Elon Musk has made mind reading a more attractive topic, it has become not only interesting for those who want to move electronic limbs by the mind but also gained the attention of those who see this technology as an important step to expand the capabilities of our brains and link them to artificial intelligence. Hopefully, one day we could replicate the mind to transfer it to a robotic body which may achieve digital immortality.
The year 2023 witnessed several developments in the field of mind reading; Whether related to the development of brain-computer interfaces that attempt to capture electrical signals issued by the brain, or artificial intelligence techniques that interpret brain signals to understand what a person is thinking.
Brain-computer Interface
The most important thing that happened this year was that Elon Musk’s company Neuralink obtained a license to begin testing on humans. Therefore, in September, the company announced its need for people who want to try the device after several successful experiments on animals in which the device, consisting of tiny electrodes, was implanted in the skull near the nerve cells to transmit signals wirelessly to the computer.
A new player has emerged in this field, Paradromic company, which obtained a license to test its new device on the brains of animals in a step that indicates the growing interest in this field. Paradromic joins three leading companies in this field: Neuralink, Synchron, and BlackRock Neurotech.
Artificial Intelligence in Mind Reading
After capturing the electrical signals issued by the brain, the stage of understanding these signals comes, and here comes the role of artificial intelligence.
The importance of artificial intelligence becomes apparent when the thinking process is complex, such as thinking about writing a sentence or imagining a picture, and not just thinking about moving an arm to the right or left. Here the options are limited, and thus predicting them may be much easier. While predicting the word a person is thinking of seems to be a more complex issue.
Synchron previously wrote what a paralyzed person was thinking, and it is clear that it uses artificial intelligence techniques to do so. This year, two studies can be mentioned that show progress in this field, but in both experiments, signals captured by magnetic resonance imaging devices were used, not those captured by brain-computer interfaces, due to the ease of obtaining training data from MRI.
- Researchers at the University of Texas extracted the words that a person was thinking under an MRI device, after an artificial intelligence model was trained on pairs of MRI images with the related words; After training, the model was able to write the words that the person was thinking of.
- In a more complex experiment, Japanese scientists trained a model to reconstruct the image that the person is thinking about; It is sufficiant to display the pictures in front of him and capture the brain signals for the model to draw the picture he is thinking about. The model showed amazing results despite their inaccuracy. In the figure below we see at the top the images that were shown to the person and at the bottom the images built by the model.
After Neuralink obtained a license to begin human trials, perhaps the coming year will bring good news for those who use electronic limbs. It will also excite those who are waiting for this technology to enable us to connect with artificial intelligence to expand our mental capabilities.
