Sometimes I think even I don’t know what I’m planning to do next. But a team of researchers has figured out a way to look at brain activity and predict a person’s future actions. Specifically, they were looking at whether a subject planned to add or subtract a pair of numbers. The technique uses brain scanning and some sophisticated pattern analysis. The eight subjects were asked to decide whether they were going to add or subtract a pair of numbers, and a few second later the numbers were presented. The pattern analysis software examined the brain activity for each volunteer and was trained to recognize the brain patterns associated with deciding on each activity, adding and subtracting (analogous to the way you need to train voice recognition software).
The software was correct in its predictions 70% of the time (this was after 40 minutes of training with a particular subject). There’s some potential for developing this into a tool for paralyzed people to compose text in their heads and have a computer recognize what letters or words they’re thinking of. As with any technology like this, ethical questions could arise in the future. I wonder how similar the patterns for the eight subjects were, and how much it might be possible to generalize in predicting the behavior of subjects for which the software has not been trained. I suppose if you want to keep your thoughts private, you can just stay out of the scanner (for now, anyway).
Here’s the press release from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and here’s an article from New Scientist.
