Like Dumbledore’s wand, a scan can pull long strings of stories straight out of a person’s brain — but only if that person cooperates.
This “mind-reading” feat, described May 1 in Nature Neuroscience, has a long way to go before it can be used outside of sophisticated laboratories. But the result could ultimately lead to seamless devices that help people who can’t talk or otherwise communicate easily. The research also raises privacy concerns about unwelcome neural eavesdropping.
As opposed to implanted devices that have shown recent promise, the new system requires no surgery. And unlike other external approaches, it produces continuous streams of words instead of having a more constrained vocabulary.
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“It definitely doesn’t nail every word,” [neuroscientist Alexander] Huth says. The word-for-word error rate was actually pretty high, between 92 to 94 percent. “But that doesn’t account for how it paraphrases things,” he says. “It gets the ideas.” For instance, when a person heard, “I don’t have my driver’s license yet,” the decoder spat out, “She has not even started to learn to drive yet.”
