Brain Scans Read Minds with 90%+ Accuracy

At the beginning of this year, we reported on a study which revealed that MRI scans are being tested out as mind-reading devices. You can read the report on that here but basically it showed that brain scans can read the patterns of a person's brain when they are viewing a particular item and then know which item the brain is thinking about when that pattern comes up again. A new study shows that the potential for brain scans as mind-reading machines may be even bigger than the original studies indicated. The major difference between the new study and the previous study was that the original study used pictures that the study subjects hjad already seen while the new study used pictures that were unseen by the study subjects. This speaks to the fact that this technology might have the ability to read the patterns in the mind with less specific rigidity in the parameters of the study than previuosly suspected. The study showed that a computer could guess what was in the mind of the study subject with over ninety percent accuracy in some cases. Considering that just a plain old guess by a human would result in less than one percent of a correct answer, this indicates that technology has made a big leap in the arena of mind reading. So what? You might think that this information is only good for a fun conversation topic at parties but it turns out that there are some important medical implications as well. For example, it has been suggested that this could ultimately be used to create technology that would allow quadriplegics to use their minds to communicate commands to a computer which could then assist them in their daily tasks. Question of the Day: What do you make about these studies of brain scans as mind reading machines? photo link