Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn’t construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. The decoder technology is in its infancy. The research, published on Monday in Nature Communications, is what Tang describes as “a proof of concept that language can be decoded from noninvasive recordings of brain activity.” “There’s a lot more information in brain data than we initially thought,” said Jerry Tang, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study’s lead author, during a press briefing. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI’s ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. Current brain-computer interfaces require the implantation of devices in the brain, but neuroscientists hope to use non-invasive techniques such as fMRI to decipher internal speech without the need for surgery. This technology could help people who can’t speak or otherwise outwardly communicate such as those who have suffered strokes or are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. While this specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging has transformed cognitive neuroscience, it isn’t a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can’t look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner.īut gradually scientists are pushing against that fundamental barrier to translate internal experiences into words using brain imaging. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures coarse, colorful snapshots of the brain in action.

The brain that changes