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News

News: June/July 2023

Big Brother learns to read your mind • Philosophy teachers resolve to associate • Scottish ethicists back euthanasia bill — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Neural activity can be monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, until recently, the images representing internal experiences could not be translated into words. Now a study reveals that fMRI imaging can be made to work with artificial intelligence language models that have a predictive function. According to a report in Nature, scientists introduced “a non-invasive decoder that reconstructs continuous language from cortical semantic representations recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Given novel brain recordings, this decoder generates intelligible word sequences that recover the meaning of perceived speech, imagined speech and even silent videos, demonstrating that a single decoder can be applied to a range of tasks.

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