AI Is Unlocking the Human Brain's Secrets

If you are willing to lie very still in a giant metal tube for 16 hours and let magnets blast your brain as you listen, rapt, to hit podcasts, a computer just might be able to read your mind. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin recently trained an AI model to decipher the gist of a limited range of sentences as individuals listened to them--gesturing toward a near future in which artificial intelligence might give us a deeper understanding of the human mind. The program analyzed fMRI scans of people listening to, or even just recalling, sentences from three shows: Modern Love, The Moth Radio Hour, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. Then, it used that brain-imaging data to reconstruct the content of those sentences. For example, when one subject heard "I don't have my driver's license yet," the program deciphered the person's brain scans and returned "She has not even started to learn to drive yet"--not a word-for-word re-creation, but a close approximation of the idea expressed in the original sentence.