Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity | Hacker News Reader

Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity

bbc.com

45 pointsggm47 comments

I have a PhD student working on EEG audio decoding. We are presently focused on a simpler subtopic: the detection of consonance and dissonance in the brain as it listens to music.

Sounds awesome!

Could you link some of your works? I’m very curious about reliability of EEG in terms of consistency between sessions.

It does make me wonder how advanced remote sensing devices are now. With more advanced hardware, can you remotely capture EEG level signals with any accuracy?

As an aside, I briefly read that as the detection of cognitive dissonance. Which I think would be a much more difficult topic.

>> The answer to whether the tech could identify inner speech was a tentative "yes". For a task involving imagining a sentence, the researchers were able to achieve an accuracy rate of up to 74% in real time. For the tasks designed to prompt spontaneous inner speech, accuracy was reduced but still above chance.

Did a number go missing from this sentence? One accuracy rate was "74%", the other was "reduced but still above chance". Why leave things vague? All that accomplishes is that it makes me distrust the factuality of the article.

Prediction: even if this requires surgery, unlocking inner thought will be used in criminal proceedings to establish guilt or attempt to be used to prove innocence. It will definitely be used unethically in military/intelligence interrogations until the law catches up.

"Hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password" XKCD 538

We normally do not accept people being hit with wrenches (or a contextual contemporary) in criminal justice trials.

I don't think that the brain surgery is accepted as well.

Being hit with a wrench seems less invasive and even preferable compared to mind-reading brain surgery.

Thankfully we aren't forced to pick between them, "neither" is the current status quo and will do quite nicely for the foreseeable future.

Not yet.

I'm not sure if this would be able to detect the difference between truthful thoughts about actual memories, and intrusive thoughts that could give the entirely wrong impression.

Yet, they still do use lie detectors, even though the things they detect can be faked, or triggered out of personal alarm or offense. So it is entirely possible, regardless.

torture not being that effective has never stopped the US government before

It depends on your classification of effective. If it is to gather accurate information, it is ineffective. If it is to gather the justification for what you were going to do anyway, it can be most effective.

For a fairly recent example: the US' post-911 War on Terror when they were waterboarding people. This definitely didn't get them any real info, and they found out in the worst way that innocent people will confess when they think they are actively dying.

Prior to this, it was already known to produce false feedback and confessions. The US military has a strange way of repeating history to see if it'll turn out differently "this time." It sadly never does.

Intrusive thoughts is a big one. Most people report some variation of this phenomenon (myself included), and are often horrified by the thoughts or images their own mind produces, very much wanting them to go away. To be judged by that is unthinkably wrong.

Exactly. I have ADHD. The real kind (not the fantasy kind everyone on X seems to have). I grew up on Ritalin. I think they'd have a hard time sorting out "conversational" streams that run through my head. Even when I'm reading something, there is still an excessive amount of internal chatter. I've heard some people hear silence, and that just freaks me out.

It often is "inspired" by what I'm hearing and reading, but not related to how I actually feel about anything in particular. Sometimes I have to put effort into not getting too extreme in those many based-on-a-theme side stories. I'm quite sure this technology would either paint me as someone I'm not, just because of my brain's way of going through a dozen interpretations of whatever it is I'm thinking about, or burn out by the extreme amounts of the internal chatter that entails.

Needless to say, I grew up on nightmares (a common ADHD thing). I eventually ended up learning lucid dreaming to escape them, but still, even my dream world comes up with s##t I would never think of in my waking reality. Those feel so very real to me that I can't imagine this brain scanner thing could tell the difference either.

My first dystopic thought was immigration counters at airports /s

The worst: ads.

Noooo. Makes me wonder how much money do you need to buy up all the ad slots in the world and replace them with blanks.

So much money that only running your mega ad operation would allow you to cover the costs.

Yeah why do that when the government can just “get” someone’s google search history?

As I understand it, the big challenge with brain electrodes is that because they are implanted in a big jiggly piece of jelly, they shift out of position and/or cause localized scarring. The practical effect is that the brain-electrode interface "wears out" after a while, and you can't get useful data. Has this been solved, or are implants still temporary?

They don't seem to mention if it is elective. An all or nothing mechanism might spell out words that the patient really didn't intend on others seeing (like "Ugh, that guy again! I can't stand the way he...")

It is pretty difficult to control your inner dialog against spontaneous and triggered thoughts.

I wanted to comment this HN entry with "people with intrusive thoughts sweating profusely" or something similar, but in truth are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever?

I for one don't fight them, regardless how horrible they would be spoken out aloud, because so far I haven't seen any evidence of anyone reading my mind.

I also made a point of explaining to my child that her thoughts are hers and hers alone, so she can think whatever she likes.

I would rather not have to backtrack on any of this.

> are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever?

There are people with no internal monologue whatsoever.

I think every verbal person has the ability to “speak” phrases in their mind; people without an internal monologue (as is, I suppose, the case for me) just don’t need / tend to do that with every thought they have.

When I was younger, I could only do it by making the movements with my tongue and sort of "whispering breathlessly"

What do you mean by this? Don't get me wrong... it sounds like you are describing something related, but different enough to need more description.

As in, I couldn't speak in my mind without making the bodily movements of speaking... Now I can, and do all the time.

While I think this is true, if you're conciously forming phrases they are by definition not intrusive, the subject of the discussion.

Yes, indeed. My argument is the intrusive thoughts wouldn’t be internally verbalised, thus such a device, in my opinion, wouldn’t be able to spell them out.

With me, they'd have 10 different things to parse. Some would be spot on. Some would be way the heck out in left field. And occasionally, some are totally obtrusive and definitely not meant to be spoken.

Thoughts are intrusive when they get in the way of what you are trying to get out of a thought process.

This is my experience too. I can rehearse words to say or simulate the conversation of others in my head. I just don't use words when I'm not doing wordy things myself.

I didn't know the Comic strip Partially Clips was a pun until I told someone about the strip, then as soon as the words came out of my mouth realised the joke.

On the other hand I can play back non verbal sounds I have heard in my head, which I think not everyone can do either. Not to the degree of my daughter though, I mentioned how I had noticed an ad was using a singer (not super famous but we knew who they were) and when I told her about it some days later her eyes went blank as she listened to it again and then she said, "Oh yes, it's Nataly"

Brains are weird.

> This is my experience too. I can rehearse words to say or simulate the conversation of others in my head. I just don't use words when I'm not doing wordy things myself.

Yep, same here. Most curiously though, I think I had an internal monologue in my childhood and teenage years, but sometime around 16–18 y.o. it went away. Sadly, I don’t remember the exact moment, as I’ve only learned about this topic around 20.

> the Comic strip Partially Clips was a pun

Whoah, took me a while too, even though you’ve explicitly told it’s there. xD

> I can play back non verbal sounds I have heard in my head, which I think not everyone can do

Nope, I can’t. (:

I'm the opposite of you two. My brain won't stfu. I took Ritalin since grade 3 until I was in my 40's. That never got rid of it, but it did make it easier to focus in spite of all the chatter and other mental distractions.

Now I'm old and lazy, and that seems to have a similar effect. The racing thoughts are still there, but they don't get in my way now that I have far fewer responsibilities to take care of.

Of course someone without an internal monologue can have intrusive thoughts! Do you think intrusive thoughts have to come in the form of a monologue? You don't have intrusive 'scenes' in your everyday experience?

> Do you think intrusive thoughts have to come in the form of a monologue?

Do you?

I'm talking about inner monologue because this thread (I recommend to chill and check it out) was talking about inner monologue when I joined.

Are question marks overly aggressive? Last time I checked this website was for talking about things, don't know who isn't chill.

I think it is fair to say that internal dialog includes whatever mode someone primarily thinks with internally. If it is words, images, or kinesthetic, only the modality is different. I don't see how these modes wouldn't constitute internal dialog if that's how people think internally. These are the primary ways people generally do form their internal world.

There are also olfactory (imagine smelling cinnamon in a slice of apple pie) and gustatory (think of vinegar). These two don't tend to occur in dialog form, but they can enhance or reinforce the other modes. Animals like dogs might not agree with that suggestion.

I have no internal monologue, but I certainly have intrusive thoughts. They just aren't in words.

> "It wasn't perfect, but 60% of the words were judged intelligible by testers"

I don't understand this part. Are they trying to pull the audio of the words out of the brain or something? I'd think it would be easier to use a dictionary of words, and use some machine learning to try and pull out the most likely next word from the brain activity, in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible

>in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible

what percentage of the words would be correct though?

No idea, but the words themselves would be intelligible. The only way I can think that they could be generating unintelligible words is if theyre building them from tokens/letters, or generating audio directly

this is like the landline telephone of brain reading tech, imagine what happens when we get an iphone 16 max for the same that works without implants

"Mental content" seems way to broad for what is rather the sensorimotor part of speech.

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