Reading Minds with Dr. Marcel Just

Dr. Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University developed technology that can decode what we think, opening the door to incredible medical applications.

Thought has always been sacred and impenetrable, a constant enigma that differentiates humanity from savagery. A thought is private because no one can hear what is going on in your skull. But Dr. Marcel Just, D. O. Hebb professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon, is decoding our mysterious ability through research that can identify thoughts.

Dr. Just’s research uses a functional MRI, fMRI for short, to get brain scans so he can see the neuroarchitecture of cognition, or the physical layout of thoughts in the brain. Dr. Just describes the fMRI brain imagery as “a fabulous gift to cognitive neuroscience” because it revealed the true nature behind thoughts: different parts of the brain are activated, called “hot spots,” by different thoughts.  This discovery inspired Dr. Just to embark on a quest to do what had previously only been accomplished by those in the worlds of science fiction: read minds, or, as he likes to call it “reveal the activation patterns associated with particular thoughts.”

His experiment started with sixty abstract objects. A group of adults lay in an fMRI scanner and then were told to think about one of the abstract objects. Based on their activation patterns, or the flow of oxygen rich blood to certain “hot spots” in the brain, the computer could accurately choose between two objects. However, this experiment expanded from sixty objects to any object. “We were able to decompose the pattern,” Just says. “We were able to get at the way the brain codes objects and we were able to break that code.” It turns out, our minds are very similar to an indexing system at a library, and that there is a pattern and map our brains and thoughts follow, and Dr. Just was able to decode that system. “We don’t have it all, but that’s where we’re headed–and we can do it.”

It’s difficult to think of something as individual as our thoughts as a code that is very similar from human to human but Dr. Just discovered that the same pattern of brain activity occurs in each of our heads, and not only for abstract objects. “We have a lot more in common–biologically–than we thought.” Dr. Just’s ability to identify activation patterns expanded from the abstract to the realm of the emotions. He was able to identify the core dimensions of around 18 emotions through a very interesting study. He instructed a group of method actors to feel certain emotions while they were under the scanner and he discovered that emotions are surprisingly more similar from person to person than abstract thought. Dr. Just believes that this is due to the fact that emotions “are even more of a product of our own minds and our brains are sufficiently similar.”

These discoveries have many potential applications. Dr. Just conducted a study using a group of adults with autism and a group of controls, individuals without a psychiatric illness. He had each group think about multiple social interactions. “Our program could tell which social interaction they were thinking about, but more than that, it could tell if someone was autistic or not.” The definition of a psychiatric illness is a thought disorder and Dr. Just’s technology recognized a dysfunctional pattern among the adults with autism. When they thought about certain social scenarios, their neural activation patterns were distorted. And his technology is not limited to autism; it could uncover the patterns of other psychiatric illnesses.  Currently, a psychiatrist gives a diagnosis after asking a patient a series of questions and determining from those answers the most likely disorder. But, diagnoses could become much more accurate through the potential application of Dr. Just’s technology. “Here is a technique where you could have someone in the scanner, ask them to think about a set of concepts and see if there is any systematic distortion of their neural activation patterns… Eventually, someday, it’s possible that the psychiatric diagnosis technique could be complimented by this brain reading technique to see if there are distortions of the neural activation patterns in certain domains of thought.”

Another potential application is brain computer interfaces. Paralyzed individuals could control prosthetics through their thoughts. The technology would pick up on the activated hot spots in an individual’s brain and know what the individual wants. “Imagine somebody communicating with his or her service robot this way. Where they think ‘I want the apple now’ and this method could conceivably decode it and have the robot bring an apple.” Of course, technology still has a long way to go. An fMRI scanner costs 2 million dollars and is huge but it’s imaginable that there will be more affordable and portable interfaces in the future.

Dr. Just is gradually decoding other thought patterns, like numbers. He’s doing what has always been considered impossible, reading minds by cracking a biological code we all share. “We’re measuring thoughts. We’re assessing their content.”