Can technology read your mind? (Answered)

After reading this article you may be able to get information related to Can technology read your mind? Thoughts and emotions cannot be decoded by current neurotechnology. But that might not be necessary with artificial intelligence. Potent machine learning systems may correlate brain activity and environmental factors.

The ability to monitor and manipulate brain electrical activity through the scalp will soon significantly impact society and medicine. Brain electrical activity patterns can show a person’s healthy and unhealthy cognitive abilities. Neurological and mental disorders can be treated, and behaviour can be controlled using new techniques to stimulate particular brain circuits. We face challenging ethical conundrums as we cross this threshold of immense promise.

Can technology read your mind?

Technologies for reading the human brain are being developed quickly in various branches of neuroscience. These tools are capable of capturing, processing, and decoding brain impulses. This has been referred to as “mind reading technology,” particularly in popular media. Should the general people be alarmed by this type of technology?

Is it truly able to read minds? The idea that having one’s mind open to see undermines one’s freedom of thought and ability to form their own opinions. This is especially true if they are not allowed to do it in privacy. Privacy, cognitive freedom, self-conception, and speech are a few issues that require urgent ethical attention. This article investigates if brain reading technologies can read minds.

If so, ethical strategies for handling them must be created. If they are not, scientists and technology creators must find ways to define them more precisely to allay unfounded worries and properly address justified ones.

Mind reading:

What does biochemistry do for the body? What does the ability to examine and control electrical activity in the human brain potentially do for the brain? Your body’s health and prospective diseases are discovered by a chemical analysis of your blood when you visit the doctor.

You can take precautions to prevent a stroke if you know you have high cholesterol and are at risk of having one. The electrical activity in your brain can be monitored for a short period using EEG and other techniques in experimental research that will soon be used in medical practice.

This can show neurological illnesses and mental illnesses like ADHD and schizophrenia. Additionally, five minutes of observing the electrical activity in your brain while you do nothing but allow your thoughts to roam can disclose the specific wiring of your brain.

Your IQ, along with your cognitive abilities, personality, and capacity for learning particular types of material, can be calculated by tapping into your daydreaming. Predicting, for instance, a preschooler’s ability to read when they enter school can be done using electrical activity in the child’s brain.

According to my new book, Electric Brain (BenBella, 2020), neuropsychologist Chantel Prat at the University of Washington in Seattle largely decided that I would have trouble learning a foreign language due to weak beta waves in a language-processing area of my cerebral cortex after only five minutes of EEG recording. (Please refrain from asking me to speak German or Spanish; I tried but failed.) How will this capacity to read minds affect career and educational choices?

fMRI brain imaging is being used by Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist Marcel Just and colleagues to understand what a person is thinking. Researchers can read minds and know exactly what a person is thinking and feeling by using machine learning to look at complex patterns of brain activity when a person thinks of a certain number or object, reads a sentence, feels a certain emotion, or learns something new. Nothing is more private than thought, claims Just, yet this notion of secrecy is no longer upheld.

Scientists could accomplish even more if they had access to people’s thoughts. They can foretell potential actions. And his team can determine whether a person is considering suicide by observing how their brains react to phrases like “death” or “happiness.” People often conceal their thoughts of suicide, even from loved ones and therapists, as the tragic deaths of comic Robin Williams and renowned chef Anthony Bourdain demonstrate.

Knowing someone is considering suicide through such “brain hacking” could save a life. The method used by the mass murderers at Columbine High School might have stopped the horrifying act of two unhappy teenagers killing their classmates and instructors and their suicide.

However, this understanding of suicidal ideation is gained by determining whether a person’s brain activity pattern differs from what is deemed “normal,” defined as the typical reaction from a wide group. How far should we go before we exclude someone from society because of abnormal brain activity?

Mind control:

Electrical stimulation has successfully treated cardiac disorders, and it may be possible to treat brain disorders by controlling electrical activity in brain circuits. Researchers and medical professionals can treat various neurological and psychiatric disorders, from Parkinson’s disease to chronic depression, by beaming electrical or magnetic pulses through the scalp and implanting electrodes in the brain.

However, many people are terrified by the idea of “mind control,” Using brain stimulation to alter behavior and treat mental illness has a murky past. To “cure” a homosexual man of his homosexual nature, neuropsychologist Robert Heath implanted electrodes into his brain at Tulane University in the 1970s.

To understand how specific behaviors and functions are controlled at a neural circuit level—and to control them by pressing buttons on his radio-controlled device energizing electrodes implanted in the brain. José Delgado, a Spanish neurologist, employed brain stimulation on humans, primates, and even a charging bull.

Delgado had the power to direct actions, change thoughts, arouse memories, and evoke passion and rage. Delgado wanted to create a “psychocivilized” society by using brain stimulation to rid the world of abnormal behavior.

Many find it unsettling to consider that electrical stimulation could be used to control someone’s brain. Still, current approaches to treating neurological and mental disorders are woefully inadequate and far too harsh. In addition to the targeted neural circuit, neurological and psychoactive drugs have a wide range of side effects. Not just the brain but every cell in the body that interacts with medications like SSRIs for treating chronic depression will be affected.

Drugs for treating neurological disorders and mental illnesses are available, but they are not always effective and are frequently prescribed based on trial and error. Prefrontal lobotomies, a common form of psychosurgery, have a tragic history of abuse.

Additionally, neurosurgeons face the unusual risk of saving a patient’s life but losing the patient themselves, whereas any surgeon faces the possibility of losing the patient on the operating table. As a result of harming healthy tissue or failing to remove all the problematic tissue, surgical treatment of brain tissue can leave patients with physical, mental, personality, or mood dysfunctions.

The electroconvulsive stimulation (ECT) procedure induces seizures throughout the entire brain to treat chronic depression and other mental diseases. After the electrical firestorm, the brain resets itself, helping many patients, but not all of them, and occasionally there are crippling side effects, or the method doesn’t work.

It makes a lot more sense to stimulate the specific neuronal circuit that is dysfunctional rather than bombarding the entire brain with electricity or medicines. Doctors are increasingly using deep brain stimulation to treat various neurological and psychiatric conditions, from dystonia to OCD, due to the technique’s success in treating Parkinson’s disease.

However, they frequently fail to have the necessary scientific knowledge of the disorder’s impact on neuronal circuits. This is particularly true for mental diseases, which are inadequately portrayed in nonhuman study animals.

It is unclear exactly how electrical stimulation helps certain ailments, particularly Parkinson’s. It’s not always possible to understand where to place the electrodes or how strong of electrical stimulation to utilize. These medical professionals are conducting experiments on their patients, but they do so because it is beneficial.

Neurofeedback, rhythmic sound or flashing light, and ultrasonic and magnetic stimulation through the scalp are noninvasive techniques that can change brainwaves and electrical activity patterns in specific brain circuits without implanting electrodes in the brain to heal neurological and mental diseases, elevate mood, and enhance consciousness.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation for the treatment of depression was given FDA permission in 2008 and later approved for the treatment of pain and migraines was added. An electrode placed on the scalp can deliver an electrical current to stimulate or stop neurons in the right parts of the brain from firing.

The military uses this technique to hasten learning and improve the cognitive performance of pilots. Because the process is so straightforward, brain stimulation devices can be bought online or made with nine-volt batteries. However, the DIY method turns the user into a test subject.

The development of new precise brain stimulation techniques is ongoing. Electrical stimulation is notoriously inaccurate because it stimulates neurons from far-off parts of the brain that stretch axons past the electrode by taking the path of least resistance through brain tissue. Optogenetics can be used in experimental animals to precisely stimulate or inhibit neural activation.

To accurately control the firing of certain neurons using laser light transmitted into the brain through a fibre optic cable, this technique involves genetic engineering to implant light-sensitive ion channels into the targeted neurons. Optogenetic stimulation could treat various neurological and mental problems by precisely controlling particular brain circuits in humans; however, doing so is not regarded as morally acceptable.

Crossing the threshold:

We are approaching a point where it will be unethical to deny people suffering from severe mental or neurological illnesses treatments by optogenetic or electrical stimulation or to withhold diagnosing their conditions objectively by reading their brains’ electrical activity.

This is due to the historical backdrop of ethical lapses and concerns that curtailed brain stimulation research for mental illnesses decades ago. The unprecedented ability to directly observe and control the brain’s electrical activity raises difficult ethical issues from technology that did not exist before. But the genie is no longer contained. We should learn more about her.

Final Words:

The methods used by brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and neural decoding with neurotechnologies have been referred to as “mind-reading.” The term “mind” in the philosophy of mind refers to mental states (such as imagination, emotion, intention, perception, and decision-making) and wishes to advance in brain-computer interface technology; neuroscience can now show certain relationships between mental states and cerebral activity. Thus, the mind has a material foundation. I hope you get all information about if you are cleared on technology that can read your mind.

Source:

• Electric Brain (BenBella, 2020)
• Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist: DR Marcel
• Neuropsychologist: Robert Heath

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