Mind-boggling! Science creates computer that can decode your thoughts and put them into words
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2094671/Mind-boggling-Science-creates-decode-thoughts-words.html
By Tamara Cohen
1st February 2012
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction dreams - or nightmares.
Scientists believe they have found a way to read our minds, using a computer program that can decode brain activity in our brains and put it into words.
They say it could offer a lifeline to those whose speech has been affected by stroke or degenerative disease, but many will be concerned about the implications of a technique that can eavesdrop on thoughts and reproduce them.
Neuroscientists at the University of California Berkeley put electrodes inside the skulls of brain surgery patients to monitor information from their temporal lobe, which is involved in the processing of speech and images.
As the patient listened to someone speaking, a computer program analysed how the brain processed and reproduced the words they had heard.
The scientists believe the technique could also be used to read and report what they were thinking of saying next.
In the journal PLoS Biology, they write that it takes attempts at mind reading to 'a whole new level'.
Robert Knight, professor of psychology and neuroscience, added: 'This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig’s [motor neurone] disease and can’t speak.
‘If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands could benefit.’
The researchers tested 15 people who were already undergoing brain surgery to treat epilepsy or brain tumours.
They agreed to have up to 256 electrodes put on to the brain surface, as they listened to men and women saying individual words including nouns, verbs and names.
A computer programme analysed the activity from the electrodes, and reproduced the word they had heard or something very similar to it at the first attempt.
Co-author Brian Pasley said there is already mounting evidence that ‘perception and imagery may be pretty similar in the brain’.
Therefore with more work, brain recordings could allow scientists to ‘synthesise the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device.’
Their study also shows in sharp relief how the auditory system breaks down sound into its individual frequencies - a range of around 1 to 8,000 Hertz for human speech.
Pasley told ABC News: 'This study mainly focused on lower-level acoustic characteristics of speech. But I think there's a lot more happening in these brain areas than acoustic analysis'.
He added: 'We sort of take it for granted, the ability to understand speech. But your brain is doing amazing computations to accomplish this feat.'
This information does not change inside the brain but can be accurately mapped and the original sound decoded by a computer. British expert Professor Jan Schnupp, from Oxford University who was not involved in the study said it was ‘quite remarkable’.
‘Neuroscientists have of course long believed that the brain essentially works by translating aspects of the external world, such as spoken words, into patterns of electrical activity’, he said.
‘But proving that this is true by showing that it is possible to translate these activity patterns back into the original sound (or at least a fair approximation of it) is nevertheless a great step forward, and it paves the way to rapid progress toward biomedical applications.’
He played down fears it could lead to range of ‘mind reading’ devices as the technique can only, at the moment, be done on patients willing to have surgery.
Non-invasive brain scans are not powerful enough to read this level of information so it will remain limited to ‘small numbers of willing patients’.
He added: ‘Perhaps luckily for all those of us who value the privacy of their own thoughts, we can rest assured that our skulls will remain an impenetrable barrier for any would-be technological mind hacker for any foreseeable future.'
[ed. The road to hell is paved with good intentions...moreover 'only' has never been a word that has been applicable to human history]
1 February 2012
30 January 2012
Why don't EU voters tell their politicians where to stick their Euro?
By Simon Richards
29th January 2012
From Germany to Greece - and from Finland to France - voters in Euroland are suffering from the disastrous, one-size-fits-all nature of the currency that was foisted on them by EU politicians so intent on their dream of an EU superstate that they chose to ignore economic reality - and the interests of their own people.
It's not as though EU voters have much affection for the currency. In Germany, in particular, the public - with, as usual, more sense than politicians - had been hostile to the Euro from the start. I discovered this, very graphically, when I was in Cologne, doing some Christmas shopping, in 2002, just after the wretched new currency came into being.
The Germans 'do' Christmas better than anyone else and, in particular, their hand-made Christmas tree decorations are second to none. One, in particular, caught my eye, in a shop in the shadow of Cologne's magnificent cathedral; it depicted a little chap with his trousers down, with a 1 Euro coin inserted in what one might politely describe as his derriere.
A shop assistant told me that the craftsmen who made the decorations wanted to demonstrate their contempt for the new currency. It had proved so popular that mine was the last one in stock. It has had pride of place on my Christmas tree ever since.
If so many EU citizens loathe the Euro, why don't they rise up against the dishonest and inept politicians who have brought them such unnecessary hardship?
It's a question I plan to put to Timo Soini, Leader of the True Finns, who is in London this week, speaking at a Freedom Association event. Timo is that rare phenomenon in the EU - a successful Eurosceptic politician who has dared to challenge the cosy consensus of the EU political elite. In the last European "Parliament" elections, he was elected with the highest personal vote share. Last year he achieved a sensational success for his Eurosceptic True Finns, leading them - from nowhere - to third place in Finland's general election.
Timo has just met with the first reverse in his fortunes, failing to get past the first round of the current presidential election in Finland. Yet this setback masks a real victory for his anti-Euro position, as it came about because Paavo Väyrynen, the Centre Party's candidate, stole his anti-Euro clothes to gain votes - in much the same way as David Cameron has stalled UKIP's progress in the polls by his refusal to go along with EU plans to make the City of London finance attempts to rescue the failing Euro.
The problem for most EU voters, is that consensus politics has denied them the opportunity to protest. In Germany, all the main political parties are in favour of the sacred cow of EU integration at any cost. In Spain, despite the ruinously high unemployment the Euro has caused, all parties sing from the same EU-approved hymn sheet. There's a very good reason for this - as professional politicians, they all have their snouts well and truly immersed in the EU trough.
29th January 2012
From Germany to Greece - and from Finland to France - voters in Euroland are suffering from the disastrous, one-size-fits-all nature of the currency that was foisted on them by EU politicians so intent on their dream of an EU superstate that they chose to ignore economic reality - and the interests of their own people.
It's not as though EU voters have much affection for the currency. In Germany, in particular, the public - with, as usual, more sense than politicians - had been hostile to the Euro from the start. I discovered this, very graphically, when I was in Cologne, doing some Christmas shopping, in 2002, just after the wretched new currency came into being.
The Germans 'do' Christmas better than anyone else and, in particular, their hand-made Christmas tree decorations are second to none. One, in particular, caught my eye, in a shop in the shadow of Cologne's magnificent cathedral; it depicted a little chap with his trousers down, with a 1 Euro coin inserted in what one might politely describe as his derriere.
A shop assistant told me that the craftsmen who made the decorations wanted to demonstrate their contempt for the new currency. It had proved so popular that mine was the last one in stock. It has had pride of place on my Christmas tree ever since.
If so many EU citizens loathe the Euro, why don't they rise up against the dishonest and inept politicians who have brought them such unnecessary hardship?
It's a question I plan to put to Timo Soini, Leader of the True Finns, who is in London this week, speaking at a Freedom Association event. Timo is that rare phenomenon in the EU - a successful Eurosceptic politician who has dared to challenge the cosy consensus of the EU political elite. In the last European "Parliament" elections, he was elected with the highest personal vote share. Last year he achieved a sensational success for his Eurosceptic True Finns, leading them - from nowhere - to third place in Finland's general election.
Timo has just met with the first reverse in his fortunes, failing to get past the first round of the current presidential election in Finland. Yet this setback masks a real victory for his anti-Euro position, as it came about because Paavo Väyrynen, the Centre Party's candidate, stole his anti-Euro clothes to gain votes - in much the same way as David Cameron has stalled UKIP's progress in the polls by his refusal to go along with EU plans to make the City of London finance attempts to rescue the failing Euro.
The problem for most EU voters, is that consensus politics has denied them the opportunity to protest. In Germany, all the main political parties are in favour of the sacred cow of EU integration at any cost. In Spain, despite the ruinously high unemployment the Euro has caused, all parties sing from the same EU-approved hymn sheet. There's a very good reason for this - as professional politicians, they all have their snouts well and truly immersed in the EU trough.
HELP SNOBS
I happened to have a computer problem the other month so after trying to figure it out myself for a while I thought that a bit of expert advice would not go amiss. I signed up to a forum and was pretty much given, albeit not explicitly, the solution I required.
Interestingly on one of the signatures of the people that helped me was a ink to a topic called 'Help Vampire'. Intrigued I clicked on it and learnt that 'Help Vampires' are people who suck the life out of someone they are asking help from either by continually asking questions or, more pertinently, by not showing any effort themselves to actually try to nut out the problem.
Now, I appreciate there are people out there who take advantage, after all as the old adage goes "why do something when you can get someone else to do it for you?". Assuming of course that people who do ask these questions have that intention. Yet it got me thinking, is there, conversely, such a thing as a 'Help Snob'? My definition of a 'Help Snob' is someone who knows his subject but enjoys the perverse thrill of lecturing others about 'needing to research'.
They might even maintain a help website such as the one I visited so they can lord it over other people who are indeed stuck, as I was. The thing is by being so smug in their attitude they conveniently forget that once upon a time, unless they are totally self-taught, which is unlikely, they needed help to learn, if not computing then something else. Also when a person knows something, they, usually, know it back to front and cannot understand why others do not.
In short a 'Help Snob' would be analogous to a driving instructor becoming irritated when you demonstrate you cannot use the controls with a disdainful "it is easy!". This sort of unncessary oneupmanship does little to move things forward, indeed it takes more time to strut and argue than to actually explain the solution. In addition this attitude simply does not impress many. It is also a bad teaching method, in my opinion, to effectively say, "have a guess." just so they can play the 'all-knowing professor' for a few moments. My own learning style is based on plenty of examples and explanation and sometimes the solution to the problem simply will not sink in, the circuit, therefore, needs to be broken with a little help and explanation.
A lot of the people on these "help" sites would probably counter by saying "I am not getting paid to do this, why should I drop everything and give you the answer?" to which I would say "why do it at all, if dealing with 'amateurs' annoys you so much?" Maybe it is just part of a human condition. Maybe, in reality, a lot of us resent giving other people our help, by default? Mercifully, however, not everyone is like this and to those that have taken the time in the past, I thank you.
Interestingly on one of the signatures of the people that helped me was a ink to a topic called 'Help Vampire'. Intrigued I clicked on it and learnt that 'Help Vampires' are people who suck the life out of someone they are asking help from either by continually asking questions or, more pertinently, by not showing any effort themselves to actually try to nut out the problem.
Now, I appreciate there are people out there who take advantage, after all as the old adage goes "why do something when you can get someone else to do it for you?". Assuming of course that people who do ask these questions have that intention. Yet it got me thinking, is there, conversely, such a thing as a 'Help Snob'? My definition of a 'Help Snob' is someone who knows his subject but enjoys the perverse thrill of lecturing others about 'needing to research'.
They might even maintain a help website such as the one I visited so they can lord it over other people who are indeed stuck, as I was. The thing is by being so smug in their attitude they conveniently forget that once upon a time, unless they are totally self-taught, which is unlikely, they needed help to learn, if not computing then something else. Also when a person knows something, they, usually, know it back to front and cannot understand why others do not.
In short a 'Help Snob' would be analogous to a driving instructor becoming irritated when you demonstrate you cannot use the controls with a disdainful "it is easy!". This sort of unncessary oneupmanship does little to move things forward, indeed it takes more time to strut and argue than to actually explain the solution. In addition this attitude simply does not impress many. It is also a bad teaching method, in my opinion, to effectively say, "have a guess." just so they can play the 'all-knowing professor' for a few moments. My own learning style is based on plenty of examples and explanation and sometimes the solution to the problem simply will not sink in, the circuit, therefore, needs to be broken with a little help and explanation.
A lot of the people on these "help" sites would probably counter by saying "I am not getting paid to do this, why should I drop everything and give you the answer?" to which I would say "why do it at all, if dealing with 'amateurs' annoys you so much?" Maybe it is just part of a human condition. Maybe, in reality, a lot of us resent giving other people our help, by default? Mercifully, however, not everyone is like this and to those that have taken the time in the past, I thank you.
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