The human mind and its control
Advances
in modern science create opportunities to identify people's thoughts and
actually control the functioning of their brains. All these highlights are
demonstrating the significance of the Social
Identity Passport (SIP)* initiative...
Artificial intelligence
can be not only a valuable assistant, but also a dangerous enemy.
In the wrong hands,
artificial intelligence can become a means of manipulation.
By Davide
Castelvecchi, Nature
magazine on January 10, 2023
A
team of researchers in China has unveiled a technique that—theoretically—could
crack the most common methods used to ensure digital privacy, using a
rudimentary quantum computer…:
Adversarial vulnerabilities of human decision-making
November 17, 2020
Significance
“What I cannot efficiently break, I cannot
understand.” Understanding the vulnerabilities of human choice processes allows
us to detect and potentially avoid adversarial attacks. We develop a general
framework for creating adversaries for human decision-making. The framework is
based on recent developments in deep reinforcement learning models and
recurrent neural networks and can in principle be applied to any
decision-making task and adversarial objective. We show the performance of the
framework in three tasks involving choice, response inhibition, and social
decision-making. In all of the cases the framework was successful in its
adversarial attack. Furthermore, we show various ways to interpret the models
to provide insights into the exploitability of human choice.
Abstract
Adversarial examples are carefully crafted
input patterns that are surprisingly poorly classified by artificial and/or
natural neural networks. Here we examine adversarial vulnerabilities in the
processes responsible for learning and choice in humans. Building upon recent
recurrent neural network models of choice processes, we propose a general
framework for generating adversarial opponents that can shape the choices of
individuals in particular decision-making tasks toward the behavioral patterns
desired by the adversary. We show the efficacy of the framework through three
experiments involving action selection, response inhibition, and social
decision-making. We further investigate the strategy used by the adversary in
order to gain insights into the vulnerabilities of human choice. The framework
may find applications across behavioral sciences in helping detect and avoid
flawed choice. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/46/29221
RISK ASSESSMENT
—
In not-too-distant future, brain hackers could steal
your deepest secrets
Religious beliefs, political leanings, and medical
conditions are up for grabs.
OAKLAND, Calif.—In the beginning, people hacked
phones. In the decades to follow, hackers turned to computers, smartphones,
Internet-connected security cameras, and other so-called Internet of things
devices. The next frontier may be your brain, which is a lot easier to hack
than most people think.
At the Enigma security conference here on Tuesday,
University of Washington researcher Tamara Bonaci described an experiment that
demonstrated how a simple video game could be used to covertly harvest neural
responses to periodically displayed subliminal images. While her game,
dubbed Flappy Whale, measured subjects' reactions to relatively
innocuous things, such as logos of fast food restaurants and cars, she said the
same setup could be used to extract much more sensitive information, including
a person's religious beliefs, political leanings, medical conditions, and
prejudices.
"Electrical signals produced by our body might
contain sensitive information about us that we might not be willing to share
with the world," Bonaci told Ars immediately following her presentation.
"On top of that, we may be giving that information away without even being
aware of it."
Flappy Whale had
what Bonaci calls a BCI, short for "brain-connected interface." It
came in the form of seven electrodes that connected to the player's head and
measured electroencephalography
signals in real time. The logos were repeatedly displayed, but
only for milliseconds at a time, a span so short that subjects weren't
consciously aware of them. By measuring the brain signals at the precise time
the images were displayed, Bonaci's team was able to glean clues about the
player's thoughts and feelings about the things that were depicted.
There's no evidence that such brain hacking has ever
been carried out in the real world. But the researcher said it wouldn't be hard
for the makers of virtual reality headgear, body-connected fitness apps, or
other types of software and hardware to covertly mine a host of physiological
responses. By repeatedly displaying an emotionally charged image for several
milliseconds at a time, the pilfered data could reveal all kinds of insights
about a person's most intimate beliefs. Bonaci has also theorized that
sensitive electric signals could be obtained by modifying legitimate BCI
equipment, such as those used by doctors.
Bonaci said that electrical signals
produced by the brain are so sensitive that they should be classified as
personally identifiable information and subject to the same protections as
names, addresses, ages, and other types of PII. She also suggested that
researchers and game developers who want to measure the responses for
legitimate reasons should develop measures to limit what's collected instead of
harvesting raw data. She said researchers and developers should be aware of the
potential for "spillage" of potentially sensitive data inside
responses that might appear to contain only mundane or innocuous information.
"What else is hidden in an electrical signal
that's being used for a specific purpose?" she asked the audience, which
was largely made up of security engineers and technologists. "In most
cases when we measure, we don't need the whole signal."
How Hackers Could Get Inside Your Head
With ‘Brain Malware’
Brain-computer interfaces offer new
applications for our brain signals—and a new vector for security and privacy
violations.
Hackers have spyware in your mind. You're minding your
business, playing a game or scrolling through social media, and all the while
they're gathering your most private information direct from your brain signals.
Your likes and dislikes. Your political preferences. Your sexuality. Your PIN.
It's a futuristic scenario, but not that futuristic.
The idea of securing our thoughts is
a real concern with the introduction of brain-computer
interfaces—devices that are controlled by brain signals such as EEG
(electroencephalography), and which are already used in medical scenarios and,
increasingly, in non-medical
applications such as gaming.
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle
say that we need to act fast to implement a privacy and security framework to
prevent our brain signals from being used against us before the technology
really takes off.
"There's actually very little time," said
electrical engineer Howard Chizeck over Skype. "If we don't address this
quickly, it'll be too late."
I first met Chizeck and fellow engineer Tamara Bonaci
when I visited the University of Washington Biorobotics Lab to check out their work
on hacking teleoperated surgical robots. While I was there, they
showed me some other hacking research they were working on, including how they
could use a brain-computer interface (BCI), coupled with subliminal messaging
in a videogame, to extract private information about an individual.
Bonaci showed me how it would work. She placed a BCI
on my head—which looked like a shower cap covered in electrodes—and sat me in
front of a computer to play Flappy Whale, a simple platform game
based on the addictive Flappy Bird. All I had to do was guide a
flopping blue whale through the on-screen course using the keyboard arrow keys.
But as I happily played, trying to increase my dismal top score, something
unusual happened. The logos for American banks started appearing: Chase,
Citibank, Wells Fargo—each flickering in the top-right of the screen for just
milliseconds before disappearing again. Blink and you'd miss them.
The idea is simple: Hackers could insert images like
these into a dodgy game or app and record your brain's unintentional response
to them through the BCI, perhaps gaining insight into which brands you're
familiar with—in this case, say, which bank you bank with—or which images you
have a strong reaction to.
Bonaci's team have several different Flappy
Whale demos, also using logos from local coffee houses and fast food
chains, for instance. You might not care who knows your weak spot for Kentucky
Fried Chicken, but you can see where it's going: Imagine if these
"subliminal" images showed politicians, or religious icons, or sexual
images of men and women. Personal information gleaned this way could
potentially be used for embarrassment, coercion, or manipulation.
"Broadly speaking, the problem with
brain-computer interfaces is that, with most of the devices these days, when
you're picking up electric signals to control an application… the application
is not only getting access to the useful piece of EEG needed to control that
app; it's also getting access to the whole EEG," explained Bonaci.
"And that whole EEG signal contains rich information about us as
persons."
And it's not just stereotypical black hat hackers who
could take advantage. "You could see police misusing it, or governments—if
you show clear evidence of supporting the opposition or being involved in
something deemed illegal," suggested Chizeck. "This is kind of like a
remote lie detector; a thought detector."
Of course, it's not as simple as "mind
reading." We don't understand the brain well enough to match signals like
this with straightforward meaning. But with careful engineering, Bonaci said
that preliminary findings showed it was possible to pick up on people's preferences
this way (their experiments are still ongoing).
"It's been known in neuroscience for a while now
that if a person has a strong emotional response to one of the presented
stimuli, then on average 300
milliseconds after they saw a stimulus there is going to be a
positive peak hidden within their EEG signal," she said.
The catch: You can't tell what the emotional response
was, such as whether it was positive or negative. "But with smartly placed
stimuli, you could show people different combinations and play the '20
Questions' game, in a way," said Bonaci.
When I played the Flappy Whale game,
the same logos appeared over and over again, which would provide more data
about a subject's response to each image and allow the researchers to better
discern any patterns.
"One of the cool things is that when you see
something you expect, or you see something you don't expect, there's a
response—a slightly different response," said Chizeck. "So if you have
a fast enough computer connection and you can track those things, then over
time you learn a lot about a person."
How likely is it that someone would use a BCI as an
attack vector? Chizeck and Bonaci think that the BCI tech itself could easily
take off very quickly, especially based on the recent sudden adoption of other
technologies when incorporated into popular applications—think augmented
reality being flung into the mainstream by Pokémon Go.
BCIs have already been touted in gaming, either as a novel
controller or to add new functionality such as monitoring
stress levels. It's clear that the ability to "read" someone's brain
signals could also be used for other consumer applications: Chizeck painted a
future where you could watch a horror film and see it change in response to
your brain signals, like a thought-activated choose-your-own-adventure story.
Or imagine porn that changes according to what gets your mind racing.
"The problem is, even if someone puts out an
application with the best of intentions and there's nothing nefarious about it,
someone else can then come and modify it," said Chizeck.
In the Flappy Whale scenario, the
researchers imagine that a BCI user might download a game from an app store
without realising it has these kind of subliminal messages in it; it'd be like
"brain malware." Chizeck pointed out that many fake,
malware-laden Pokémon-themed apps appeared
in the app store around the real game's release.
But hacking aside, Bonaci and Chizeck argued that the
biggest misuse of BCI tech could in fact be advertising, which could pose a
threat to users' privacy as opposed to their security.
"Once you put electrodes on people's
heads, it's feasible"
You could see BCIs as the ultimate in targeting ads: a
direct line to consumers' brains. If you wore a BCI while browsing the web or
playing a game, advertisers could potentially serve ads based on your response
to items you see. Respond well to that picture of a burger? Here's a McDonald's
promotion.
The researchers think there needs to be some kind of
privacy policy in apps that use BCIs to ensure people know how their EEG data
could be used.
"We usually know when we're giving up our
privacy, although that's certainly become less true with online
behaviour," said Chizeck. "But this provides an opportunity for
someone to gather information from you without you knowing about it at all.
When you're entering something on a web form, you can at least think for a
second, 'Do I want to type this?'"
Brain signals, on the other hand, are involuntary;
they're part of our "wetware."
The reason the University of Washington team is looking
into potential privacy and security issues now is to catch any problems before
the tech becomes mainstream (if indeed it ever does). In a 2014
paper, they argue that such issues "may be viewed as an attack
on human rights to privacy and dignity." They point out that, unlike
medical data, there are few legal protections for data generated by BCIs.
One obvious way to help control how BCI data is used
would rely on policy rather than technology. Chizeck and Bonaci argue that
lawyers, ethicists, and engineers need to work together to decide what it's
acceptable to do with this kind of data. Something like an app store
certification could then inform consumers as to which apps abide by these
standards.
"There has to be an incentive for all app
developers, programmers, manufacturers to do it," said Bonaci.
"Otherwise why would they change anything about what they're doing right
now?"
The Washington team has also suggested a more
technical solution, which would effectively "filter" signals so that
apps could only access the specific data they require. In their paper, they
call this a "BCI Anonymizer" and compare it to smartphone apps having
limited access to personal information stored on your phone. "Unintended
information leakage is prevented by never transmitting and never storing raw
neural signals and any signal components that are not explicitly needed for the
purpose of BCI communication and control," they write.
Chizeck said a student in the lab was currently
running more tests to characterise further the type and detail of information
that can be gleaned through BCIs, and to try a method of filtering this to see
if it's possible to block more sensitive data from leaking out.
By doing this work now, they hope to nip future
privacy and security concerns in the bud before most people have ever come into
contact with a BCI.
"It's technically becoming feasible; once you put
electrodes on people's heads, it's feasible," said Chizeck. "The
question is, do we want to regulate it, can we regulate it, and how?"
Could
these three brain regions be the seat of consciousness?
We may someday wake up someone from a persistent vegetative state by stimulating this network, the neurologists hope
November 10, 2016
An international team of neurologists led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has identified three specific regions of the brain that appear to be critical components of consciousness: one in the brainstem, involved in arousal; and two cortical regions involved in awareness.To pinpoint the exact regions, the neurologists first analyzed 36 patients with brainstem lesions (injuries). They discovered that a specific small area of the brainstem — the pontine tegmentum (specifically, the rostral dorsolateral portion) — was significantly associated with coma.* (The brainstem connects the brain with the spinal cord and is responsible for the sleep/wake cycle and cardiac and respiratory rates.)
Once they had identified the area involved in arousal, they next looked to see which cortical regions were connected to this arousal area and also become disconnected in disorders of consciousness. To do that, they used the Human Connectome — a sort of wiring diagram of the brain.
Thanks to the connectome, “we can look at not just the location of lesions, but also their connectivity,” said Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, Director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation and the Associate Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at BIDMC.
They discovered two connected cortical regions: the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) and the left ventral anterior insula (AI). Both regions were previously implicated in both arousal and awareness.“Over the past year, researchers in my lab have used this approach to understand visual and auditory hallucinations, impaired speech, and movement disorders,” said Fox. “A collaborative team of neuroscientists and physicians had the insight and unique expertise needed to apply this approach to consciousness.”
Consciousness networkFinally, the team investigated whether this brainstem-cortex network was functioning in another subset of patients with disorders of consciousness, including coma. Using a special type of MRI scan, the scientists found that their newly identified “consciousness network” was disrupted in patients with impaired consciousness.
Published recently in the journal Neurology, the findings — bolstered by data from rodent studies — suggest that the network between the brainstem and these two cortical regions plays a role in maintaining human consciousness.
A next step, Fox notes, may be to investigate other data sets in which patients lost consciousness to find out if the same, different, or overlapping neural networks are involved.
“This is most relevant if we can use these networks as a target for brain stimulation for people with disorders of consciousness,” said Fox. “If we zero in on the regions and network involved, can we someday wake someone up who is in a persistent vegetative state? That’s the ultimate question.”
* 12 lesions led to coma and 24 (the control group) did not. Ten out of the 12 coma-inducing brainstem lesions were involved in this area, while just one of the 24 control lesions was.
Abstract of A human brain network
derived from coma-causing brainstem lesions
Objective: To characterize a brainstem location specific to
coma-causing lesions, and its functional connectivity network.
Methods: We compared 12 coma-causing brainstem lesions to 24 control brainstem lesions using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping in a case-control design to identify a site significantly associated with coma. We next used resting-state functional connectivity from a healthy cohort to identify a network of regions functionally connected to this brainstem site. We further investigated the cortical regions of this network by comparing their spatial topography to that of known networks and by evaluating their functional connectivity in patients with disorders of consciousness.
Results: A small region in the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum was significantly associated with coma-causing lesions. In healthy adults, this brainstem site was functionally connected to the ventral anterior insula (AI) and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). These cortical areas aligned poorly with previously defined resting-state networks, better matching the distribution of von Economo neurons. Finally, connectivity between the AI and pACC was disrupted in patients with disorders of consciousness, and to a greater degree than other brain networks.
Conclusions: Injury to a small region in the pontine tegmentum is significantly associated with coma. This brainstem site is functionally connected to 2 cortical regions, the AI and pACC, which become disconnected in disorders of consciousness. This network of brain regions may have a role in the maintenance of human consciousness.
Methods: We compared 12 coma-causing brainstem lesions to 24 control brainstem lesions using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping in a case-control design to identify a site significantly associated with coma. We next used resting-state functional connectivity from a healthy cohort to identify a network of regions functionally connected to this brainstem site. We further investigated the cortical regions of this network by comparing their spatial topography to that of known networks and by evaluating their functional connectivity in patients with disorders of consciousness.
Results: A small region in the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum was significantly associated with coma-causing lesions. In healthy adults, this brainstem site was functionally connected to the ventral anterior insula (AI) and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). These cortical areas aligned poorly with previously defined resting-state networks, better matching the distribution of von Economo neurons. Finally, connectivity between the AI and pACC was disrupted in patients with disorders of consciousness, and to a greater degree than other brain networks.
Conclusions: Injury to a small region in the pontine tegmentum is significantly associated with coma. This brainstem site is functionally connected to 2 cortical regions, the AI and pACC, which become disconnected in disorders of consciousness. This network of brain regions may have a role in the maintenance of human consciousness.
references:
Mind Reading and Mind Control Technologies
Are Coming
We need to
figure out the ethical implications before they arrive
- By R.
Douglas Fields on March 10, 2020
The
ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to
control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways.
Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s
cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits
can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing this
threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us.
MIND READING
The
ability to interrogate and manipulate electrical activity in the human brain
promises to do for the brain what biochemistry did for the body. When you go to
the doctor, a chemical analysis of your blood is used to detect your body’s
health and potential disease. Forewarned that your cholesterol level is high,
and you are at risk of having a stroke, you can take action to avoid suffering
one. Likewise, in experimental research destined to soon enter medical
practice, just a few minutes of monitoring electrical activity in your brain
using EEG and other methods can reveal not only neurological illness but also
mental conditions like ADHD and schizophrenia. What’s more, five minutes of
monitoring electrical activity flowing through your brain, while you do nothing
but let your mind wander, can reveal how your individual brain is wired.
Tapping
into your wandering mind can measure your IQ, identify your cognitive strengths
and weaknesses, perceive your personality and determine your aptitude for
learning specific types of information. Electrical activity in a preschooler’s
brain be used to can predict, for example, how well that child will be able to
read when they go to school. As I recount in my new book, Electric Brain (BenBella, 2020),
after having brainwaves in my idling mind recorded using EEG for only five
minutes, neuropsychologist Chantel Prat at the University of Washington, in
Seattle, pronounced that learning a foreign language would be difficult for me
because of weak beta waves in a particular part of my cerebral cortex
processing language. (Don’t ask me to speak German or Spanish, languages that I
studied but never mastered.) How will this ability to know a person’s mind
change education and career choices?
Neuroscientist
Marcel Just and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University are using fMRI brain
imaging to decipher what a person is thinking. By using machine learning to
analyze complex patterns of activity in a person’s brain when they think of a
specific number or object, read a sentence, experience a particular emotion or
learn a new type of information, the researchers can read minds and know the
person’s specific thoughts and emotions. “Nothing is more private than a
thought,” Just says, but that privacy is no longer sacrosanct.
Armed
with the ability to know what a person is thinking, scientists can do even
more. They can predict what a person might do. Just and his team are able to
tell if a person is contemplating suicide, simply by watching how the person’s
brain responds to hearing words like “death” or “happiness.” As the tragic
deaths of comedian Robin Williams and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain show,
suicide often comes as a shock because people tend to conceal their thoughts of
suicide, even from loved ones and therapists.
Such
“brain hacking” to uncover that someone is thinking of suicide could be
lifesaving. The technique applied to the Columbine high school mass murderers
might have prevented the horror of two troubled teens slaughtering their
classmates and teachers, as well as their own suicides. But this insight into
suicidal ideation is gleaned by judging that the pattern of brain activity in
an individual’s brain deviates from what is considered “normal” as defined as
the average response from a large population. At what point do we remove a
person from society because their brain activity deviates from what is
considered normal?
MIND CONTROL
The
ability to control electrical activity in brain circuits has the potential to
do for brain disorders what electrical stimulation has accomplished in treating
cardiac disorders. By beaming electrical or magnetic pulses through the scalp,
and by implanting electrodes in the brain, researchers and doctors can treat a
vast array of neurological and psychiatric disorders, from Parkinson’s disease
to chronic depression.
But
the prospect of “mind control” frightens many, and brain stimulation to modify
behavior and treat mental illness has a sordid history. In the 1970s
neuropsychologist Robert Heath at Tulane University inserted electrodes into a
homosexual man’s brain to “cure” him of his homosexual nature by stimulating
his brain’s pleasure center. Spanish neuroscientist José Delgado used brain
stimulation in monkeys, people and even a charging bull to understand how, at a
neural circuit level, specific behaviors and functions are controlled—and to
control them at will by pushing buttons on his radio-controlled device
energizing electrodes implanted in the brain. Controlling movements, altering
thoughts, evoking memories, rage and passion were all at Delgado’s fingertips.
Delgado’s goal was to relieve the world of deviant behavior through brain
stimulation and produce a “psychocivilized” society.
The
prospect of controlling a person’s brain by electrical stimulation is
disturbing for many, but current methods of treating mental and neurological
disorders are woefully inadequate and far too blunt. Neurological and
psychoactive drugs affect many different neural circuits in addition to the one
targeted, causing wide-ranging side effects. Not only the brain but every cell
in the body that interacts with the drugs, such as SSRIs for treating chronic
depression, will be affected.
At
present, drugs available for treating mental illness and neurological
conditions are not always effective, and they are often prescribed in a
trial-and-error manner. Psychosurgery, notoriously prefrontal lobotomy, also has
a tragic history of abuse. Moreover, while any surgeon faces the prospect of
losing the patient on the operating table, neurosurgeons face the unique risk
of saving a patient’s life but losing the person. Surgical removal of brain
tissue can leave patients with physical, cognitive, personality or mood
dysfunctions by damaging healthy tissu, or failing to remove all the
dysfunctional tissue. Electroconvulsive stimulation (ECT), to treat chronic
depression and other mental illnesses, rocks the entire brain with seizure; in
the wake of the electrical firestorm, the brain somehow resets itself, and many
patients are helped, but not all, and sometimes there are debilitating side
effects or the method fails to work.
Rather
than blasting the whole brain with bolts of electricity or saturating it with
drugs, it makes far more sense to stimulate the precise neural circuit that is
malfunctioning. Following the success of deep brain stimulation in treating
Parkinson’s disorder, doctors are now applying the same method to treat a wide
range of neurological and psychiatric illnesses, from dystonia to OCD. But they
are often doing so without the requisite scientific understanding of the
disorder at a neural circuit level. This is especially so for mental illnesses,
which are poorly represented in nonhuman animals used in research. How
electrical stimulation is working to help these conditions, including
Parkinson’s disease, is not fully understood. The necessary knowledge of where
to put the electrodes or what strength and pattern of electrical stimulation to
use is not always available. Such doctors are in effect doing experiments on
their patients, but they are doing so because it helps.
Noninvasive
means of modifying brainwaves and patterns of electrical activity in specific
brain circuits, such as neurofeedback, rhythmic sound or flashing light,
ultrasonic and magnetic stimulation through the scalp, can modify neural
activity without implanting electrodes in the brain to treat neurological and
mental illnesses and improve mood and cognition. The FDA approved treating
depression by transcranial magnetic stimulation in 2008, and subsequently
expanded approval for treating pain and migraine. Electrical current can be
applied by an electrode on the scalp to stimulate or inhibit neurons from
firing in appropriate brain regions.
The
military is using this method to speed learning and enhance cognitive
performance in pilots. The method is so simple, brain stimulation devices can
be purchased over the internet or you can make one yourself from nine-volt
batteries. But the DIY approach renders the user an experimental guinea pig.
New
methods of precision brain stimulation are being developed. Electrical
stimulation is notoriously imprecise, following the path of least resistance through
brain tissue and stimulating neurons from distant regions of the brain that
extend axons past the electrode. In experimental animals, very precise
stimulation or inhibition of neuronal firing can be achieved by optogenetics.
This method uses genetic engineering to insert light sensitive ion channels
into specific neurons to control their firing very precisely using laser light
beamed into the brain through a fiberoptic cable. Applied to humans,
optogenetic stimulation could relieve many neurological and psychiatric
disorders by precision control of specific neural circuits, but using this
approach in people is not considered ethical.
CROSSING THE
THRESHOLD
Against
the historical backdrop of ethical lapses and concerns that curtailed brain
stimulation research for mental illnesses decades ago, we are reaching a point
where it will become unethical to deny people suffering from severe mental or
neurological illness treatments by optogenetic or electrical stimulation of
their brain, or to withhold diagnosing their conditions objectively by reading
their brain’s electrical activity. The new capabilities of being able to
directly monitor and manipulate the brain’s electrical activity raise daunting
ethical questions from technology that has not existed previously. But the
genie is out of the bottle. We better get to know her.
CMU aims to map all types of knowledge in
the brain
June 30, 2017
By combining machine-learning algorithms with fMRI
brain imaging technology, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) scientists have
discovered, in essense, how to “read minds.”
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) to view how the brain encodes various thoughts (based on
blood-flow patterns in the brain). They discovered that the mind’s building
blocks for constructing complex thoughts are formed, not by words, but by
specific combinations of the brain’s various sub-systems.
Following up on previous research, the findings,
published in Human Brain Mapping (open-access
preprint here) and funded by the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA),
provide new evidence that the neural dimensions of concept representation are
universal across people and languages.
“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.”
Goal: A brain map of all types of
knowledge
The researchers used 240 specific events (described by
sentences such as “The storm destroyed the theater”) in the study, with seven
adult participants. They measured the brain’s coding of these events using 42
“neurally plausible semantic features” — such as person, setting, size, social
interaction, and physical action (as shown in the word clouds in the
illustration above). By measuring the specific activation of each of these 42
features in a person’s brain system, the program could tell what types of
thoughts that person was focused on.
The researchers used a computational model to assess
how the detected brain activation patterns (shown in the top illustration, for
example) for 239 of the event sentences corresponded to the detected neurally
plausible semantic features that characterized each sentence. The program was
then able to decode the features of the 240th left-out sentence. (For
“cross-validation,” they did the same for the other 239 sentences.)
The model was able to predict the features of the
left-out sentence with 87 percent accuracy, despite never being exposed to its
activation before. It was also able to work in the other direction: to predict
the activation pattern of a previously unseen sentence, knowing only its
semantic features.
“Our method overcomes the unfortunate property of fMRI
to smear together the signals emanating from brain events that occur close
together in time, like the reading of two successive words in a sentence,” Just
explained. “This advance makes it possible for the first time to decode
thoughts containing several concepts. That’s what most human thoughts are
composed of.”
“A next step might be to decode the general type of
topic a person is thinking about, such as geology or skateboarding,” he added.
“We are on the way to making a map of all the types of knowledge in the brain.”
Future possibilities
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.
Abstract of Predicting the Brain
Activation Pattern Associated With the Propositional Content of a Sentence:
Modeling Neural Representations of Events and States
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.
How To Become Supernatural
A Lesson In The Science Of Change
Dr. Joe Dispenza
May 25, 2016 at 10:00 AM
Today we’re going to learn about how to become
supernatural. Impossible, you say? Well, please stay with us as we discuss
the possibility further.
I have taught thousands of people how to reprogram
their thinking through scientifically proven neurophysiologic principles. It is
a very simple method that creates a bridge between true human potential and the
latest scientific theories of neuroplasticity.
Common people around the world are doing the uncommon.
They’re healing themselves from chronic and acute diseases, they’re creating
magnificent changes in their lives and great opportunities, they’re having
mystical and spiritual experiences that transcend this linear reality, and
they’re healing themselves from traumas from the past.
We decided to start measuring students in our
workshops, because we were seeing a lot of spontaneous remissions happening
during the workshops. In our five-day workshops you have a community of 500 or
more people, all of whom have been practicing the work that we do. You put them
together and you set a certain task that’s outside of what most people consider
normal, if they reach for it enough times, sooner or later someone arrives at
that place.
And so we have been seeing significant changes in a
lot of the measurements that we’re taking that just don’t fall into the
category of, well, the person came into our event, we scanned their brain, and
then they went through five days of training and meditation, at the end of five
days there was a change in their brain patterns. That’s the before-and-afters
tell us that, wow, that is pretty cool that someone healed themselves of
Parkinson’s disease or traumatic brain injuries or anxiety or depression. We
see a lot of that, but what we’re seeing now is we’re getting measurements that
are so outside of convention that it’s never actually been recorded in the
history of neuroscience.
So we’re seeing a lot of that. We’re seeing some cool
things taking place in epigenetic changes in our students because we’re
measuring changes in neurotransmitters, changes in hormones, and we’re
measuring what’s happening in their hearts as well.
So we started doing the measurements because we saw
those real-time changes right in our events, and when you see them in real time
it means genes are switching on and off, it means there are changes in the
neurocircuitry, there are changes in the type of brain patterns that are
produced, and there are changes in the way our hearts work with our brains.
And we now know that in order for you to create
reality or to change some aspect of your body or health it requires a clear
intention and an elevated emotion, and if you put those two together you’re
going to change your state of being. So we did the measurements because we were
seeing those significant changes, and we’re at the point now where we’re not
only seeing people heal themselves from diseases, but now we’re seeing people,
their scans and their measurements really outside of normal, and when it’s this
much outside of normal, or when it’s beyond natural, the only way we could
describe it is supernatural.
Researchers watch video images people are
seeing, decoded from their fMRI brain scans in near-real-time
Advanced deep-learning "mind-reading"
system even interprets image meaning and recreates the video images
October 27, 2017
Purdue Engineering researchers have developed a system
that can show what people are seeing in real-world videos, decoded from their
fMRI brain scans — an advanced new form of “mind-reading” technology that
could lead to new insights in brain function and to advanced AI systems.
The research builds on previous pioneering
research at UC Berkeley’s Gallant Lab, which created
a computer program in 2011 that translated fMRI brain-wave patterns
into images that loosely mirrored a series of images being viewed.
The new system also decodes moving images that
subjects see in videos and does it in near-real-time. But the researchers were
also able to determine the subjects’ interpretations of the images they saw —
for example, interpreting an image as a person or thing — and could even
reconstruct the original images that the subjects saw.
Deep-learning AI system for watching what
the brain sees
Watching in near-real-time what the brain
sees. Visual information generated by a video (a) is processed in a cascade
from the retina through the thalamus (LGN area) to several levels of the visual
cortex (b), detected from fMRI activity patterns (c) and recorded. A powerful
deep-learning technique (d) then models this detected cortical visual
processing. Called a convolutional neural network (CNN), this model transforms
every video frame into multiple layers of features, ranging from orientations
and colors (the first visual layer) to high-level object categories (face,
bird, etc.) in semantic (meaning) space (the eighth layer). The trained CNN
model can then be used to reverse this process, reconstructing the original
videos — even creating new videos that the CNN model had never watched.
(credit: Haiguang Wen et al./Cerebral Cortex)
The researchers acquired 11.5 hours of fMRI data from
each of three women subjects watching 972 video clips, including clips showing
people or animals in action and nature scenes.
To decode the fMRI images, the research
pioneered the use of a deep-learning technique called a convolutional
neural network (CNN). The trained CNN model was able to
accurately decode the fMRI blood-flow data to identify specific image
categories. The researchers could compare (in near-real-time) these viewed
video images side-by-side with the computer’s visual interpretation of what the
person’s brain saw.
The researchers were also able to figure out how
certain locations in the visual cortex were associated with specific
information a person was seeing.
Decoding how the visual cortex works
CNNs have been used to recognize faces and objects,
and to study how the brain processes static images and other visual stimuli.
But the new findings represent the first time CNNs have been used to see how
the brain processes videos of natural scenes. This is “a step toward decoding
the brain while people are trying to make sense of complex and dynamic visual
surroundings,” said doctoral student Haiguang Wen.
Wen was first author of a paper describing
the research, appearing online Oct. 20 in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
“Neuroscience is trying to map which parts of the
brain are responsible for specific functionality,” Wen explained. “This is a
landmark goal of neuroscience. I think what we report in this paper moves us
closer to achieving that goal. Using our technique, you may visualize the
specific information represented by any brain location, and screen through all
the locations in the brain’s visual cortex. By doing that, you can see how the
brain divides a visual scene into pieces, and re-assembles the pieces into a
full understanding of the visual scene.”
The researchers also were able to use models trained
with data from one human subject to predict and decode the brain activity of a
different human subject, a process called “cross-subject encoding and
decoding.” This finding is important because it demonstrates the potential for
broad applications of such models to study brain function, including people
with visual deficits.
The research has been funded by the
National Institute of Mental Health. The work is affiliated with the Purdue
Institute for Integrative Neuroscience. Data reported in this paper
are also publicly available at the Laboratory of
Integrated Brain Imaging website.
Abstract of Neural Encoding and
Decoding with Deep Learning for Dynamic Natural Vision
Convolutional neural network (CNN) driven by image
recognition has been shown to be able to explain cortical responses to static
pictures at ventral-stream areas. Here, we further showed that such CNN could
reliably predict and decode functional magnetic resonance imaging data from
humans watching natural movies, despite its lack of any mechanism to account
for temporal dynamics or feedback processing. Using separate data, encoding and
decoding models were developed and evaluated for describing the bi-directional
relationships between the CNN and the brain. Through the encoding models, the
CNN-predicted areas covered not only the ventral stream, but also the dorsal
stream, albeit to a lesser degree; single-voxel response was visualized as the
specific pixel pattern that drove the response, revealing the distinct
representation of individual cortical location; cortical activation was
synthesized from natural images with high-throughput to map category
representation, contrast, and selectivity. Through the decoding models, fMRI
signals were directly decoded to estimate the feature representations in both
visual and semantic spaces, for direct visual reconstruction and semantic
categorization, respectively. These results corroborate, generalize, and extend
previous findings, and highlight the value of using deep learning, as an
all-in-one model of the visual cortex, to understand and decode natural vision.
references:
Automatic Detection of Fake News
(Submitted on 23 Aug 2017)
The proliferation of misleading information in
everyday access media outlets such as social media feeds, news blogs, and
online newspapers have made it challenging to identify trustworthy news
sources, thus increasing the need for computational tools able to provide
insights into the reliability of online content. In this paper, we focus on the
automatic identification of fake content in online news. Our contribution is
twofold. First, we introduce two novel datasets for the task of fake news
detection, covering seven different news domains. We describe the collection,
annotation, and validation process in detail and present several exploratory
analysis on the identification of linguistic differences in fake and legitimate
news content. Second, we conduct a set of learning experiments to build
accurate fake news detectors. In addition, we provide comparative analyses of
the automatic and manual identification of fake news.
Subjects:
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Computation and Language (cs.CL)
|
Cite as:
|
|
(or arXiv:1708.07104v1 [cs.CL] for
this version)
|
Submission history
From: Veronica Perez-Rosas [view email]; https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07104
How
Political Opinions Change
A clever experiment shows it's surprisingly easy
to change someone’s political views, revealing how flexible we are
- By Philip
Pärnamets, Jay Van
Bavel on November 20, 2018
- أعرض
هذا باللغة العربية
Our political opinions and attitudes are an important
part of who we are and how we construct our identities. Hence, if I ask your
opinion on health care, you will not only share it with me, but you will likely
resist any of my attempts to persuade you of another point of view. Likewise,
it would be odd for me to ask if you are sure that what you said actually was
your opinion. If anything seems certain to us, it is our own attitudes. But
what if this weren’t necessarily the case?
In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick
people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people
to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. Our
findings imply that we should rethink some of the ways we think about our own
attitudes, and how they relate to the currently polarized political climate.
When it comes to the actual political attitudes we hold, we are considerably
more flexible than we think.
A powerful shaping factor about our social and
political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion
messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate
change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically
like-minded networks. This echo-chamber problem seems to be made worse by the
algorithms of social media companies who send us increasingly extreme content
to fit our political preferences.
We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to
protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our
reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function. A recent study illustrates this very well:
participants who were assigned to follow Twitter accounts that retweeted
information containing opposing political views to their own with the hope of
exposing them to new political views. But the exposure backfired—increased
polarization in the participants. Simply tuning Republicans into MSNBC, or
Democrats into Fox News, might only amplify conflict. What can we do to make
people open their minds?
The trick, as strange as it may sound, is to make
people believe the opposite opinion was their own to begin
with.
The experiment relies on a phenomenon known as choice
blindness. Choice
blindness was discovered in 2005 by a team of Swedish researchers. They presented participants
with two photos of faces and asked participants to choose the photo they
thought was more attractive, and then handed participants that photo.
Using a clever
trick inspired by stage magic, when participants received the photo
it had been switched to the person not chosen by the
participant—the less attractive photo. Remarkably, most participants accepted
this card as their own choice and then proceeded to give arguments for why they
had chosen that face in the first place. This revealed a striking mismatch
between our choices and our ability to rationalize outcomes. This same finding
has since been replicated in various domains including taste for jam, financial
decisions, and eye-witness testimony.
While it is remarkable that people can be fooled into
picking an attractive photo or a sweet jam in the moment, we wondered whether it
would be possible to use this false-feedback to alter political beliefs in a
way that would stand the test of time.
In our experiment, we first gave false-feedback about
their choices, but this time concerning actual political questions (e.g.,
climate taxes on consumer goods). Participants were then asked to state their
views a second time that same day, and again one week later. The results were
striking. Participants’ responses were shifted considerably in the
direction of the manipulation. For instance, those who originally had favoured
higher taxes were more likely to be undecided or even opposed to it.
These effects lasted up to a week later. The changes
in their opinions were also larger when they were asked to give an argument—or
rationalization—for their new opinion. It seems that giving people the
opportunity to reason reinforced the false-feedback and led them further away
from their initial attitude.
Why do attitudes shift in our experiment? The
difference is that when faced with the false-feedback people are free from the
motives that normally lead them to defend themselves or their ideas from
external criticism. Instead they can consider the benefits of the alternative
position.
To understand this, imagine that you have picked out a
pair of pants to wear later in the evening. Your partner comes in and
criticizes your choice, saying you should have picked the blue ones rather than
the red ones. You will likely become defensive about your choice and defend
it—maybe even becoming more entrenched in your choice of hot red pants.
Now imagine instead that your partner switches the
pants while you are distracted, instead of arguing with you. You turn around
and discover that you had picked the blue pants. In this case, you need to
reconcile the physical evidence of your preference (the pants on your bed) with
whatever inside your brain normally makes you choose the red pants. Perhaps you
made a mistake or had a shift in opinion that slipped you mind. But now that
the pants were placed in front of you, it would be easy to slip them on and
continue getting ready for the party. As you catch yourself in the mirror, you
decide that these pants are quite flattering after all.
The very same thing happens in our experiment, which
suggests that people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their
political views once you strip away the things that normally make them
defensive. Their results suggest that we need rethink what it means to hold an
attitude. If we become aware that our political attitudes are not set in stone,
it might become easier for us to seek out information that might change them.
There is no quick fix to the current polarization and
inter-party conflict tearing apart this country and many others. But
understanding and embracing the fluid nature of our beliefs, might reduce the
temptation to grandstand about our political opinions. Instead humility might
again find a place in our political lives.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-political-opinions-change/?
amp&utm_source=
Robert M. Sapolsky = Recent Articles
amp&utm_source=
In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony
by Darren Byler
How
China used a network of surveillance to intern over a million people and
produce a system of control previously unknown in human history
Novel forms of state violence and colonization have been unfolding for years in
China’s vast northwestern region, where more than a million and a half Uyghurs
and others have vanished into internment camps and associated factories. Based
on hours of interviews with camp survivors and workers, thousands of government
documents, and over a decade of research, Darren Byler, one of the leading
experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance systems, uncovers how a vast
network of technology provided by private companies―facial surveillance, voice
recognition, smartphone data―enabled the state and corporations to blacklist
millions of Uyghurs because of their religious and cultural practice starting
in 2017. Charged with “pre-crimes” that sometimes consist only of installing
social media apps, detainees were put in camps to “study”―forced to praise the
Chinese government, renounce Islam, disavow families, and labor in factories.
Byler travels back to Xinjiang to reveal how the convenience of smartphones
have doomed the Uyghurs to catastrophe, and makes the case that the technology
is being used all over the world, sold by tech companies from Beijing to
Seattle producing new forms of unfreedom for vulnerable people around the
world.
WE ASSEMBLE MOVEMENTS
From grassroots organizations to
advocacy groups, we seed the narratives and gather the audience you desire.
When your strategy demands paid protest, we organize and bring it to life.
UNASSAILABLE
AUTHENTICITY
We
are strategists mobilizing millennials across the globe with seeded audiences
and desirable messages. With absolute discretion a top priority, our operatives create convincing scenes that become the
building blocks of massive movements. When you need the appearance of outrage,
we are able to deliver it at scale while keeping your reputation intact.
Russia’s Top Five Persistent Disinformation Narratives
JANUARY 20, 2022
https://www.state.gov/russias-top-five-persistent-disinformation-narratives/
Your
Brain, Free Will and the Law
- By Robert
M. Sapolsky, Steve
Mirsky on May 29, 2020
Robert M. Sapolsky = Recent Articles
- How
Economic Inequality Inflicts Real Biological Harm
- Aspiration
Makes Us Human
- Stressed-Out
Memories
Steve Mirsky = Recent Articles
‘It takes only 2-5 years to destabilise a nation...The next stage is crisis. It may take only 6 weeks’ Listen to this ex KGB agent’s eerily prescient account of ‘active measures’ of how Russia seeks to destroy its enemies through chaos
(C/o @brexit_sham)ore
I’m certain this is how it happens. I’m totally convinced that minds are altered to accept lies and deceit even in the face of facts and evidence. Thankfully some people are less susceptible than others but you only need a few percent in order to influence an election. Brexit.
Paddletramp
GEC Special
Report:
Pillars
of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem
August
2020 …: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf
Clark
David
Effective
Techniques for Manipulating, Persuading, & Influencing People!
All
of us have experienced manipulation in some form or another in our lives. It
can present itself in the form of a commercial on television, a billboard ad on
the street, or a sales person that is trying to convince you to purchase a
product or service. It can commonly be experienced in your social or personal
relationships such as your friend asking you to borrow something, or your
mother convincing you to attend a family reunion.
There
are many different types of manipulative techniques and this psychological
guidebook will spend some time to look at how manipulation could be affecting
you and how to use it in your benefit.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39856416-manipulation
Those who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/nwt/books/isaiah/5/
Dark Psychology And
Manipulation: How to Stop Being Manipulated, the Secrets and the Art of Reading
People. Psychology of Persuasion, of Narcissist and ... Human Behavior. Winning
Influence.
Finally you can access the
power of personal influence
The
fascination with Dark Psychology, the study of the art and science behind
manipulation and mind control, has exploded since this clinical research term
first appeared in academic journals back in 2004.
In Dark
Psychology and Manipulation readers will be taken into the minds, the
behaviors, the tactics and the techniques of the Narcissists, Machiavellians,
Psychopaths, and Everyday Sadists living and working among us.
You’ve
worked with some of these people, you’ve worked for them, you’ve dated them,
married them, divorced them, admired them, feared them, but most of all
wondered what it is that makes them do the dark and disturbing things they do.
how
dangerous are these people?
Are
they normal?
Is
their behavior forgivable?
Should
we be modeling some of our own ways of doing things—at work, in romance, at the
grocery store—after them?
Not
all of them are crazy.
Some
of them are even wildly successful—in business, in romance, in general.
Are
they certifiable or is their behavior just a little more extreme than mine?
As
the field of Dark Psychology continues to grow, and researchers, clinical
psychologist, social engineers, therapists, and other experts (and survivors)
continue to find out more about what makes these people tick, you’ll find
analyses of the latest studies in Dark Psychology.
Plus,
the book gives readers quick and easy breakdowns of how each dark personality
is different from the other, and how they are similar.
Learn
more about the Narcissist—and how to spot one, how to know when you’re being
worked by one. Find out why Psychopaths have suddenly become role models for
many a CEO and upper management businessperson.
How
did they go from untouchable to the corporate version of James Bond?
Take
a look at the various techniques used by these personalities of the Dark Triad:
manipulation, brainwashing, seduction.
All
of which are really just after two things: power and control.
Do
yourself a favor: educate yourself before others decide how you should be
educated.
Learn
how others have been trying to seduce you, trying to lead you astray, down a
path that they’ve chosen, not that you chose.
Don’t
be the prey. Which doesn’t mean you have to be the predator, either. It just
means you’ll be able to choose.
It
means you won’t be at the mercy of anyone from this world of Dark Psychology.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46021100-dark-psychology-and-manipulation
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