IUBio

Is it possible to read someone's mind?

yan king yin (at dot) y.k.y.lycos.com at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk
Wed May 9 08:09:32 EST 2001


(sorry.. "word wrap" messed up my post)

"Richard Vickery" <Richard.Vickery at unsw.edu.au>

> The EEG is an averaged response from many millions of neurons.  What is lost
> in the averaging is all the detail like what the person is thinking, the EEG
> just tells you WHETHER they are thinking  (their brain state: asleep, relaxed
> etc)
>
> In principle you really would need to know what each neuron is doing - fMRI
> has time and space resolution problems, EEG has space resolution problems. It
> is not inconceivable that new technology could allow us to simultaneously
> monitor the activity of billions of neurons, but to interpret the role of each
> of the neurons would probably take more than thelifetime of each individual
> that you tried to analyse.

I think someone experienced with fMRI can tell, from looking at brain
activation patterns, what state of mind the subject is in (roughly).
The same with EEG, it depends on how many samples you want to provide
with it.

Brain development is dependent upon a person's life history and each
ones brain is different.  The number of samples required to train an
Artificial Neural Net must, therefore, be comparable to a whole lifes
experience. So you are right.

On the other hand, the "mechanisms" that enable us abstract thinking
came from evolution, which is slow.  which means that they could be
simple and few in number.  Like the immune system that can generate
huge combinations of antibodies, the brain's mechanisms could be
similar.

So it might be possible to identify a *particular* brain state with
the exact group of neurons (or glia for that matter) associated with
it.  Moreover, once that mechanism is fully understood then it might
be possible to transfer the information from one substrate (cells)
to another (silicon?).

To answer the original poster: before such mechanisms were elucidated,
it would be anyones guess how long it would take.  I agree that it is
at present, impossible.






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