NOVA - Official Website | Mind-Reading Machines

What Will the Future Be Like?

PBS Airdate: November 14, 2012

DAVID POGUE: Mindreading!

It's a timeless fantasy that's shown up in science fiction and movies for decades, but now, scientists may finally be figuring out how a machine could read your mind. And, for the very first time, mind reading headsets are becoming real.

TAN LE (Emotiv Lifesciences Inc.): You really want to just slowly imagine the cube fading out into that black.

DAVID POGUE: Look what I can do to the orange cube, without touching any dials or keyboards, but just thinking, "Disappear."

My god. I can control this thing with my mind.

Tan Le is an entrepreneur, with a headset that must be reading my mind,…

TAN LE: We have to actually train the system.

DAVID POGUE: …because she's turned it into the ultimate remote control. Just by thinking commands, I can make the orange cube on a computer lift; I can start this car; and launch this helicopter.

The future is going to be awesome.

I am a superpower!

So how does this contraption work? Is it mindreading?

TAN LE: I wouldn't say, necessarily, "mindreading."

DAVID POGUE: The headset doesn't actually hear my thoughts, but its 14 electrodes do pick up patterns of electrical activity coming from my brain, my brainwaves.

Brain cells communicate with each other by firing off tiny chemical and electrical signals. And whenever I think something like "disappear," a particular pattern of brainwaves is generated. The headset picks that up.

TAN LE: So, as the neurons inside your brain fire up, the signal gets weaker and weaker, as it travels through, and then gets projected onto the surface of the scalp.

DAVID POGUE: Oh, wow. Okay.

TAN LE: So it's very, very faint.

DAVID POGUE: So they're not thoughts. It's not mindreading. It's like the echo of neural activity deep in my brain?

TAN LE: That's right.

DAVID POGUE: Even though it's just an echo, the signal is good enough for the computer to recognize a simple brain pattern, once it learns it, like, "Lift."

And voila! It's reading my mind.

Can you imagine, I mean, some future world where everything is hooked up to this? I could just make anything happen, just by wishing it. Or at least, that's what I was hoping, until Tan Le tells me this headset can be easily confused; in other words, wrong.

TAN LE: If you were wearing this all day long, I can imagine instances when you might have a brain pattern that's very similar to when you were thinking about disappear, and it may trigger that same action.

DAVID POGUE: You mean, things might happen when I'm not wishing them to?

TAN LE: That's right.

DAVID POGUE: Any mindreader that relies on electrodes on the surface of the scalp is bound to be imperfect, because what it "hears" is a mere echo of my brain cells firing. But what if we could tap directly into the brain?

That's what they're attempting here at Brown University.

Cathy Hutchinson is paralyzed from a stroke, but she's controlling a robotic arm, with much more precision than any headset would allow, thanks to sensors that have been implanted directly onto the surface of her brain.

Cathy made headlines when she played a crucial role in a groundbreaking mindreading experiment. She simply thought about reaching out to pick up a cup of coffee, the sensors in her brain picked up electrical impulses, and a computer turned them into commands, controlling the robotic arm.

It's an astonishing breakthrough for brain science, that offers hope for the paralyzed.

I went to see John Donoghue, one of the heads of the BrainGate team at Brown, to find out how they turn mind into motion.

This is a model right?

JOHN DONOGHUE (Brown University): No, this is a real human brain, with its spinal cord attached.

DAVID POGUE: Come on!

JOHN DONOGHUE: This is an adult brain. This is, you know, it's the right size to fit inside your head.

DAVID POGUE: John's been working toward a machine that can tap into our brains for more than 20 years.

JOHN DONOGHUE: The problem is really quite immense. We had to know where in the brain the signals are; but we've known that. If you follow back a little distance behind the middle of the brain and you run into this little bump, this is the marker for the arm, this little twist. And that little twist is the place, the gross anatomical landmark for where your arm is actually controlled.

DAVID POGUE: So every time you move your arm, first, this one little spot on the brain says "go" and sends signals to a particular set of muscles, and then the arm moves.

JOHN DONOGHUE: The next problem is, how do you get that signal? And we need to have a sensor, you need to have something that can pick those signals up. So, we've developed this microelectrode array which is extremely tiny.

DAVID POGUE: The size of a baby aspirin, the microelectrode, with 100 tiny probes, was implanted on the spot in Cathy's brain that controls the arm.

Still, turning the signals into clear instructions for the robot wasn't easy.

So this seems to be the arm. This is the one I saw in the video of Cathy Hutchinson controlling it with her brain?

LEIGH HOCHBERG (United States Department of Veterans Affairs): That's right. This is one of the two arms that she was using.

DAVID POGUE: Wow. And so, how does it work, exactly?

LEIGH HOCHBERG: Well, why don't you give it a try?

DAVID POGUE: Okay.

To demonstrate how incredibly complex the brain's control of movement really is, neuroscientist Leigh Hochberg asked me to try to move this robot arm with a joystick.

All right. Oh! On the white rug, too. Oh, dear.

LEIGH HOCHBERG: Try again?

DAVID POGUE: It would be so much easier, if I only had a brain.

Stop, stop! It's taking over! It's an uprising!

LEIGH HOCHBERG: Almost.

DAVID POGUE: I can see it takes practice.

LEIGH HOCHBERG: It takes some practice.

DAVID POGUE: So, if such simple commands are difficult, imagine how hard it would be to actually read complex thoughts.

Could a machine ever do what the Amazing Kreskin used to claim to do, on his classic 1970s TV show?

KRESKIN (Mindreader, The Amazing World of Kreskin/Film Clip): Does his birthday fall on March the 6?

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE (The Amazing World of Kreskin/Film Clip): Yes!

KRESKIN (The Amazing World of Kreskin/Film Clip): Thank you very much for standing, ma'am.

DAVID POGUE: I hear that this could be the mechanical Kreskin. And it's not a magic trick. It's a nine-ton M.R.I. at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh.

Psychologist Marcel Just and computer scientist Tom Mitchell use the M.R.I. to peer directly into the brain as it works.

M.R.I. TECHNICIAN: Hi, David. How're you doing?

DAVID POGUE: Good.

M.R.I. TECHNICIAN: In this study, you're going to see labeled pictures of objects.

DAVID POGUE: While I ponder the objects projected onto a screen, the scanner isn't reading brainwaves or electricity. Instead, it's measuring the flow of oxygen-rich blood in my brain, to detect exactly which parts are active when I think about different objects.

M.R.I. TECHNICIAN: Okay, great job, David. We'll come get you in one second.

MARCEL JUST: When you think of something, your brain activates in those places that correspond to your interactions with it.

DAVID POGUE: Like, if I think of "skyscraper," is there an area of the brain for skyscraper pictures?

TOM M. MITCHELL (Carnegie Mellon University): If you think of a skyscraper, you actually think of many things: you might think of very tall thing; you might think of the material; you might think of going inside of it. What we'll see in the brain is a whole collage, and, put together, it becomes the signature for "skyscraper."

DAVID POGUE: The team has already identified the areas in the brain that activate for shelter, for food, and for holding something in your hand.

MARCEL JUST: It's not like a dictionary definition; it's kind of an experience definition.

DAVID POGUE: By studying my brain scans, can their mindreading computer guess what I was thinking?

So, I saw 20 pictures flash before me, and on each one I thought about it, imagined it, envisioned it. So how do we know if the computer knew what I was thinking.

TOM MITCHELL: The computer is going to take pairs of those words.

DAVID POGUE: The mindreading computer is given a pair of my brain scans: one when I was thinking of a grape, the other, of a cave. But which is which?

If the shelter area of my brain lights up, the computer guesses I was thinking "cave." Since the other scan shows activity in the food and handling areas, it guesses that a "grape" was on my mind.

And was it right?

The computer is correct. Number one.

Picking between two words, the computer's chances are 50-50. But can it keep it up?

Two for two!

Oh, it got nine correct.

And the 10th was correct, also. Nicely done, 10 out of 10. That's unbelievable!

For all 10 pairs, the computer gets it right, and that's pretty impressive.

It's a far cry from walking down the street with a device that could read the everyday thoughts of passersby, but it's enough to have some experts on the future concerned.

SHERRY TURKLE: Whenever you're starting to talk about the integrity of the body, the integrity of the mind, and being able to somehow violate that, in any way, it becomes scary.

DAVID POGUE: I'm sure there are many people right now, going "Oh, my god, take away their funding! I don't want to have my mind read. I want my innermost thoughts to remain innermost."

MARCEL JUST: What if all of our thoughts were public? Lying, for example, would go away. It's sort of like a mental nudist colony.

TOM MITCHELL: Well, here's one way to think of it. Like any big technology, there are all kinds of ways you can use it. And here you could use it for some pretty amazing things. There are also things that none of us would want to do. It's a good time, now, to begin thinking of those and thinking about what kind of guidelines we want to put in place.

What Will the Future Be Like?

HOST: David Pogue
WRITTEN BY: Terri Randall & Steven Reich
PRODUCED and DIRECTED BY: Terri Randall

Mind-Reading Machines

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