Could Brain Imaging Replace The SAT? Imagine it's the year 2032. You are a high school student. You are at a center where a visual scanner confirms your identity so you can enter a room where you are about to receive a brain scan. A robot attendant with a soothing voice recommends that you should relax and that you are welcome to take a nap. As you lie down in the scanner and earphones playing your favorite music block out ambient noise, you find yourself drifting off to sleep .
You wake up. Well, as you were sleeping, you just took the neuro version of the SAT. This fictional scenario is certainly not a reality today, but perhaps something like it may be a reality in the future. Haier paints a picture of our future: "Can it be done today? In 1988, Haier and his colleagues scanned volunteers while they attempted to solve problems from the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal intelligence test.
In other words, smarter people had brains that could be more efficient. Says Haier, "That's kind of a no brainer. " When will computer hardware match the human brain? by Hans Moravec. Journal of Evolution and Technology. 1998. Vol. 1 When will computer hardware match the human brain? (Received Dec. 1997) Hans Moravec ABSTRACT This paper describes how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. Brains, Eyes and Machines Computers have far to go to match human strengths, and our estimates will depend on analogy and extrapolation. There are considerations other than sheer scale. More computer power is needed to reach human performance, but how much? The retina is a transparent, paper-thin layer of nerve tissue at the back of the eyeball on which the eye's lens projects an image of the world.
It takes robot vision programs about 100 computer instructions to derive single edge or motion detections from comparable video images. 100 million instructions are needed to do a million detections, and 1,000 MIPS to repeat them ten times per second to match the retina. MIPS and Megabytes. to mimic their behavior. Ultrasound Helmets Control Brain Activity. Scientists at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona are exploring the use of ultrasound to stimulate brain activity without the invasive procedures or internal implants required for current electrical stimulation methods. In addition to treatment of neurological diseases like Parkinson’s disease, they are exploring military applications of direct brain stimulation using ultrasound devices placed inside helmets worn by soldiers. The helmets could help improve and retain soldier alertness levels for extended periods of time, provide pain management assistance in the field, reduce stress, and protect against traumatic brain injury.
A team led by Dr. William Tyler, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University, has been exploring the use of ultrasound for non-invasive brain simulation for some time. Funding from the Army Research Laboratory and DARPA helped the group adopt their research for military applications. Ultrasound Helmets Control Brain Activity. Computer Used To Decode Brain Activity. Scientists believe they have found a way to read people's minds in what could be the first step towards helping brain-damaged patients who cannot speak. US researchers used a computer programme to decode brain activity and put it into words using a form of electronic telepathy. Experts described the breakthrough, unveiled in the journal Public Library of Science Biology, as "remarkable" and believe it could ultimately be possible to decipher people's thoughts. Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley used the programme to predict what spoken words volunteers had listened to by analysing their brain activity.
Previous research has shown imagined words activate similar brain areas as words that are said aloud, raising hopes they can also be uncovered by "reading" brain waves. Professor Robert Knight, who worked on the study, said: "This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak.
Mind-Reading Experiment Reconstructs Movies in Our Mind. The approximate reconstruction (right) of a movie clip (left) is achieved through brain imaging and computer simulation.UC Berkeley It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. He believes such a technique could eventually reconstruct a dream or other made-up mental movie well enough to be recognizable. People shouldn't be worried about others secretly eavesdropping on their thoughts in the near future, since the technique requires a person to spend long periods in an MRI machine, he noted.
Scientists Read Dreams. By Mo Costandi of Nature magazine Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep. A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep.
This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between seven and ten times, on different days, for each participant. During each block, participants were woken up ten times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams six or seven times every hour, giving the researchers a total of around 200 dream reports. But the extra effort will be worth it, he says.