Earlier this year, Japanese scientists published a study which proved that they had done the unthinkable: created software that could read minds.

Developed by a group of researchers at the University of Kyoto, the program works by decoding brain activity via a neural network.

The study was carried out by showing images of simple objects to volunteers. Then FMRI scans were used to measure electrical activity and blood flow in the subjects’ brains.

While the results were not 100% accurate, the majority were accurate enough to rule out the possibility of it being pure luck.

An interesting quote from the study:

"We found that the generated images resembled the stimulus images (both natural images and artificial shapes) and the subjective visual content during imagery,” the team of scientists said in a report published by BioRxiv.

*"While our model was solely trained with natural images, our method successfully generalized the reconstruction to artificial shapes, indicating that our model indeed 'reconstructs' or 'generates' images from brain activity, not simply matches to exemplars."

The implications of this discovery are huge, especially for developers of Augmented Reality content. Imagine having a conversation with a friend and being able to know what they are thinking when speaking to you.

It would certainly make dating a lot simpler.

How would you use mind-reading technology?

Let me know in a comment!