October 14, 2009 | John-Dylan Haynes
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 | 16.00 - 17.00 hrs
Doelenzaal (UB), Singel 425, Amsterdam
Decoding conscious and unconscious mental states from brain activity in humans
Prof. dr. John-Dylan Haynes
Professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany
Recent advances in human neuroimaging have shown that it is possible to accurately read out a person's conscious experience based only on non-invasive fMRI measurements of their brain activity. This "brain reading" is possible because each thought is associated with a unique pattern of brain activity that can serve as a "fingerprint" of this thought in the brain. By training a computer to recognize these fMRI "thought patterns" it is possible to read out what someone is currently thinking with high accuracy. Here several studies from our lab will be presented that show how to use decoding to investigate conscious and unconscious neural processing. This includes comparisons of neural and perceptual information, unconscious visual processing and decoding of high-level decisions. It will be shown that it is even possible to read out a person's concealed intentions and to predict how someone is going to decide a few seconds later. The talk will also discuss fundamental challenges and ethical aspects of such "brain reading".