[drzoltar]

My understanding is that we won’t get a “mind reader” model out of this, because visual stimulus vs your imagination happen in separate parts of the brain. In other words we won’t be reading the minds of suspected criminals anytime soon. Maybe someone with neurology experience can chime in here? Is it even theoretically possible to see what’s happening in the imagination?

[wongarsu]

In the best (worst?) case the method generalizes well, and you could just replace the training set of fMRI scans of people viewing images with fMRI scans of people asked to recall images they were shown previously, or fMRI scans of people told to imagine a scene based on a verbal description. It's rarely that easy though

[giantrobot]

> In other words we won’t be reading the minds of suspected criminals anytime soon.

Oh don't worry, this will get wrapped up in some pseudoscience bullshit and misleading statistics and marketed to law enforcement. But not to worry, at first it'll only be used on real bad criminals. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear!

[meindnoch]

I have a hunch that any sort of mind-reading machine would have to be tailored uniquely to the individual you want to probe. The internal neural representations likely develop uniquely for each individual.

[soulofmischief]

We'll just train a model on training models.

[wongarsu]

Maybe that's actually feasible, in the sense that you don't have to train a complete new model but can spit out a personalized model based on a calibration sequence of ten images.

[soulofmischief]

Yep! This process is known as fine-tuning.