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Friday 10 June 2011

A mind-reading machine may soon be a reality


  • Imagine a machine that can read what is going on your mind. Well, it may soon be a reality as scientists claim to have successfully decoded brain signals related to vision.
  • Researchers from the University of Glasgow said they were able see how the brain tuned into different brainwave patterns to code different visual features.
  • Professor Philippe Schyns, who led the study, said: "How the brain encodes the visual information that enables us to recognise faces and scenes has long been a mystery.
  • "It's a bit like unlocking a scrambled television channel. Before, we could detect the signal but couldn't watch the content; now we can," he was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
  • For their study, the researchers showed six volunteers images of people's faces displaying different emotions such as happiness, fear and surprise.
  • In a series of trials, parts of the images were randomly covered so that, for example, only the eyes or mouth were visible.
  • Participants were then asked to identify the emotion being displayed while electrodes attached to the scalp measured the volunteers' brainwaves.
  • The scientists were able to show that brainwaves varied greatly according to which part of the face was being looked at.
  • "Beta" waves, with a frequency of 12 hertz, carried information about the eyes, while four hertz "theta" waves were linked to the mouth.
  • Information was also encoded by the phase, or timing, of the brainwave, and less so by its amplitude, or strength.
  • Professor Schyns said: "While we are able to detect EEG activity in certain areas of the brain when particular tasks are performed, we've not known what information is being carried in those brainwaves.
  • "What we have done is to find a way of decoding brainwaves to identify the messages within." Professor Schyns said the study revealed how the brain tuned into different brainwave patterns to code different visual features.
  • "It is a bit like radiowaves coding different radio stations at different frequency bands," he added. "This work has huge potential in the development of brain-computer interfaces." The research is published online in the journal Public Library of Science Biology.Source: Indian Express