Creating a Mental Transcript of Everything You Think Sunday, Jun 21 2009
BCI 2:47 pm
The vast majority of all thought is wasted because we forget what we were thinking. There is no record unless we write it all down.
Some form of electronic telepathy already exists, but it is crude. Ambient Corp’s neckband lets you speak without opening your mouth. The system only knows 150 words.
In the longer term, it may be possible to use a similar technology to make a constant transcript of thoughts in realtime. This article from PopSci mentions:
Neuroscientists are already able to read some basic thoughts, like whether an individual test subject is looking at a picture of a cat or an image with a specific left or right orientation. They can even read pictures that you’re simply imagining in your mind’s eye. Even leaders in the field are shocked by how far we’ve come in our ability to peer into people’s minds.
Did you know that we can already read basic thoughts? The PopSci article is optimistic about timeframes — it sort of has to be, because it is a magazine made for entertainment. (And generally untrustworthy, like its cousin New Scientist.) Mind reading technology may be somewhat far off (or possibly not), but it certainly has interesting implications. I am curious about combining mind-reading technology with augmented reality to open up exciting new forms of collaboration and gaming. There could be major breakthroughs in that area within a decade, if we are lucky.
It seems to me that directly reading thoughts offers only a small benefit over current methods of transcribing thoughts. While the neckband may only support 150 unspoken words, there are a variety of voice-recognition systems that support a good range of spoken words. It used to be that a bluetooth earpiece for a mobile phone was regarded as unusual, it wouldn’t take much of a change to society to regard personal dictaphones as “normal”.
The real problem will be indexing the notes. It seems that Google’s task of indexing web pages which are mostly designed to be indexed (we WANT people to read our blogs) and receive links to indicate their content and quality is a lot easier than indexing a stream of consciousness.
If secure and reliable personal indexing systems became available right now then I expect that the sale of dictaphone devices would dramatically increase.
Researchers have apparently used an MRI to determine what a person was going to type ahead of time. Here’s the news article. newswise(dot)com/articles/view/553339/
I haven’t actually seen the study. That’s basically just a press release. However it is interesting. It would be nice to have something like an EEG cap that could translate verbal thoughts into writing on a computer. I think I could probably accomplish a lot more with something of that nature.
…for me, being able to create a transcript of all my thoughts brings the obvious exciting thought.
Being able to data-mine my entire catalog of experiences, creative insights, random musings…omg!
I wonder if some kind of ongoing logging of some broadband effect of thinking would be equivalent to cryonics in the sense that it’d be possible to accurately restore the person from this data.
Vladimir, Martine Rothblatt is pushing a similar idea under the name of “mindfiles”. I personally am skeptical. I remember thoughts from when I was child, and without scanning my brain precisely, there is no way to preserve those memories with thought transcripts or any other indirect means.
It’s a question of having sufficient evidence about the state of the brain, not of preserving enough of the state of the brain directly. The state of the brain is restored through inference, as an answer to the question “what kind of brain would generate precisely this output?”. With output detailed enough, the answer to that question will become very precise, and thus accurate. I don’t believe that, say, books written by a person give enough evidence, but some kind of fine-resolution brain scanning (raw data only), even of very limited capabilities and scope, may be just enough, especially considering the holographic organization of memory, with different regions of the brain reflecting at least some of the aspects of most concepts.
@etbe – I agree that indexing would be a huge issue.
As it is right now, my computer archives of studies, blog posts, news articles, papers, etc. etc. (all the stuff I save from surfing) is not at all organized to how I’d like it to be. And I haven’t delved into into social bookmarking enough to find an alternative, but my guess is that there will still be limitations.
I live out of my binders and journals. The journals provide the space for streams-of-consciousness and any thoughts or feelings I want to record and remember. The binders provide the framework for metacognition, which is required for something like running a blog or working on a project.
My journals and binders are still analog, and I don’t see myself converting them to digital even if it’d be easy. Just like I don’t see myself turning to mind-readers or virtual reality mind-reading interfaces in the near future (if it were to be realized). There is still something about analog that I can interface with more effectively. The paper that helped me understand why this is, is called, “Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion.”
It’d be cool to have an instant mind-reader. But I’m skeptical for a few reasons. First of all, I don’t think that we’ll be able to “read” the mind for long time. And I don’t think that “reading” the mind is an exact science. Language itself constrains and shapes thoughts. The words I choose in my journal entries are variables — they might be different if I’m using a pink pen instead of a blue one, if I mispell a word and improvise off of the typo, if I censor my rant, and so on. The language co-constructs the thoughts — that encoding would be lost with “direct mind-readers,” which would probably have to record in language.
And even if it were possible to pin it down to an exact science, I’d still be skeptical of how useful it would be to me, because I’d be in the same situation with a huge database with serious file management issues.
Maybe I’m just old school though?
I want one. it will create the singularity. or maybe urs will.