A team of American investigators has united the neurociencia and computer science to obtain something that seemed impossible: to obtain that a computer deciphers what a human being is thinking of concrete form. Besides the medical aims of the study, this small step taken by professors and university students will help to include/understand better how and where the information is placed in the brain.

An equipment of the Department of Study of Machines in the University Carnegie Mellon of Pittsburgh (EE.UU.) was the creator of this small published scientific advance in the Science magazine. According to the investigators responsible for the project, the neurocientista Marcel Just and the computer scientist Tom Mitchell, the procedure consisted of the use of a computer and functional magnetic resonances, the last newness in the field of cerebral image, that scan the brain so that the cerebral activity can be seen in real time.

In order to carry out the experiment, nine voluntary students used whom they had to think about 58 different nouns, whereas she was attracted the image of the cerebral activity. According to Mitchell in declarations picked up by Otr/press in an official notice of the University of Pittsburgh explained, once obtained these images and stored in the computer, the process to the inverse one was realised. Starting off of a cerebral image caught previously of some of the volunteers, the computer was able to associate this image with the word that the volunteer had thought before.

For satisfaction of the investigators, the computer realised some associations of words and cerebral images with a 70 percent of agreement. Although also they recognized that still it is much way to cross to arrive at a more complex and fast cerebral reading. The following bet is in the combination of nouns and adjectives and to see the results in the computer.

The creators of the project also assured that this study could help much people. According to professor Mitchell, the effects of this study could improve the quality of life and the treatments of those who have linguistic disorders or few capacities to learn.

It interests to you:

• The science of the mind