“What Am I Thinking Of?” — Deep Learning Edition
It’s a bit of a holy grail really — if we could, somehow, figure out what all that brain activity actually corresponds to, well, that would change everything, wouldn’t it? Control systems powered by thoughts would move from science fiction to reality , as would the abuses to privacy . That said, the brain has been remarkably opaque to our probing thus far, so I guess the future is still the future, right? Maybe not so far in the future though. The first crack came from fMRI , where, to simplify things, the experimenters basically stuck people in MRI systems, showed them a picture (of, say, a leopard), and recorded what happened in the brain. The good news is that a bunch of stuff would light up in the brain, with the equivalent bad news being that a bunch of stuff would light up in the brain, and nobody knew what it meant . Some researchers went about this a bit more scientifically, and instead of a leopard, would show the subje...