It is now possible to see what a person is looking at by scanning their brain. The technique, published last November by a team of Japanese neuroscientists, uses FMRI to reconstruct a digital image of the picture entering the eye, albeit at very low resolution and only after hundreds of training runs. Still, it’s an awesome development, and many articles covering this research have called it “mind reading” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). But it really isn’t, and it’s fun to explore what real “mind reading” would imply.

When I hear “mind reading” I want psychic abilities. I want to be able to know what number you’re thinking of, where you were on the night of March 4th, and what you actually think of my souffle. This is the sort of technology that could be badly misused, as the comments on one blog note:

Am I the only one finding this DEEPLY disturbing? It opens the doors to some of the scariest 1984-style total-control future predictions. Imagine you can’t hide your f#&%!ng MIND!

Fortunately, we’re not there yet. Morover, if we did have the technology to read minds, we’d have much bigger societal issues than privacy to deal with. The existence of “mind reading machines” would imply that we possessed good formal models of the human mind, and that is a can of worms.

Continue reading FMRI “Mind Reading” Doesn’t Yet Threaten Humanity