Just a month ago I speculated that the use of an MRI scanner in the context of PVS research could point the way to machine-simulated telepathy. Now it transpires that more scientists are claiming that an MRI scanner can be used … to machine-simulate telepathy. I presume that they had already started their research before I went public with my big idea!
Apparently, different memories produce different signals when the MRI scanner is used to scan the hippocampus. By my reckoning this is one stage more advanced than the PVS research: the former only suggested the possibility of simple yes / no responses, but this suggests that a greater range may be detected.
However there is at least two fairly major drawbacks – the first is that the researchers managed to correctly identify thoughts “more than 50% of the time” – but less than 100%. Let’s face it, a telepathic message that is 49% garbled is going to be 100% useless – if you don’t know which bits are the garbled bits and which not. The second drawback is one of the same ones that I identified in regard to the PVS research. The MRI scanner can apparently identify brain activity associated with certain types of memory, but it does not identify the memories themselves. It is the alphabet, but not the language, of telepathy. Nevertheless, it does give hope that more may be achieved if further research is carried out.
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