Science

 

Can Neuroscientists Read Your Thoughts?

If we are not exactly sure what a thought is, how would we recognize a thought if we saw one? Is it even a measurable physiological object? Or does it exist in some realm of mind that defies measurement?

Neuroscientists assume a thought is represented in electrical activity of the brain. But if the linguists are right, then electrical activity in animal brains would not indicate thoughts, nor would it in babies. And yet the electrical activity in babies and animals has many structural similarities to language-enabled humans.

What if a thought is not constructed of electrical activity after all? This does not mean electrical activity has no influence on a thought. It may well. But it could be fully impossible to construct or reconstruct a thought out of a pattern of electrical activity alone.

Reading Thoughts in the Brain

This comes to the big question of whether we are on the path to reading human thought by measuring the activity of the brain.

In 2008, a widely publicized paper, "Identifying Natural Images From Human Brain Activity" in the journal Nature led to headlines like "Brain Decoding: Reading Minds" and "Scan a Brain, Read a Mind? In this study, people were asked to view natural scenes and these images were reconstructed (somewhat) from the early visual area of the brain using a method called fMRI, which measures differences in blood oxygen levels, to construct patterns of where there was greater activity. While this is in and of itself quite a feat, does this mean they were able to read a thought?