The Download: Feeding the world with poop, and 2024’s performing stories

Can people truly understand other people’s thoughts?

November 2023

Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. Please note that this is not easy. First, you must lie motionless for several hours in an fMRI scanner while watching a movie or listening to an audiobook.

If you do choose to endure a claustrophobic time in the scanner, the software will learn to produce a customized reconstruction of what you saw or heard by analyzing how blood flows through your brain.

Recently, researchers have deployed generative artificial intelligence tools, such as stable diffusion and GPT, to create more realistic (if not entirely accurate) reconstructions of movies and podcasts based on neural activity. So how far are we from true “mind reading”? Read the full story.

——Grace Huggins

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