"Mind reading" technology can now decode complex thoughts

Via David

In the past, “mind reading” systems have been able to guess what single-digit number a person might be thinking of, but deeper thoughts have been beyond the technology’s reach. Now, a team from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has developed a way to accurately read more complex concepts from a brain scan, and even piece together entire sentences.

Even the most basic sentence is loaded with more information than you might realize: each word represents a new concept, and their placement and relationship to each other can drastically change the meaning of the whole. The CMU team found that the “building blocks” the mind uses to construct thoughts are made up of concepts, rather than being based on words themselves. That suggests the brain processes concepts in a universal way, regardless of a person’s language and culture.