'Mind-reading' computer programme
Updated on 31 May 2008
A computer programme has been developed that can predict how common nouns are visualised in the brain.
The mind-reading model is able to forecast patterns of brain activity that occur with thoughts of people, places or things.
The research could potentially improve the understanding and treatment of language and learning deficiencies, say scientists.
Researchers have previously used brain scans to show which neurons are activated when a person thinks of a word.
The new work goes further by predicting these activation patterns for specific nouns - things normally experienced through the senses.
Scientists in the US used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans to collect 60 neural patterns from human volunteers.
Each pattern represented how the human brain interpreted and expressed a different noun image.
The patterns were used to "train" the computer model so that it could predict the brain activity associated with different nouns, even those which did not feature in its training.
Professor Marcel Just, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said: "We are fundamentally perceivers and actors. So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain's code."
While developing the model, the researchers used a theory that represents nouns as 25-dimensional objects. Each dimension is a sensory-motor feature such as eating or smelling. This descriptive way of representing nouns allowed the model to predict with 70% accuracy the neural activity for thousands of novel images.
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