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Prying Into the Brain
By Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com
A dream—or nightmare—is gradually yielding to scientific progress. In their study, "Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies," researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and quantitative modeling to decode and reconstruct people's dynamic visual experience. Subjects spent hours inside an MRI scanner, watching Hollywood movie trailers, while the scanner measured blood flow through the brain's visual cortex. Subsequent quantitative modeling of this data yielded actual videos of what might have been going on in the subjects' minds (study and video).
The hope is that these efforts will lead to applications that can access the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, like coma patients. But if the technology ever reaches that stage, there will be no reason to stop at coma patients. Why not read the mind of your spouse? Or of everyone? Google and Facebook, if they still exist in that distant future, will have a field day. And surely, there will be an app for that.
Other significant efforts are underway. At the annual CeBit conference in Hanover, Germany, last March, researchers from the Berlin Institute of Technology showed off a pinball machine controlled by electroencephalography (EEG), which records the brain's electrical activity via dozens of electrodes placed on the scalp.
In April, Japan announced a big collaborative project by its car makers and research institutions to develop technology beyond thought-controlled games and phones: car navigation systems that would search for restaurants when the driver thinks about food. I mean, come on. We think about food a lot. Will that system take us to the next restaurant instead of our appointment? What if someone with diabetes thinks about a milk shake? What if we think about sex?
Meanwhile, German researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin produced a car that allows drivers to steer left and right as well as accelerate and decelerate—via a neuroheadset developed for video games by Emotiv, a San Francisco company. For this to work, the researchers had to train the headset's 16 sensors on the scalp to recognize the brain's electric signals related to specific driving commands.
The latest effort is the collaboration between Nissan and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, which already developed a Brain Machine Interface (BMI) system for wheelchair users (press release). Now Nissan wants to advance the system to the next level. Using profuse amounts of data and quantitative modeling, the device would associate electric activity in the brain with eye movements and data from the surroundings to guess if the driver wants to turn right or stop to pick up a hitchhiker. It would then execute the driver's thoughts.
So a pedestrian jaywalks. Driver thinks, "You idiot, you." The BMI captures the thought and activates the horn. Pedestrian holds up his middle finger. Driver thinks, "I'm going to kill you." The BMI captures the thought and the wild eye movement and....
OK, there would in fact be another application running on Windows 8, possibly, that would determine, based on data from numerous sensors, that this is a human being, the number one item on its list not to hit. And it would shut down the BMI temporarily. We do that in real life all the time. One impulse gets shut down by an application that is trained to do just that. Call it our moral sense, good financial decision making, survival instinct, or whatever.
As we know from the flash crash and countless other incidents, quantitative modeling can lead to compelling but wrong decisions. Combining quantitative modeling with activity in the brain is a prescription for disaster; the brain, our most unreliable organ, uses its profuse creativity on a routine basis to make up for shortcomings in data and knowledge. And the application that is supposed to shut down the BMI at certain critical junctures doesn't always work. We see that all the time. People make truly crazy decisions and execute them to the utter astonishment of everyone else around.
In this context, I can't help but think of the Fed's policy decisions: Inflation As Solution: Hosing The Middle Class.
Or about misguided fun-seekers and their horrid demise: Permit
Required For Deadly Pitfall
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com
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Synoptic action attempting to assort and abduction a way to anticipate algo's may actualize imaginations that arise to mimick the action of observing. Lots of fun in the funhouse! One footfall further... the observer, however, is something absolutely different.
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yes right A dream—or nightmare—is gradually yielding to scientific progress. In their study, "Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies,....
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This concept is very far from reality. I don’t think this may end up with the testing process although it’s not that impossible. As you mentioned, experts have been coordinating with Nissan, one of the reputable dealer of car models such as leaf and frontier together with Nissan parts out there. Well, for drivers this would be a great help especially when on the road. This would definitely prevent accidents from happening and would also test the mental alertness of drivers. As you know, there were noted cases of accidents even if you stay on the safe line. There is no safe zone actually when driving and engaging the said technology would definitely save all of us both drivers and civilians from getting hurt.
I am not sure about this and I don't think that this can be a prescription for a disaster fro the people. Anvelope iarna
Pattern recognition and classification. Same stuff is used by trading algos to read the market's "mind" and classify its mood into "long", "short", "undecided". The result are trades and not the display of colorful pictures but the technology under the hood is the same.
Synoptic activity attempting to categorize and capture a way to conceptualize algo's may create imaginations that appear to mimick the process of observing. Lots of fun in the funhouse! One step further... the observer, however, is something quite different.
The hope is they will be able to communicate with comma patients. If you ask me, over 90% of
the people walking around are in a comma. If you don't believe me, start asking people you meet,
What is going on in the world today? You will find out what I mean.
you can't print conscience--or principle--let alone just plain curiosity. these things don't "exist" in our mind. while under stress i think the ability to predict a trader's possible reactions on both sides of the trade is something that can be and is in fact modeled in the software sense of the term--once we're in the realm of sovereigns the data sets are so large, varied and complex as to render "mapping the mind" simply irrelevant in my view however. In short "how do we account for interest?" We know it exists: the United States gives billions to Pakistan while we have tens of millions on food stamps here at home. How is this possible? How can this ever make sense?
Winter is Coming
The world is full of stupid people...
Good grief!! There is already a computer which can do FAR more than any computer devized by some nerds in some university ... who are using it to try to artificially replicate what they already have.
It is called "the brain" - linked with such senses as sight, hearing, touch, taste and especially emotions ... something no mechanical/electronic computer can ever have.
A few hundred years ago David Hume expressed this as, "If was not for our passions and emotions, we could have no idea of a substance."
Isaac Newton said that the only way we can have knowledge of the universe is via what is within ourselves.
Kant summarized it all by saying that all we can ever experience is the "phenomenal world" within ourselves ... never "the world-in-itself".
OK I have lost you all (?) but I will bring this matter back to more mundane stuff.
The day that computer nerds can programme a mini-drone to do what the brain of any insect can do; then that will be the day I will admit that I am wrong about our "natural" computers ... but all the while that even dust mites do better at surviving than our over-inflated species, I will wait and see.
I will wait and see if the drones that bomb innocents can one day land upside-down on some ceiling, like common flies do ... with their tiny onboard computers (brains).
Socrates had it best - which is why I post backwards of his name.
Ignorance is the only real claim to wisdom.
Not sure if CG and WB would gel with me on this, but they attracted me to ZH ... not those too sure of theyselves.
I also identify with Rene Descartes, for whom doubt was the only reasonable position.
Good grief!! There is already a computer which can do FAR more than any computer devized by some nerds in some university ... who are using it to try to artificially replicate what they already have.
It is called "the brain" - linked with such senses as sight, hearing, touch, taste and especially emotions ... something no mechanical/electronic computer can ever have.
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This is a free market economy in this US driven world. And free market economy is about the elimination of redundancies.
So if you want to eliminate a feature in the US world order, make it redundant.
US citizens are duplicitous. They hide their real goals between false pretexts. Easier and easier to expose as the US propaganda is growing cheaper by the day.
I think you have to differntiate between thought-reading technology (as addressed here) and pure AI.
so like the matrix meets facebook?
I Dream of Wires
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOwwW9SOoOw