I have a PhD student working on EEG audio decoding. We are presently focused on a simpler subtopic: the detection of consonance and dissonance in the brain as it listens to music.

It does make me wonder how advanced remote sensing devices are now. With more advanced hardware, can you remotely capture EEG level signals with any accuracy?

As an aside, I briefly read that as the detection of cognitive dissonance. Which I think would be a much more difficult topic.

Could you link some of your works? I’m very curious about reliability of EEG in terms of consistency between sessions.

Sounds awesome!

>> The answer to whether the tech could identify inner speech was a tentative "yes". For a task involving imagining a sentence, the researchers were able to achieve an accuracy rate of up to 74% in real time. For the tasks designed to prompt spontaneous inner speech, accuracy was reduced but still above chance.

Did a number go missing from this sentence? One accuracy rate was "74%", the other was "reduced but still above chance". Why leave things vague? All that accomplishes is that it makes me distrust the factuality of the article.

Prediction: even if this requires surgery, unlocking inner thought will be used in criminal proceedings to establish guilt or attempt to be used to prove innocence. It will definitely be used unethically in military/intelligence interrogations until the law catches up.

I'm not sure if this would be able to detect the difference between truthful thoughts about actual memories, and intrusive thoughts that could give the entirely wrong impression.

Yet, they still do use lie detectors, even though the things they detect can be faked, or triggered out of personal alarm or offense. So it is entirely possible, regardless.

Intrusive thoughts is a big one. Most people report some variation of this phenomenon (myself included), and are often horrified by the thoughts or images their own mind produces, very much wanting them to go away. To be judged by that is unthinkably wrong.

torture not being that effective has never stopped the US government before

It depends on your classification of effective. If it is to gather accurate information, it is ineffective. If it is to gather the justification for what you were going to do anyway, it can be most effective.

Yeah why do that when the government can just “get” someone’s google search history?

The worst: ads.

Noooo. Makes me wonder how much money do you need to buy up all the ad slots in the world and replace them with blanks.

"Hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password" XKCD 538

We normally do not accept people being hit with wrenches (or a contextual contemporary) in criminal justice trials.

Being hit with a wrench seems less invasive and even preferable compared to mind-reading brain surgery.

Thankfully we aren't forced to pick between them, "neither" is the current status quo and will do quite nicely for the foreseeable future.

I don't think that the brain surgery is accepted as well.

Not yet.

My first dystopic thought was immigration counters at airports /s

As I understand it, the big challenge with brain electrodes is that because they are implanted in a big jiggly piece of jelly, they shift out of position and/or cause localized scarring. The practical effect is that the brain-electrode interface "wears out" after a while, and you can't get useful data. Has this been solved, or are implants still temporary?

They don't seem to mention if it is elective. An all or nothing mechanism might spell out words that the patient really didn't intend on others seeing (like "Ugh, that guy again! I can't stand the way he...")

It is pretty difficult to control your inner dialog against spontaneous and triggered thoughts.

I wanted to comment this HN entry with "people with intrusive thoughts sweating profusely" or something similar, but in truth are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever?

I for one don't fight them, regardless how horrible they would be spoken out aloud, because so far I haven't seen any evidence of anyone reading my mind.

I also made a point of explaining to my child that her thoughts are hers and hers alone, so she can think whatever she likes.

I would rather not have to backtrack on any of this.

> are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever?

There are people with no internal monologue whatsoever.

I have no internal monologue, but I certainly have intrusive thoughts. They just aren't in words.

I think every verbal person has the ability to “speak” phrases in their mind; people without an internal monologue (as is, I suppose, the case for me) just don’t need / tend to do that with every thought they have.

While I think this is true, if you're conciously forming phrases they are by definition not intrusive, the subject of the discussion.

When I was younger, I could only do it by making the movements with my tongue and sort of "whispering breathlessly"

Of course someone without an internal monologue can have intrusive thoughts! Do you think intrusive thoughts have to come in the form of a monologue? You don't have intrusive 'scenes' in your everyday experience?

> Do you think intrusive thoughts have to come in the form of a monologue?

Do you?

I'm talking about inner monologue because this thread (I recommend to chill and check it out) was talking about inner monologue when I joined.

> "It wasn't perfect, but 60% of the words were judged intelligible by testers"

I don't understand this part. Are they trying to pull the audio of the words out of the brain or something? I'd think it would be easier to use a dictionary of words, and use some machine learning to try and pull out the most likely next word from the brain activity, in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible

>in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible

what percentage of the words would be correct though?

No idea, but the words themselves would be intelligible. The only way I can think that they could be generating unintelligible words is if theyre building them from tokens/letters, or generating audio directly

"Mental content" seems way to broad for what is rather the sensorimotor part of speech.