Successfully decipher complex thoughts in the human brain

Simple to complex thoughts in your head can be read through brain scans. Even this device can assemble discrete ideas into a complete thought.

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A research team from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has developed a technique for reading complex human thoughts. Each word recreates an idea and they realize that instead of the meaning of each word, the pieces of this idea can be used to build different thoughts.

This suggests that the human brain processes ideas in an inclusive way, no matter what language you speak and in which culture.

The team has found a way to see complex thoughts in fMRI signals. From the correlation between thought and brain activity patterns, we will know how the thought in the head is formed.

CMU's research has tested how a fMRI magnetic resonance scanner with machine learning algorithms decodes complex thoughts and how the brain encodes these thoughts.

Complex facts are made up of different idea pieces, which are components of a particular meaning. Our brain processes different types of information among these data in different regions, so that the CMU system can choose an overview of what is in one's head.

The researchers invited 7 people to participate in the test to test the decoding power of the system. They let volunteers read 240 pre-compiled data and recorded the patterns of brain activity when these people began to read.

After the algorithm has trained 239 sentences and conducted brain scans, the CMU system was able to assemble and find the missing final sentence based on individual data in the brain.

This experiment was conducted 240 times by the researchers and gradually eliminated the questions in a systematic way. The results surprised them, the algorithm was able to predict the missing sentence based on the behavior of the brain with an accuracy of up to 87%. On the other hand, if a question is loaded into the system, we will get the correct form of brain activity.

CMU's method allows us to decipher thoughts that contain many ideas. In the future, researchers will test decoding a general topic that a person is thinking about.

This is a tremendous advance, enabling us to create a map that re-draws all forms of knowledge in the brain.