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Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity
- shablulman 8mo ago[flagged]
- vlovich123 8mo agoPrediction: even if this requires surgery, unlocking inner thought will be used in criminal proceedings to establish guilt or attempt to be used to prove innocence. It will definitely be used unethically in military/intelligence interrogations until the law catches up.
- red75prime 8mo ago"Hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password" XKCD 538
- devmor 8mo agoWe normally do not accept people being hit with wrenches (or a contextual contemporary) in criminal justice trials.
- red75prime 8mo agoI don't think that the brain surgery is accepted as well.
- nkrisc 8mo agoBeing hit with a wrench seems less invasive and even preferable compared to mind-reading brain surgery.
- jdiff 8mo agoThankfully we aren't forced to pick between them, "neither" is the current status quo and will do quite nicely for the foreseeable future.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8mo agoNot yet.
- ksaj 8mo agoI'm not sure if this would be able to detect the difference between truthful thoughts about actual memories, and intrusive thoughts that could give the entirely wrong impression. Yet, they still do use lie detectors, even though the things they detect can be faked, or triggered out of personal alarm or offense. So it is entirely possible, regardless.
- polytely 8mo agotorture not being that effective has never stopped the US government before
- Lerc 8mo agoIt depends on your classification of effective. If it is to gather accurate information, it is ineffective. If it is to gather the justification for what you were going to do anyway, it can be most effective.
- ksaj 8mo agoFor a fairly recent example: the US' post-911 War on Terror when they were waterboarding people. This definitely didn't get them any real info, and they found out in the worst way that innocent people will confess when they think they are actively dying. Prior to this, it was already known to produce false feedback and confessions. The US military has a strange way of repeating history to see if it'll turn out differently "this time." It sadly never does.
- slfnflctd 8mo agoIntrusive thoughts is a big one. Most people report some variation of this phenomenon (myself included), and are often horrified by the thoughts or images their own mind produces, very much wanting them to go away. To be judged by that is unthinkably wrong.
- ksaj 8mo agoExactly. I have ADHD. The real kind (not the fantasy kind everyone on X seems to have). I grew up on Ritalin. I think they'd have a hard time sorting out "conversational" streams that run through my head. Even when I'm reading something, there is still an excessive amount of internal chatter. I've heard some people hear silence, and that just freaks me out. It often is "inspired" by what I'm hearing and reading, but not related to how I actually feel about anything in particular. Sometimes I have to put effort into not getting too extreme in those many based-on-a-theme side stories. I'm quite sure this technology would either paint me as someone I'm not, just because of my brain's way of going through a dozen interpretations of whatever it is I'm thinking about, or burn out by the extreme amounts of the internal chatter that entails. Needless to say, I grew up on nightmares (a common ADHD thing). I eventually ended up learning lucid dreaming to escape them, but still, even my dream world comes up with s##t I would never think of in my waking reality. Those feel so very real to me that I can't imagine this brain scanner thing could tell the difference either.
- pmontra 8mo agoMy first dystopic thought was immigration counters at airports /s
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoThe worst: ads.
- magackame 8mo agoNoooo. Makes me wonder how much money do you need to buy up all the ad slots in the world and replace them with blanks.
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoSo much money that only running your mega ad operation would allow you to cover the costs.
- y-curious 8mo agoYeah why do that when the government can just “get” someone’s google search history?
- dr_dshiv 8mo agoI have a PhD student working on EEG audio decoding. We are presently focused on a simpler subtopic: the detection of consonance and dissonance in the brain as it listens to music.
- kennyloginz 8mo agoSounds awesome!
- volemo 8mo agoCould you link some of your works? I’m very curious about reliability of EEG in terms of consistency between sessions.
- Lerc 8mo agoIt does make me wonder how advanced remote sensing devices are now. With more advanced hardware, can you remotely capture EEG level signals with any accuracy? As an aside, I briefly read that as the detection of cognitive dissonance. Which I think would be a much more difficult topic.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ksaj 8mo agoThey don't seem to mention if it is elective. An all or nothing mechanism might spell out words that the patient really didn't intend on others seeing (like "Ugh, that guy again! I can't stand the way he...") It is pretty difficult to control your inner dialog against spontaneous and triggered thoughts.
- Tade0 8mo agoI wanted to comment this HN entry with "people with intrusive thoughts sweating profusely" or something similar, but in truth are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever? I for one don't fight them, regardless how horrible they would be spoken out aloud, because so far I haven't seen any evidence of anyone reading my mind. I also made a point of explaining to my child that her thoughts are hers and hers alone, so she can think whatever she likes. I would rather not have to backtrack on any of this.
- throwaway290 8mo ago> are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever? There are people with no internal monologue whatsoever.
- volemo 8mo agoI think every verbal person has the ability to “speak” phrases in their mind; people without an internal monologue (as is, I suppose, the case for me) just don’t need / tend to do that with every thought they have.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- trocado 8mo ago"Mental content" seems way to broad for what is rather the sensorimotor part of speech.
- jml7c5 8mo agoAs I understand it, the big challenge with brain electrodes is that because they are implanted in a big jiggly piece of jelly, they shift out of position and/or cause localized scarring. The practical effect is that the brain-electrode interface "wears out" after a while, and you can't get useful data. Has this been solved, or are implants still temporary?
- voidUpdate 8mo ago> "It wasn't perfect, but 60% of the words were judged intelligible by testers" I don't understand this part. Are they trying to pull the audio of the words out of the brain or something? I'd think it would be easier to use a dictionary of words, and use some machine learning to try and pull out the most likely next word from the brain activity, in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible
- bryanrasmussen 8mo ago>in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible what percentage of the words would be correct though?
- voidUpdate 8mo agoNo idea, but the words themselves would be intelligible. The only way I can think that they could be generating unintelligible words is if theyre building them from tokens/letters, or generating audio directly
- YeGoblynQueenne 8mo ago>> The answer to whether the tech could identify inner speech was a tentative "yes". For a task involving imagining a sentence, the researchers were able to achieve an accuracy rate of up to 74% in real time. For the tasks designed to prompt spontaneous inner speech, accuracy was reduced but still above chance. Did a number go missing from this sentence? One accuracy rate was "74%", the other was "reduced but still above chance". Why leave things vague? All that accomplishes is that it makes me distrust the factuality of the article.
- vivzkestrel 8mo agothis is like the landline telephone of brain reading tech, imagine what happens when we get an iphone 16 max for the same that works without implants