My head is a boffin-free zone.
There are a few scientific questions which we should all probably just agree not to investigate further, for our own collective good.
The questions of whether we can invent superintelligent AI, or build death rays or identify the origins of That Weird Stain on the hotel carpet, for instance, are all perhaps better left unanswered.
This humble scribe would argue that there’s a good case for adding “mind reading” to the list.
Yet the boffins persist.
French scientists say they have taken another step toward understanding how the brain works to produce images inside the head (also known as the mind’s eye).
In a study published in Society for Neuroscience, the PSL University researchers said that the neural mechanisms for orienting attention are different when visualising using the mind’s eye than when viewing something on a screen.
Basically, the mind’s eye doesn’t use the same visual processing functions that the regular (outside head?) eye uses.
To prove this, the researchers hooked up 28 healthy volunteers (27 of whom happened to be geography students) to EEG machines and asked them to visualise a map of France while staring at symbols.
They were then told the names of two French cities and given six seconds to say which was closer to Paris.
After completing several sets of that task, the hapless volunteers were presented with pairs of coloured dots and asked to indicate which was closer to the middle.
This is where the boffins got particularly wily.
“For each participant, visual dot locations in the Perception task were derived from the city locations used in the Imagery task and then adjusted to ensure comparable task difficulty,” they wrote.
“… Initial dot positions were computed from the GPS coordinates of city pairs.
“Specifically, dots were placed at the screen locations where the cities would appear if a 500 pixel-diameter map of France were overlaid on the screen, with Paris centred at fixation.
“Those initial locations were then modulated to match accuracy in the Perception task to accuracy in the Imagery task.”
The results showed that the spatial format of visualisation was not analogous to visual perception, challenging the assumption that mental imagery space is isomorphic to visual space.
All of which is to say: in my efforts to prevent the advent of mind reading, I will never, under any circumstances, imagine a map of France.
Visualise yourself sending a story tip to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
