Mind reading breakthrough immediately raises questions of ethics

2 May 2023 / Richard A Lovett

It’s now possible to read a person’s brain activity and “decode” it into speech, researchers have revealed, in what appears to be something akin to “mind reading.”

The discovery is initially focused on helping people with disabilities to communicate.

“We were kind of shocked that this works as well as it does,” says team leader Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin, who announced the development at a news conference in the US and published in Nature Neuroscience.

The researchers say previous speech decoders have been applied to neural activity recorded after invasive neurosurgery, which limits their use. Other decoders that have used non-invasive brain activity recordings were limited to decoding single words or short phrases.

The new process begins by having people listen to stories while their brain activity is monitored by a method known as “functional MRI,” which measures tiny changes in blood flow as the brain responds to what it’s hearing.

More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/mind-reading-breakthrough-immediately-raises-questions-of-ethics/