Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have uncovered how to, essentially, read minds.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and machine learning the team viewed how the brain encodes various thoughts (based on blood-flow patterns in the brain).

“One of the big advances of the human brain was the ability to combine individual concepts into complex thoughts, to think not just of ‘bananas,’ but ‘I like to eat bananas in evening with my friends,’” said CMU’s Marcel Just, the D.O. Hebb University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “We have finally developed a way to see thoughts of that complexity in the fMRI signal. The discovery of this correspondence between thoughts and brain activation patterns tells us what the thoughts are built of.”

The project follows up on previous research, that is funded by the United States Government, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), to provide evidence that the neural dimensions of concept representation are universal across people and languages.

[embeddoc url=”https://www.dropbox.com/s/btr1h8rq71io9fw/Wang_Just_HBM-2017_Journal-preprint.pdf?dl=1″ download=”all” viewer=”google”]

The findings represent a Biblical confirmation that God did truly divide the people of Babel even though He created each individual with the same language mechanisms;

The Tower of Babel is described in Genesis 11:1-9. After the Flood, God commanded humanity to “increase in number and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Humanity decided to do the exact opposite, “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth’” (Genesis 11:4). Humanity decided to build a great city and all congregate there. They decided to build a gigantic tower as a symbol of their power, to make a name for themselves (Genesis 11:4). This tower is remembered as the Tower of Babel.

In response, God confused the languages of humanity so that they could no longer communicate with each other (Genesis 11:7). The result was that people congregated with other people who spoke the same language, and then went together and settled in other parts of the world (Genesis 11:8-9). God confused the languages at the Tower of Babel to enforce His command for humanity to spread throughout the entire world.

Got Questions

As these are the End Times it is no surprise that mathematics and science are the common language that is both being used to reconstruct the Tower of Babel in a sense, and to reunite what God divided.

The Abstract of the findings can be seen below;

Even though much has recently been learned about the neural representation of individual concepts and categories, neuroimaging research is only beginning to reveal how more complex thoughts, such as event and state descriptions, are neurally represented. We present a predictive computational theory of the neural representations of individual events and states as they are described in 240 sentences. Regression models were trained to determine the mapping between 42 neurally plausible semantic features (NPSFs) and thematic roles of the concepts of a proposition and the fMRI activation patterns of various cortical regions that process different types of information. Given a semantic characterization of the content of a sentence that is new to the model, the model can reliably predict the resulting neural signature, or, given an observed neural signature of a new sentence, the model can predict its semantic content. The models were also reliably generalizable across participants. This computational model provides an account of the brain representation of a complex yet fundamental unit of thought, namely, the conceptual content of a proposition. In addition to characterizing a sentence representation at the level of the semantic and thematic features of its component concepts, factor analysis was used to develop a higher level characterization of a sentence, specifying the general type of event representation that the sentence evokes (e.g., a social interaction versus a change of physical state) and the voxel locations most strongly associated with each of the factors. – More

According to Lead Google engineer Ray Kurzweil the future possibilities of this technology are as follows;

It’s conceivable that the CMU brain-mapping method might be combined one day with other “mind reading” methods, such as UC Berkeley’s method for using fMRI and computational models to decode and reconstruct people’s imagined visual experiences. Plus whatever Neuralink discovers.

Or if the CMU method could be replaced by noninvasive functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), Facebook’s Building8 research concept (proposed by former DARPA head Regina Dugan) might be incorporated (a filter for creating quasi ballistic photons, avoiding diffusion and creating a narrow beam for precise targeting of brain areas, combined with a new method of detecting blood-oxygen levels).

Using fNIRS might also allow for adapting the method to infer thoughts of locked-in paralyzed patients, as in the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering research. It might even lead to ways to generally enhance human communication.

The CMU research is supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) via the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

CMU has created some of the first cognitive tutors, helped to develop the Jeopardy-winning Watson, founded a groundbreaking doctoral program in neural computation, and is the birthplace of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. CMU also launched BrainHub, an initiative that focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors.