| Computers Can Read Minds! |
 Computers Can Read Minds! Mon, 2 June 2008 The first step towards a time when we'll be enslaved by robots
 If any computer could read your mind, it would be this one. The study, conducted at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was done to help gain a greater understanding of how and where the brain stores different kinds of information.
They imaged each of the nine people thinking about the 58 different words, to create a kind of "average" image of a word.
The computer was then given a test, and was correctly able to identify a brain image taken when a person though 'celery', and another of when someone thought 'airplane'.
"If I show you the brain images for two words, the main thing you notice is that they look pretty much alike. If you look at them for a while you might see subtle differences," [study leader Tom] Mitchell said. "We have the program calculate the mean brain activity over all of the words that somebody has looked at. That gives us the average when somebody thinks about a word, and then we subtract that average out from all those images," Mitchell added. - SMH The next step in the study is to teach the computer to distinguish between different phrases and strings of words.
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