Mind reading? Of course not. I love reading. Look, mind reading might sound
like pseudoscientific-- pardon my language-- bullshoot. But its scientific counterpart,
thought identification, is very much a real thing. It's based in neuroimaging
and machine learning, and what's really cool is
that experiments in mind reading aren't just about spying
on what someone is thinking. They're about figuring out
what thoughts are even made of. I mean, when I think
of something, what does that mental picture
actually look like? What resolution is it in? How high fidelity
is a memory, and how do they change
over time? Well, in this episode, I'm going to look at how
reading people's minds can help us answer
these questions. My journey begins right here
at the University of Oregon. I'm meeting with Dr. Brice Kuhl
from the Kuhl lab. He's a neuroscientist
who uses neuroimaging and machine learning to figure
out what people are thinking without them telling him. So tell me what
you're doing here. Well, I'm in the cognitive
neuroscience program here, and I study human memory. My lab primarily uses
neuroimaging methods, so we do a lot of work using functional magnetic
resonance imaging, or fMRI. And how do you use
fMRI to investigate memories? We're looking at the pattern
of neural activity. When you form a memory,
there's a certain pattern. And we can record
that pattern and then test whether
that pattern is reinstated or reactivated at a later point,
like when you're remembering it. Does that mean we can look at
the patterns of brain activity and deduce what it is that is
being remembered, or recalled, or even just thought? Yes, and so we call that
decoding. So it basically takes
your input pattern as some pattern of activity
that we record while you're remembering
something. And we make a prediction
about what you're remembering. You can see how this sounds
like mind reading. [laughs]
Yes. It sounds like that. So, Brice, what are you going
to do to me today? So, what we're going
to be doing today is uncharted territory
for us. So we're going to be trying out
a kind of new variant of the experiment on you. So I can't guarantee
any particular results. But it represents
where the field is and where
we're trying to go. Today, you're going to
participate in an experiment where you'll be studying faces. So we're going
to have you study 12 pictures of celebrities. People I already am
familiar with. -People that you know, yeah.
-Okay. And you're going to try
to remember those pictures. Then we're going to have you go
into the MRI scanner. Try to bring that picture
to mind as vividly as possible. And we're going to be recording
your brain activity as you try to imagine
these pictures. We're going to try
to build the face. Essentially draw a picture of
what you're remembering. -A picture?
-A picture. An actual picture
that we can print out and I could, like,
hang on my wall. [laughs]
If you wanted. [Michael]<i> The first step
is for me to memorize</i> <i> the 12 specific
celebrity photographs</i> <i> Brice will later try
to detect me thinking about.</i> <i> I sat down to do this
graduate student, Max.</i> <i> The success of his predictions
depend, in part,</i> <i> on my ability
to recall these faces</i> <i> as vividly as possible
while inside the fMRI.</i> All right, so... [sighs] I think I have a pretty good
memory of all of those. -Great.
-I feel the stakes are high. <i> With the celebrity faces
hopefully memorized,</i> <i> it's time for the next step:</i> <i> going through
the metal detector</i> <i> and into the fMRI,</i> <i> where Brice will record
and monitor my brain activity,</i> <i>and then later feed it into his
algorithm to rebuild the faces.</i> <i> This will be the first time
he's attempted</i> <i> to reconstruct faces
from long-term memory,</i> <i> which is very difficult,
because we're relying</i> <i> on how clearly I can remember
the celebrity photos</i> <i> I saw an hour ago.</i> I love its eyes.
Look at that. [woman] Wouldn't the kid be like,
"It's going to eat me"? <i> An fMRI monitors the activity
within the brain</i> <i> by dividing it up
into thousands of small cubes</i> <i> called voxels,
or volumetric pixels.</i> <i> Each of these voxels contains</i> <i> hundreds of thousands
of neurons.</i> <i> Using fMRI,
we are able to detect</i> <i> blood flow
within these voxels,</i> <i> which means that that part
of the brain is active.</i> <i> If I'm shown several pictures
of people with mustaches,</i> <i> my brain will react
to the features for each face.</i> <i> But there will be
a common area of my brain</i> <i> that is engaged
throughout.</i> <i> That may be the area of my
brain that reacts to mustaches.</i> <i> So later,
when I imagine a face,</i> <i> if Brice notices
that area is engaged,</i> <i> he can predict
that I am thinking</i> <i> about a mustache.</i> So right now Michael's
in the scanner, and he's seeing words appear
on the screen one at a time, and he's trying
to visualize the face, remember the face in as much
detail as possible. What you can see here are
the images that we're acquiring. We get one of these
brain volumes every two seconds. So these are refreshing in real
time as we collect the images. [Michael]<i> With part one
of the fMRI session over,</i> <i> it's time for part two,
where Brice and his team</i> <i> will learn the language
of my brain activity,</i> <i> so they can later
decode by brain scans.</i> Hi, Michael.
You doing okay still? [Michael]
Yup. <i> They'll show me hundreds
of unique faces,</i> <i> and record how my brain reacts</i> <i> to certain facial
characteristics.</i> <i> They will then use
this information</i> <i> to reconstruct
the celebrity faces</i> <i> I thought about during
the first phase of the scan.</i> Really, the more faces that
we can show Michael, the better. So we're going to basically keep
him in there as long as he's comfortable. [Michael]<i>
Two hours was the maximum time</i> <i> we could get in the fMRI.</i> <i> But I was able to look
at over 400 faces,</i> <i> which should be enough to get</i> <i> some pretty interesting
results.</i> Hey, Michael, you did it.
That was great. We're going to come
get you out. [Michael]
All right. Yeah, so these just show
some of the pictures that we were taking
while you were in there. Some images of your brain. Now we are going
to crunch some numbers. Max is going to analyze
your data. We'll meet up
again tomorrow, where we'll look
at the results, where we try to actually
reconstruct the face images from the brain data
that we just collected. All right.
Well, see you tomorrow. All right.
Thanks a lot. Max, thank you as well.
I can't wait. You better pull
an all-nighter. I want this data
to be perfect. All right, so I am back
at Dr. Kuhl's lab. Overnight, his team
crunched the data, and I can't wait to see what
they think they saw me thinking. How are my results? I think they look good. We're going to take a look
in just a moment here. All right,
I can't wait. -So can I just take a seat?
-Yeah, have a seat. All right, so... first of all... what am I seeing?
Oh, okay, well, these are the pictures
I actually memorized. -That's right.
-And this is what you've reconstructed
from my imagination. -That's right.
-Oh, wow. Okay. [Brice]
Okay, so this is one
of the reconstructions that was generated. [Michael]
Interesting. [Max]
So that's John Cho. [Michael]
Not bad. Not bad. -Can we see the side by side?
-Yeah. [Michael]
I see, you know, similarities in the kind of facial
expressions in general. You know, you could almost
see the hairline matching here. The shape of the face
I also thought was-- It kind of had
a square shape to it. -Yes. Yes.
-So those are the things that came out to me. And so when I was
visualizing this image of John Cho, the squareness of the face was
the first, most salient thing. I just kept thinking,
he was the square guy. Excellent, all right. [Brice]
So that's Megan Fox. [Michael]
Mm-hmm. You're going to show us the--
side by side. [Michael]
The side by side. Right. [Brice]
You can see the picture
you actually saw, and that's the reconstruction
we generated. I'll you this.
Megan Fox, I was not able to have a really clear picture
in my mind. For some reason, this image
of her was really hard for me to bring back into my mind. The sternness in the face was
something that I did pick up on. So I did sense that there was--
It looked feminine. And you picked up
on the sternness. And so together,
that produces a match. [Michael]<i> Keep in mind
that Brice and his team</i> <i> have read these
from my memory.</i> <i> But when I remember a face,</i> <i> do I picture every detail
simultaneously</i> <i> with photographic accuracy?</i> <i> Or do I just attend to a few
at a time?</i> <i> By reading my mind,
they may be seeing</i> <i> how bad my memory is,
and how it works.</i> -Me! Me!
-[Brice laughs] Okay, so that is your
reconstruction of me thinking about
this image of myself. [Brice]
That's right. Where'd the beard go? [Brice] I don't know.
I was hoping you could tell me. [Michael]<i>
For instance, this is a picture
of me remembering my own face.</i> <i>It really doesn't look like me,
but the question is:</i> <i> how good am I
at picturing myself?</i> <i> I don't think of my own face
that often,</i> <i> so the strangeness
in the result</i> <i> may be as much about flaws
in my own memory</i> <i> and mental picture of myself
as flaws in the technology.</i> So that's Jennifer Lawrence,
I believe. [Michael]
That's Jennifer Lawrence? It looks like it's Jennifer
Lawrence's much older uncle. [all chuckle] Nothing here was too
mind-blowingly close. But this is something that
you're just starting out trying these sort of long-term
memories. <i> What Brice and his team
read in my mind</i> <i> might have been more accurate
if they'd shown me thousands</i> <i> rather than hundreds of images
in the fMRI,</i> <i> because then the algorithm
would have learned</i> <i> the language of my brain
more thoroughly.</i> <i> But regardless,
the quality of my memories</i> <i> would have still
been an issue.</i> <i> I mean, look what happens
when memory</i> <i> is cut out of the equation
entirely.</i> <i> Brice also read
my brain activity</i> <i> when I was looking
at faces in the fMRI.</i> <i> not just imagining them.</i> <i> And those results
were much closer</i> <i> than those reconstructed
from my memory.</i> Okay, so, what am I looking at
right here? [Brice]
Okay, so what you're seeing here in the top row,
these are images that you saw while you were in the scanner. Below that, in this bottom row,
these are the reconstructions that we draw from the patterns
of brain activity we collected. -This is from the source image.
-Right. [Michael]
These are from my brain. -[Brice] Right.
-[Michael] They're pretty close. Yeah, overall they were
pretty close. So not perfect. These are-- you can see there's
some variability in these. But this is consistent
with what we've found before, that the reconstructions
that we generated, when you're viewing
the faces, there is some correspondence
between the actual face. So this is kind of
a sanity check, that we can actually
reconstruct the images -when you're viewing them.
-Right, right. They're pretty good. Well, Brice, Max,
thank you so much for letting me
be a part of this. I hope my data's useful. Thank you.
It's been a lot of fun. It's always useful for us
to think about these things. Dr. Brice Kuhl's memory research
is showing that it's possible for a computer
to read someone's mind. To figure out
what they're thinking. But a lot of progress
still needs to be made. I mean, if you want to know what I'm thinking right now,
for example, it's still easier to just ask me
to tell you. But what if I can't
tell you? Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitani
is a researcher, professor and pioneer
exploring the frontier behind the wall of sleep. I've come here
to Kyoto University to meet with him and to see
what it's like to read not what someone
is thinking, but what someone
is dreaming. Kamitani sensei,
I'm Michael. -Hi, I'm Yuki.
-Yuki, nice to meet you. [Michael]<i>
For the last ten years,</i> <i> Dr. Kamitani has been
at the forefront</i> <i> of machine mind reading.</i> The subject is, you know,
ready to go in. <i> Similar to Brice Kuhl,</i> <i> his early experiments explored
reconstructing images</i> <i> shown to subjects in an fMRI
based on their brain activity.</i> <i> In Kamitani's case,</i> <i> the images were
black-and-white shapes,</i> <i> and the reconstructions
were strikingly accurate.</i> <i> Recently, Kamitani has focused
on using deep neural networks</i> <i> and machine learning</i> <i> to decipher subjects'
brain activity</i> <i> while they view
much more complex photographs.</i> <i> What you're seeing is the
result of a deep neural network</i> <i> processing the brain activity
of a subject</i> <i> looking at the photograph.</i> <i> This could have myriad
applications in the future,</i> <i> for example,
in criminal investigations</i> <i> and interpersonal
communication.</i> [Kamitani]
This is far from perfect. But I think you still see some,
you know, eyes and, you know... [Michael]
Well, yeah. And colors too. [Kamitani]
Yeah, to some extent, yeah. <i>His most current work, however,
is about the subconscious.</i> <i> He's attempting something
extremely ambitious:</i> <i> recording our dreams.</i> Would you call yourself
a sleep researcher, or a vision researcher? Maybe a brain decoder. A brain decoder. That's a pretty cool
job description. Can you show me anything from
what you're doing with dreams? [Kamitani]
Mm-hmm, yeah. <i> Dr. Kamitani's work
on dream decoding</i> <i> begins with a similar process
to Dr. Kuhl's:</i> <i> showing the test subject
thousands of images</i> <i> while they are in an fMRI</i> <i> in order to learn
what the brain looks like</i> <i> when it is thinking
of certain things.</i> <i> Once the machine-learning
algorithm is pretty good</i> <i> at identifying what images
the subject is thinking about,</i> <i> the subject is placed
in an fMRI</i> <i> with an EEG cap
on their head,</i> <i> and invited to fall asleep.</i> <i> When the EEG waves indicate
that the person is dreaming,</i> <i> the algorithm predicts
which kinds of things</i> <i> the subject is most likely
dreaming about.</i> <i> Right now, the algorithm
looks for 20 categories.</i> <i> Things like buildings,
transportation,</i> <i> and characters
in a language.</i> <i> Researchers then awaken
the subject,</i> <i> ask them what they were
dreaming about,</i> <i> and see if the algorithm's
prediction</i> <i> and the person's
recollection match.</i> <i> Here is actual data from
one of Kamitani's experiments.</i> <i> Below is a word cloud
of categories.</i> <i> The name of each category
get bigger or smaller</i> <i> in real time
based on the probability</i> <i> that they are present
in the subject's current dream.</i> <i> Now, as you can see,
activity is currently strongest</i> <i> for the category "character,"
meaning written language.</i> <i> At this point
the subject was awoken,</i> <i> and this is what
they reported.</i> That's pretty spooky. -[laughs]
-Right? I mean, you-- you spied on their dream. Yeah, in a way.
But... the accuracy's
not that great, so... Well, the accuracy's
not that great but, you know, my normal accuracy for guessing
people's dreams is zero. Right. <i> While continuing
his research</i> <i> into predicting
the content of dreams,</i> <i> Dr. Kamitani is embarking
on his newest project:</i> <i> actually reconstructing images
from our dreams.</i> So you've brought
some of the reconstructions that your lab has created... Mm-hmm. ...of dreams. Right, they all look like dreams
about blobs. [Kamitani]
Yeah. I mean, I want to just
take a step back and... appreciate that what we're
looking at on this screen are, in a way, some of the first
photographs of a dream. Mm-hmm. <i> We are looking
at the earliest phase</i> <i> of revolutionary research.</i> <i> One day, we may able
to have images,</i> <i> or even record movies,
of our own dreams.</i> <i> And Dr. Kamitani is the only
person in the world</i> <i> doing this so far.</i> <i>He's a lone explorer journeying
into our subconscious.</i> So this work hasn't even
been published yet. No. -Thank you for showing it to me.
-[laughs] The insights that researchers
like Dr. Kuhl and Dr. Kamitani might be capable of achieving
in the future because of mind reading are difficult
to fully fathom. But let's slow down
for a second, because we're talking
about a technology that can know us
better than we know ourselves. Should we really
be doing this? Well, to address
that question, I'm going to meet
with an expert in ethics, neuroscience
and artificial intelligence: Julia Bossmann. She's the director of strategy
at Fathom Computing, a council member
of the World Economic Forum, an alum of Ray Kurzweil's
Singularity University, and a former president
of the Foresight Institute, a think tank specializing
in future technologies and their impacts. Julia, thanks for taking some
time to chat. -Yeah, of course.
-You are the perfect person for me to bring
these questions to. -Mm-hmm.
-And they're deep questions. But I think they're
extremely important, and they're becoming
more and more pressing. I think we're living in such
an interesting time right now, because we're in this time
where brains and machines are actually moving
closer together. So when it comes
to being able to look at brain activity, where are
the ethical lines here? How private should
my internal thoughts be? Like with any powerful
technology, it depends on the hands
that wield it. All these new technologies are things that can make whoever
uses them more powerful. So we want to not blame
the technology, but we want to-- how is it being used, and who is using it? So how do we make sure
that this technology is in the right hands? So I think it's very important
to involve people who act on policy and law to understand what is coming
in the future. I am hopeful about
the collaborative aspect of it. Let's talk about
the good things now. I mean, what are
the applications here? Yeah, so if we think about the late Stephen Hawking,
for example, if he had a way of richer
interfacing with the world or with computers,
we can only imagine what he could have
shared with us. Those with locked-in syndrome,
right? They are there.
They know that they are there. But we just need something
to look into their brain to see what it is
that they are trying to say, -or what they're feeling.
-Right, exactly. So, what do you say
to people that have that kind of fear
of technology, of us surrendering our true
natural selves to technology? There is something enticing
about getting to the next level of what some people might call
a human evolution or civilization development,
and so on. In a way, we are already not
living natural lives, right? Because then most of us would
die before the age of, I don't know, 30 or 40. We would have all kinds
of diseases. We would not wear
this clothing. We wouldn't have eyeglasses
or contact lenses. We wouldn't have antibiotics. [Julia]
We are already kind of very futuristic cyborgs
if we compare ourselves to the human that was living
10,000 years ago and was genetically
almost identical with who we are now. [Michael]
Yeah, we really are. In order to understand
cognition, right now we basically have
to either just ask people to talk about
what they're thinking, or observe their behavior. But reading thoughts directly
would be a lot better. That is how Dr. Kuhl
is studying memory, and it's how Dr. Kamitani
is studying sleep and dreams. But even though the technology
has a long way to go, it's easy to see
how ethical questions could become an issue. Well, here's the thing: there is no such thing
as a totally wild human. We are co-evolving
with technology. Humans and technology today
are inseparable. Now, it's true that we need
to be careful about every new thing we do, but we cannot change the fact
that they will happen. It's a story we've lived through
again and again. You know, we could have
sat around forever debating whether or not
a speed limit should exist and who should have
the authority to enforce it. But we didn't. Instead, we went ahead
and invented cars, and responsibly figured out
the details as we went along. Ethical questions
about new technologies do the most good when
they facilitate the technology, not when they needlessly
hinder progress. So follow your dreams. And, as soon as you can,
show them to me. And, as always,
thanks for watching.
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Why must you threaten me?
Was this the last episode?
Around the 14:10 mark in the video did anyone else notice what sounded like music from Mass Effect?
When this dream reading technology gets developed further, I wonder if it could also record psychedelics experiences, like the one in S2E2.
About ethics and technology, I think there is an important line that we need to be aware of.
Tecnology exists to accomplish certain tasks such as automatation of tasks that were done by humans in the past, or tasks that we don't have the strength or processing power to do (technology can also be simple tools, like a knife). But as far as I know, we humans have always had the power of deciding what tasks should that piece of technology do or what the outcome should be; we have always made the decisions.
One key aspect for decision-making is to have the knowledge of what is taking place. With our knowledge on fisics, mathematics, mechanics, logic, etc. we have always made shure to have control over technology by having the last say on decision-making.
But what happens when technology is able to handle knowledge about something that is too complex for us to understand? In that case we wouldn't be able to control what decisions have to be done, or what those decisions actually mean.
The human mind could be one of those things that is more complex than what we will ever be able to understand. And putting it in the hands of technology is a line that we soud not cross lightly.
My thoughts are that we have two kind of predictions about the use of some new technology:
Short term prediction, as more realistic or convergent.
Long term prediction, as far too futuristic and hence fantastic, divergent.
My short term prediction is that in the near future we will have some app that record our dreams, and when we wake up, even if we don't quite remember all the weird narrative of the dream, we will have some kind of ML highlighted brief on wich we can rely.