It may sound like sci-fy,

but mind reading equipment are much closer to become a reality than most people

can imagine. A new study carried out at D’Or Institute for Research and

Education used a Magnetic Resonance (MR) machine to read participants’ minds

and find out what song they were listening to. The study, published today in Scientific

Reports, contributes for the improvement of the technique and

pave the way to new research on reconstruction of auditory imagination and

inner speech. In the clinical domain, it can enhance brain-computer interfaces

in order to establish communication with locked-in syndrome patients.

In the experiment, six

volunteers heard 40 pieces of classical music, rock, pop, jazz, and others. The

neural fingerprint of each song on participants’ brain was captured by the MR

machine while a computer was learning to identify the brain patterns elicited

by each musical piece. Musical features such as tonality, dynamics, rhythm and

timbre were taken in account by the computer.

After that, researchers

expected that the computer would be able to do the opposite way: identify which

song participants were listening to, based on their brain activity – a

technique known as brain decoding. When confronted with two options, the

computer showed up to 85% accuracy in identifying the correct song, which is a

great performance, comparing to previous studies.

Researchers then pushed the

test even harder by providing not two but 10 options (e.g. one correct and nine

wrong) to the computer. In this scenario, the computer correctly identified the

song in 74% of the decisions.

In the future, studies on

brain decoding and machine learning will create possibilities of communication

regardless any kind of written or spoken language. “Machines will be able to translate

our musical thoughts into songs”, says Sebastian Hoefle, researcher from D’Or

Institute and PhD student from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The study is a result of a collaboration between Brazilian researchers and

colleagues from Germany, Finland and India.

According to Hoefle, brain

decoding researches provide alternatives to understand neural functioning and

interact with it using artificial intelligence. In the future, he expects to

find answers for questions like “what musical features make some people love a

song while others don’t? Is our brain adapted to prefer a specific kind of music?”

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