The media is abuzz about an apparent discovery by two doctors, Jack Gallant and Sinji Nishimoto, who have invented a "psychic computer." The computer can read a person's thoughts, and display them on a screen as a video. Sounds far-fetched? Well, it is, and it's too early to tell what exactly these two have invented.
As the Times UK reports, the study has not been peer reviewed, so we can't be sure what they're doing, but it appears that using an fMRI, a machine that can read brain activity, and a computer with a custom algorithm, they can reproduce people's thoughts on a screen.
If I understand it correctly, it works like this: when you think of a color or a shape, certain areas in the brain activate. The fMRI can read these activations, and through the algorithm, reproduce the conditions necessary for that to happen. A green square would produce a distinct pattern, the fMRI would pick it up, report it to the computer, who then decodes the pattern back into a green square. This all happens real time, so the image appears as a video.To be clear, no one is reporting that this device is like the machines depicted in the movie "Brainwaves," but the pair of researchers do claim some extraordinary things. From the article:
Finally, the software was used to monitor the two patients' brains as they watched a new film and to reproduce what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone.
Remarkably, the computer programme was able to display continuous footage of the films they were watching - albeit with blurred images.
In one scene which featured the actor Steve Martin wearing a white shirt, the software recreated his rough shape and white torso but missed other details, such as his facial features.
This is an amazing breakthrough, but it is far from being "psychic." It's not recording what a person is thinking, but specifically what a person is watching. Emotions, correlations, and what the images mean to the person are not part of the dataset. We have no information what the machine would do if a person was dreaming or simply imagining something
So this is exciting, and another step forward in figuring out how are brains work, but lets refrain from calling these algorithms "psychic." It's merely a new way of recording and presenting data; no paranormality needed.