It’s a simple question, and one we ask each other all the time… but it comes with a whole lot of psychological baggage, not least that of the barrier between the thoughts you choose to communicate and those you choose to keep confined to your own cerebrum. So here’s the trigger for your next Phildickian moment of existential paranoia – brain scanning procedures developed by scientists in the specialist neurological field of “neural decoding”show promise of eventually being able to analyse what you’re thinking about:
Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading “neural decoder” at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field’s most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.
Go read the whole article; neural decoding has the smell of a technology that’s about to get much bigger very quickly, especially when the military types hear about it and start throwing money in its general direction. And take note of the fact that although the success rates for algorithms guessing the correct connections between thoughts and subjects are pretty low at this point, they’re still above raw chance… and way above what most “professional psychics” can muster. [image by mararie]
In a similar vein:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/controlling-single-neurons/
I’m not concerned – I’m sure DARPA is 20 years ahead on this tech already (gulp).
IN Response to what are you thinking about:
I have been following thought processes solely based on algorithms and heirarchies in my mind, ever since my “awakening”. This philosiphy or concept, I agree to be truths or likelihoods. My brain (which biologically is the same as yours) or mind has been flawlessly following algorithms applied to daily activities at such a success rate that it equates to probabilities of future events. In a nut shell it’s simply setting a goal and following the steps to that goal. and when that goal is acheived in the present. It’s a direct result from your actions in the past. (Common sense right?) My human brain already acknowledges that it’s a calculator, My brain as all others can calculate with out ever learning math(my brain however does translate math).
The same way an animal calculates the movement of prey and inevietably eats dinner. with this princaple applied, I believe humans naturally associates natural frequencies and conclude assumptions, this is one of the biggest natural hinderence in this topic. A level of Self actualization must be acheived, before introduction of such thought processes. Actions based on assumptions not based on facts or truths do not create a high success rate. Success rates tend to be high when processes are followed on a time line of successful frequencies known to be true. These are my beliefs founded on my current basis of understanding.