including sight, touch, taste or smell. The model was also taught how millions of English words are used in practice. In tests on nine volunteers the computer could accurately predict what brain patterns would be created by simple nouns for which it had never seen images.

“We believe we have identified a number of the basic building blocks that the brain uses to represent meaning,” said Tom Mitchell, a computer scientist, who helped to lead the study.

These building blocks could be used to predict patterns for any concrete noun, he added.

Marcel Just, a professor of psychology at the university, said the computer model gave a clearer insight than previously existed into how humans think.

“We are fundamentally perceivers and actors,” he said.

“So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it.

“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.”

What would “political hack” conjure up? (We can guess the strength of the smell..)