While currently, it requires a bulky, expensive MRI machine, in the future people might wear patches on their head which use waves of light to penetrate into the brain and provide information on blood flow.
This could allow people’s thoughts to be detected as they move around.
The new study, reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, used a ‘decoder’, which incorporates both a computer model to interpret people’s brain activity and language-processing technology similar to ChatGPT to help generate possible words.
After hours of training, the decoder was able to pick up what people were thinking about half the time.
That meant it produced text which closely, and sometimes exactly, matched the words people were listening to – working this out using only their brain activity.
For example, one person listening to a speaker say ‘I don’t have my driver’s license yet’ had their thoughts translated as ‘she has not even started to learn to drive yet’.
The researchers say the breakthrough could help people who are mentally aware yet unable to speak, like stroke victims or those with motor neurone disease.
Unlike other mind-reading technology, it works when people think of any word, and not just those from a set list — although it struggles with pronouns like ‘he’ and ‘I’.
h/t BoatyMcBoatface