Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Our thoughts are private – or at least they were. New breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence are changing that assumption, while at the same time inviting new questions around ethics, privacy, and the horizons of brain/computer interaction. Research published last week from Queen Mary University in London describes an application of a deep neural network that can determine a person's emotional state by analyzing wireless signals that are used like radar.

I was just a youth when Evelyn Wood debuted her speed-reading course back in 1959. For years, I was fascinated with the prospect of getting my reading assignments over with as quickly as possible so that I could get on to the fun part of life. Fortunately, I massively turned that around. The Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course became a huge sensation. So much so that the Kennedy White House sent staff members to take the course.

Our thoughts are private – or at least they were. New breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence are changing that assumption, while at the same time inviting new questions around ethics, privacy, and the horizons of brain/computer interaction. Research published last week from Queen Mary University in London describes an application of a deep neural network that can determine a person's emotional state by analyzing wireless signals that are used like radar. In this research, participants in the study watched a video while radio signals were sent towards them and measured when they bounced back. Analysis of body movements revealed "hidden" information about an individual's heart and breathing rates.

In science fiction, the practice of silently saying words thought by the mind is called subvocalization. If the term does not sound familiar, think of when you read a board or a text, and the consciousness automatically reproduces the writings in the brain: it's like you're reading aloud inside your head, is not it? Recently, this began to be used for purposes of interaction with computers and mobile devices, and the MIT researchers even created a wearable that measures neuromuscular signals, they are triggered when the individual does the subvocalization. The gadget may at first appear to be just a medical device attached to the user's face, but one can imagine that in future the size of the component will decrease and it will be allocated to the face in a more subtle way. It is also speculated that wearable can be used as a sort of wizard, with activations integrated through "Hey Siri" or "OK Google", but for now, the system created by MIT works in a different way: with electrodes that pick up the signals that you verbalize internally, as if they were bone-conducting headphones.