Mind Reading

Mind Reading Research Sees What You Mean

When we see words on a screen or piece of paper, their meaning comes to us quite naturally. But how does that understanding happen?

That is the question that Professor Marcel Just, the Director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University, spends his time trying to answer. I came upon Just’s through a paper he and his colleagues recently published on how we map the meaning of sentences in our brains. That research changed my understanding of the way we make meaning out of concepts.

Mind Reading Research

In the simplest terms, this new research details a computational model for predicting how particular sentences activate the way neurons fire in the brain. While having their brains scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the study’s research participants were asked to read some 240 sample sentences. Just and team then fed this data into machine learning algorithms to analyze it and ended up with 42 elements, which they dubbed “neurally plausible semantic features” (NPSFs). The resulting computer model accurately predicted which areas of the brain would light up when subjects read a set of new test sentences. It also made it possible to have a rough understanding of what these individuals were thinking simply by looking at how their brains were activating.

Yes, this represents an early step towards mind reading.

What This Research Means

I asked Just what he thought was most significant about this research:

“We’re getting at the basic building blocks of human thought. We like to think that you can think any old idea that you want to. Everybody thinks they’re creative, they’re generative, they’re unique and there’s some truth to that. But we’re all given a very similar set of Lego pieces with which to build our thoughts. We’re finding out what those pieces are, what types of pieces they are, and to some extent how they go together.”

In the last few years, a number of studies have shown that individual concepts light up particular locations in the brain. But in this research, Just and his team demonstrated for the first time the ability to map full sentences against the activation patterns they generate in the brain. We now know which parts of the brain light up from reading “the judge met the mayor” and which ones from reading “the flood-damaged the hospital.”

In other words, we now know how to look inside the brain to see the way it connects concepts together in simple sentences. This research thus marks an important step in unraveling how the nothingness of ideas manifests within the spongy, pink tissue of a human brain. By looking at the brain activation of someone, we now have a rough understanding of what they’re thinking about. It is, in fact, a rudimentary form of mind reading.

If that weren’t enough, the researchers also found that the same sentences activated the same regions of the brain across different research participants. That means that when I read “the fish lived in the river,” the neurons in my brain fire in a very similar pattern to those in yours. This finding suggests that we humans share a conceptual map with each other and that that map is baked right into our brains. It is a remarkable finding that dramatically changes the way we understand our relationship to conceptual meaning.

What’s more, these conceptual maps are language-independent. In a separate paper, the researchers demonstrated that English-language sentences activate the same areas in an English speaker’s brain as their translations into Portuguese do in the brain of a Portuguese speaker. According to Just, this phenomenon isn’t restricted to alphabetic languages either as they recently found similar results with Mandarin Chinese speakers.

Validating with Other Models

The research applies an additional layer of evaluation (called factor analysis) to further group the model’s conceptual elements into four bigger buckets of meaning: people, places, actions, and feelings. These categories of thought map to what we already know about the functions of various regions in the brain. As Just puts it:

“…From the brain function, from the information processing of the brain, we can then get back to its biological structure but the biological structure just reflects the functional subdivisions.”

Here’s a graphic depiction of those clusters from the research:

The other interesting cross-check in this research compared the model to a different approach to categorizing concepts from the field of Natural Language Processing. These “vector representations” use machine learning to group like concepts by their proximity to one another in large bodies of text. The researchers evaluated four of these techniques against their model by comparing them to labor-intensive human assessments of concept similarities. The researcher’s model performed reliably better than the vector representations, but it’s interesting to note that the validity of these other approaches was also corroborated by the research. Because these vector representations can be easily automated, they are a much less expensive than measuring brain activations. Just also noted in our conversation that there are ways to link the two approaches:

“You can map those (vector representation) co-occurrence properties to the brain activation and it works out not bad. So suppose for some reason you wanted to write a sentence or a text that activates certain brain areas, you could do it using the vector representation.”

The Limits of Today’s Mind Reading

One of the questions that kept coming back to me while digesting this research was just how nuanced these conceptual maps were, especially when it comes to interpreting what someone is thinking. Here’s what Just had to say:

“We can do kind of mind reading but not very precisely. We can tell if you’re talking about eating something and maybe we can tell the difference between a banana and a peach by the way you hold it, but we certainly can’t tell the difference between a peach and a nectarine… Obviously, your brain knows the difference between a nectarine and a peach, and if it’s in your brain you should be able to get it. We haven’t tried that level of discrimination.”

He went on to note that their model interprets a concept like “jury” as a slightly broader concept; something akin to say, a “group of people.” Getting that level of conceptual discrimination for mind reading and other applications will likely require a next-generation brain scanning technology:

“It’s really the sensitivity of the instrument in general. Fundamentally fMRI is not direct enough to give you the mapping to very, very specific content. We need the next technology to get us that sensitivity. I don’t know what it’s going to be. People are doing intra-cranial recording with micro-electrode arrays, but you need patients who have their brain exposed to do that.”

Applications of Conceptual Mapping

Professor Just was very eager to get into the potential applications of this research. We talked about a few areas specifically.

The first is psychiatric diagnosis. In a 2014 paper on the neurocognitive markers of autism, Just and his colleagues used machine learning to isolate a dimension they called “self-representation” as a reliable means of identifying patients on the autism spectrum. For people with high-functioning autism Just notes, “the concept of a social interaction, like persuading, hugging or insulting doesn’t involve a self-representation. It’s just a dictionary definition.”

The other application that Just is excited about is in education. Last year, he and Robert Mason published research on how the brain incorporates scientific concepts. As Just puts it:

“Basic physics concepts get mapped to these fundamental brain systems that have been there for thousands of years even though the physics concepts have only been formalized for a couple hundred. To give you an example, one of the factors in the representation of physics concepts is ‘radiating energy.’ And your brain doesn’t really care whether it’s heat, light or sound. It’s just ‘radiating energy’ that it understands because radiating energy is a fundamental thing that we experience from heat or whatever. So then you take your physics course and someone writes on the board some equation that pertains to radiating energy and that’s where that goes in the brain – that’s how it gets represented.”

What is exciting about these results is the possibility of designing curricula around these underlying, natural conceptual hooks. Just imagine how lectures and homework deliberately tied into our existing brain structures might change the efficacy of teaching.

I recently wrote about using machine learning to explore interspecies communication and asked Just about this possibility. While it is not his area of focus, he noted that others are using fMRI imaging to understand what’s happening in the heads of monkeys and dogs. He’s generally bullish:

“I think with this approach, one could do comparative psychology like never before. We’re going to find out how primates and other animals think. We’re going to find out how infants think.”

Changing Our Understanding of Meaning

One of the things I found most heartening in speaking with Just is his focus on the social and emotional aspects of knowing something. I asked him about how he saw the connection between more objective representations of knowledge and the subjective experience that it generates in us:

“In the dictionary when you look up “snake” it just tells you what it is. But I think, in the human brain “snake” also evokes fear in a lot of people. I think that’s part of the brain’s definition of “snake.” I don’t make that much of a distinction. Just as its shape is one of its properties, its ability to evoke fear, for reasons I don’t understand, is one of its properties… The non-objective elements of meaning are a normal part of the representation of meaning.”

Just is a cognitive neuroscientist. He noted that when he started his work, his focus was all about the objective aspects of thought. “But what brain imaging has revealed is how incredibly emotion and interpersonally-oriented human brain activity is. We view our world in that emotional and interpersonal context. It’s there. It’s ubiquitous.”

As we turn to the human brain as a model for the future of artificial intelligence, it’s important to keep this insight front-of-mind.

 

 

3 thoughts on “Mind Reading Research Sees What You Mean”

  1. Another fascinating article, Gideon. I found it interesting that Professor Just acknowledges that it will take the next-generation scanning technology for more conceptual discrimination in mind-reading and says “I don’t know what its going to be.” Having read your article about his amazing research to this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t Just who researches and creates “what its going to be.”

    With the recent introduction of I-phone X and the facial recognition, I can’t help but think one of these days Apple will introduce thought recognition!

  2. Pingback: The Semantic Networks We Write By | Teodora Petkova

  3. Mind Reading Technologies and Tongues – Governments from around the world have been using mind reading technologies that can read your mind. They use the same technologies that God would use to talk to you. A technique is called Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM). Look it up online. They use satellites shot to space by Space X founder Elon Musk, The Russian Federation, The Federal Government and NASA. Comparable to a cellular satellite. It’s a high bandwidth U/Z signal that listens to your brains wavelength and reads your conscience. Activating 70-90% of your brain. Many define it as a form of telepathy. People who can talk back to the satellite with their mind talk tongues. They have had this technology for years now. Not making a patent to stay ahead of our civilization. To try and be smart as the world they record our thoughts. They steal our ideas, money, murder, blackmail and use it as a tool for war. You sometimes get a headache when a mind reading machine is on you. Suspected users of mind reading technologies are as follow. Vladimir Putin, Donald J. Trump, Xi Jinping, some in DARPA, Chancellor Merkel, Justin Trudeau and Benjamin Netanyahu. Were to hold are governments accountable.  A Ravenous wolf in sheep’s clothing – An alien spirit reborn as a Human being. They use A.I. and walk the Earth. An alien had shot an asteroid at us. Fire and brimstone to reborn Earth. He was working with the devil an alien being. The devil walked. God saved us from one rapture. Destroying an alien ship. The devil to tell us we weren’t deserving and bring back his deserving. Aliens. To use our image from the casket that preserved our flesh. For us to be damned to hell for cremation. The devil to conquer the world. Mathew 7:15 Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. Your spirit is in your brain and leaves your body when you die. The spirit slowly rises towards the North Pole after death. The atmosphere to keep it contained. A solar flare can kill your spirit. Your conscience/soul controls most the brain and the brain control the body. To be brought back from flesh and bone means to be reborn as a clone. Wolves in American and Russian governments have been stealing spirits for their memories to help them conquer the world. Look into monopoles (spirits). Utilizing the Bermuda Triangle changing the magnetic compass .003 degrees. Transferring spirits to technologies. The simulation. Not disclosing the true purpose of certain military bases at the Bermuda Triangle and the North Pole.  A spirit can be put in a chip and be reborn. The clone grown around the chip within tank like a womb. Artificial intelligence can also walk as flesh and blood using a programmed chip similar to a robot. They can create remote controlled clones that have computer brains. Utilizing satellite reception. Grown in labs around the computer where the brain would be. Some are half brain and half computer. Using the flesh from the ethnicity preferred. Many can be remotely controlled by satellite much like a remote-control vehicle/robot. They can see and hear through them. Having them raised in the country they want to conquer. To win an election in your government and have others get within positions of power in military, intelligence, elite society and space. Also having them do their wet work. We need to be educated on these technologies. There taking our world.  Revelation behold, he is coming with the clouds. A spaceship from Alpha Centauri. The planet Kent. Jesus Christ landed in Russia. A spirit can fly a spaceship. No natural life support needed. God saved him from the devil unfortunately his ship was low on energy. He had to land. President Putin gave his word to him. Jesus was to have 7 days to honor flesh and blood. Jesus to walk and honor his church. He wanted to inform the world and save me and you. President Putin and Trump denied him. Not telling the world. Many said Jesus is stuck in his ship at a top-secret installation in Russia similar to area 51. We need to save many other souls. Were to prove a reborn clone, UFO’s (seen using micro waves), hacked satellites and mind reading technologies. To find the clone labs and destroy them. The clones to change our genome. They want to deny our children and take our world. To deny us free will and hold us for eternity. There in positions of power. To look you in the face and lie. Many souls live in a medium class ship between Earth and Mars. God saved them. About a 120 billion souls from Earth reside there. No hell. Many of our friends and families there. You can communicate with them if you have a line of communication with a satellite. The government hiding much.  Purgatory is Mars. To improve overtime and become a flesh and blood experience. Your spirit can become a robot. Energy is life. Humans to honor the full rotation of life. Not to deny natural existence. We can bring ourselves back. Were to walk as 1. A form of creation is to redistribute matter and alter a big bang. We live in a multiverse. Spirits to be added to evolution. Bred in from Kent. Earth to become a tier 1 civilization. To have 1 heaven on Earth. A simulation. To have a democracy of heaven and Earth. For us to live like kings in time. Humans to learn they have spirits. Science and technology to prove them. Church to become community and teaching. Many religions to become 1. To be self-reliant. Were to save of ourselves. To have judgment on evil beings walking as flesh and blood humans.  God and Allah one in the same after the New Testament. The devil to split us apart. God said I’m to tell you a revelation. For me to teach you prophecy and fix his word. The devil changed word to push his agenda. A man talking tongues to save the world by informing you. God wants his original doctrine to be released along with the book of Judah. The truth to come out. The Catholic Church to obtain it from Pope Francis. Please spread the word. The government to hack my internet.  Christopher, I speak tongues. prophecyisnow.com

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