REAL mind reading machines and their techniques

Lately, a large amount of content coming our way all share a related topic: mind reading.  There are titles like  "Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them" and "Brain scanning may be used in security checks".  The brain scanners that are currently used by scientists are not the kind of mind reading machines we see in science fiction movies, but they are still quite amazing.  With all the research and information scientists now have on the human brain, they are able to translate data from brain scans to be able to know exactly what you saw or what you were thinking.  In the future, could robots use this research and develop new technology to help them in their destruction of mankind?

"Scientists are one step closer to knowing what you’ve seen by reading your mind"

So how exactly can a scientist read your mind?  It's all done through careful analysis of the brain's neural activities and patterns.  To do this, a functional magnetic resonance imager, or fMRI, is used.   So, how does a fMRI work?

Functional MRI is based on the increase in blood flow to the local vasculature that accompanies neural activity in the brain. This results in a corresponding local reduction in deoxyhemoglobin because the increase in blood flow occurs without an increase of similar magnitude in oxygen extraction.

If I am understanding this correctly, this all has to do with the fact that blood is either red or purple/blue, depending on whether is has oxygen in it or not.  Deoxyhemoglobin is blood lacking oxygen and it is purple/blue.  Since the neural activity in your brain increases when it is seeing something or trying to make a decision, then the flow of blood to the brain also increases.    Oxygen rich blood with be predominant in the parts of the brain containing the neural activity, which scientists can map out and record.  Therefore, when a brain scan shows this change happening in a certain part of your brain, a scientist is able to know what you saw, thought or decided.   Below are some results and analysis from fMRI research.

What kind of results come out of fMRI research?

The first example is relatively simple, at least in terms of what you'll read later.  A group of French scientists were able to tell how many dots a person had just seen.

The researchers presented ten study participants with either number symbols or dots while their brains were scanned with fMRI. They then used a multivariate analysis method to devise a way of decoding the numbers or number of dots people had observed.
...the numerosity of dot sets can be predicted above chance from the brain activation patterns evoked by digits, the researchers show.

Being able to see the number of dots a person had just seen doesn't really evoke the curiosity and fear that a mind reading machine  normally would.   A robot couldn't do much with this research.

The next example allows brain scan to reveal even more information.  Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley are able to know what you saw through an fMRI scan.

Having modeled how images are represented in the brain, the researchers translated recorded patterns of neural activity into pictures of what test subjects had seen.  Though practical applications are decades away, the research could someday lead to dream-readers and thought-controlled computers.

The scientists would take the results from the fMRI and feed the information to a computer program and the software was able to pick the image the subject saw out of a database of 6 million images. Another study, done by scientists at University College, London, were able to use the results of a fMRI to know exactly where a person was standing in a room.  A combination of these brain scanning techniques is much more advanced, and could have some heavy consequences should robots have this technology.  Humans could simply be scanned and the robots would know everywhere they have been.  There could be no hideouts for humans, unless nobody ever left a hiding spot.

All that is bad enough, but what else can be seen from brain scans?

In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.

This almost hurts my brain to read.  So, brain scans are able to know what I'm going to decide before I even know that I'm making a decision?  Now this is the kind of mind reading machines that could be more likely associated with science fiction, except it is real.  The researchers at the Max Planck Institute used an fMRI and focused on the frontopolar cortex, an area of the brain that is associated with high-level planning, and on the parietal cortex, which is an area of  the brain that deals with sensory integration.  They were able to watch how brain activity started in one part then moved to the other to be able to guess what decision the person was going to make.  With this technology, robots could scan humans that were faced with making a decision, know their decision before the humans knew it themselves and adjust their attack accordingly.  With this technology, there is still one hope for humans; free will.

Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will..."We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point".

The only hope for humans fighting against mind reading robots

All of these brain scanning techniques are just the beginning of what scientists and researchers will be able to understand about what a person saw and/or what decisions a person will make.  The science of mind reading is sure to expand in science's never ending quest to go farther and know more, but what consequences will come of it?  Should robots ever become self aware and turn on humans, the ability for them to be able to scan the human brain and quickly process the results could hasten to demise of manking.  Free will is humanity's only weapon of defense, but will it be enough to overcome mind reading robot soldiers?

::from Science Daily,  Columbia University Medical Center, Wired 1 2 3 & The Guardian::