Imagine the future where you are able to get a text output from nothing but your thoughts – yes, that is right, Princeton scientists have managed to make it possible, although their effort is still in its infancy. These scientists managed to generate text using nothing but mental content that are reflected in brain images, where their most recent work pointed to the possibility of capturing such brain images during the viewing of a scene, reconstructing an approximation of the scene from those images later on using words.
This development came about after they attempted to understand just what goes on in the brain whenever a person reads or mulls over abstract ideas like love or justice. This kind of research might lead to a better understanding of how people would be able to consider meaning and context whenever they read or think.
I would suppose this will also have some kind of military application if the technology is refined even further – for example, you manage to capture someone from the enemy camp and want to extract secrets from his/her mind, but “traditional” methods have failed to break that particular person. Since we are not as advanced as the Star Wars era to have IT-O interrogation droid to strike fear into the hearts of the interrogated, perhaps this particular line of research will have to do.
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