Despite its overwhelming success, the human brain peaked about two million years ago. Lucky for us, computers are helping us understand our brains better, but there may be some consequences to giving AI a skeleton key to our mind.
A team of Japanese researchers recently conducted a series of experiments in creating an end-to-end solution for training a neural network to interpret fMRI scans. Where previous work achieved similar results, the difference in the new method involves how the AI is trained.
An fMRI is a non-invasive and safe brain scan similar to a normal MRI. What differs is the fMRI merely shows changes in blood flow. The images from these scans can be interpreted by an AI system and ‘translated’ into a visual representation of what the person being scanned was thinking about.
This isn’t totally novel; we reported on the team’s previous efforts a couple months ago. What’s new is how the machine gets its training data.