The Army has found a way to read people’s brain waves

A cognitive neuroscientist by the name of Anthony Ries, working for a United States Army research facility, has just developed an automated program that can interpret brain waves, which essentially means that it can read minds. It’s not the kind of advanced mind reading that you’d expect to see in a sci-fi movie, however, and the functionality of the system is incredibly limited, but tests have proven successful so far, and the technology is only going to improve as time goes on.

In an Army Research Laboratory facility here called “The MIND Lab,” a desktop computer was able to accurately determine what target image a Soldier was thinking about. MIND stands for “Mission Impact Through Neurotechnology Design,” and Dr. Anthony Ries used technology in the lab to decode the Soldier’s brain signals. Ries, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies visual perception and target recognition, hooked the Soldier up to an electroencephalogram – a device that reads brain waves – and then had him sit in front of a computer to look at a series of images that would flash on the screen. There were five categories of images: boats, pandas, strawberries, butterflies and chandeliers. The Soldier was asked to choose one of those categories, but keep the choice to himself. Then images flashed on the screen at a rate of about one per second. Each image fell into one of the five categories. The Soldier didn’t have to say anything, or click anything. He had only to count, in his head, how many images he saw that fell into the category he had chosen.