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The computer reads minds

22.07.2008

A computer program developed by American scientists is able, based on the results of a brain scan, to determine what word a person is thinking about.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University led by Tom Mitchell suggested that the way the brain processes nouns depends on how they are related to verbs. "Hammer", for example, activates the areas of the brain associated with movement, "lock" - with spatial information.

Using these assumptions, Mitchell and his colleagues created a program that tried to account for semantic relationships. The program was tested on nine volunteers whose brains were scanned as they looked at cards with nouns written on them.

There were 60 of these words in total, and 58 of them were entered into a computer along with the corresponding maps of brain activity. Then the program analyzed the text, with a volume of 10 billion characters, and established links between the experimental words and the previously introduced 25 verbs. This was followed by a testing phase: the program was tasked with predicting the areas of the brain "responsible" for two missing words when entering. Three quarters of the answers were correct. The idea itself is not new: there is a model that guesses which of the 100 images a person sees.

"Our model involves analyzing not only visual signals, but also the meaning of words," says Tom Mitchell.

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