Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of interpreting and reconstructing human thoughts. 

The scientists recently published a paper in Nature Neuroscience exploring using AI to non-invasively translate human thoughts into words in real time.

According to the researchers, current methods for decoding thought into words are either invasive — meaning they require surgical implantation — or limited in that they “can only identify stimuli from among a small set of words or phrases.”

The team at Austin circumvented these limitations by training a neural network to decode fMRI signals from multiple areas of the human brain simultaneously.

In conducting this experiment, the researchers had several test subjects listen to hours of podcasts while a fMRI machine non-invasively recorded their brain activity. The resulting data was then used to train the system on a specific user’s thought patterns.

(by Tristan Greene)