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Mind-reading AI works out what you are thinking from brain scans

A brain decoder can extract words and sentences from the brain recordings of people listening to stories or watching silent films

By Alex Wilkins

14 October 2022

A functional MRI scan showing stimulation in the brain

Functional MRI scans can show when parts of the brain are stimulated

Living Art Enterprises/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

An artificial intelligence can detect when someone is thinking about specific concepts such as food or sleep just by looking at brain scans. The system might one day be used to help people who have lost the ability to speak or to investigate mental health conditions.

When we receive a stimulus from the outside world, such as hearing spoken words or seeing an image, this is encoded in the brain as neural activity. Attempts to decode this activity to …

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