Buddy
The Living Force
3D Student said:I'm kind of doubtful about third density mind reading machines.
Same here. I have no way of knowing what may have been developed in secret, but I have yet to read an article on so-called mind-reading that justifies the conclusion that any mind-reading machine exists. The article in the OP indicates 250 trials were made to get 71% accuracy within such constraining conditions that the subject might as well have been put in a strait-jacket.
Some two years before that (2005, I think) a similar article came out involving the use of fMRI machines and subjects looking at a pattern on paper. As I seem to recall, the results of the experiment at the time were touted as proof our mind could be read by machines. There were so many layers of assumptions between the actual data and the interpretation though, one wonders how anybody even bought into the story.
I think the best that could actually be said is that what the researchers actually recorded were simply patterns of nerve excitation from the rods in the eye to their destination brain neuron and synaptic activity. So it's more like tapping a trunk nerve rather than reading a mind. They couldn't possibly have graphed anything as subjective as the subject's actual subjective experience of what they reportedly felt was the image being represented within the pattern of lines. No such image showed up in the neural activity recorded. IOW, all the fMRI could show is the overall pattern representation in those nerve excitation patterns. Nothing more could be demonstrated or repeated, let alone proven.
That some people seem to have such a hard time telling the difference between data and conclusions, says a lot in itself, I think.