Decoding Mental States with fMRI and EEG

我们怎么能知道别人在想什么呢？几十年来，科学家和科幻作家们一直在关注着这样一个概念：有朝一日，我们或许能够不借助语言或行动来传达我们的思想。许多所谓的“脑机接口”或“思想翻译设备”已经被尝试和测试过，但它们的速度、准确性、易用性和广泛的培训要求往往受到限制。神经科学的最新进展提出了一些新的心理学、技术和统计学方法来解决这个问题。在这个项目中，我们将使用三种完全不同的技术来开发新型系统，充分利用这些新方法来解码心理思想。并行系统将使用功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）、脑电图（EEG）和功能性近红外光谱（fNIRS）来构建，并根据参与者将学习的表达思想的心理策略类型和用于解释思想的数学方法进行优化。我们还将调查培训如何帮助参与者提高绩效，以及哪些方法可以实时部署。这项研究对理解心理表征或“思想”如何在大脑中编码以及它们与行为的关系具有深远的意义。研究结果还将在多个领域找到新的应用，包括许多寻求开发大脑控制计算新方法的领域（例如游戏行业、军事、人机交互和测谎）。

How can we ever know what another person is thinking? The notion that we might one day be able to convey our thoughts, without recourse to speech or action, has pre-occupied scientists, and science fiction writers, for decades. Many so-called 'brain computer interfaces' or 'thought-translation devices' have been tried and tested, but are frequently limited by their speed, accuracy, ease of use and extensive training requirements. Recent advances in neuroscience have suggested a number of new psychological, technological and statistical approaches to this problem. In this project, we will use three quite different technologies to develop new types of systems that take full advantage of these novel approaches for decoding mental thoughts. Parallel systems will be built using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and optimised in terms of the types of mental strategies that participants will be taught to convey their thoughts and the mathematical methods that will be used to interpret them. We will also investigate how training may help participants to improve performance and which of these methods can be deployed in real time. This research has far-reaching implications for understanding how mental representations, or 'thoughts', are coded in the brain and how these relate to behaviour. The results will also find new applications in multiple fields, including many that seek to develop novel methods for brain-controlled computing (e.g. the gaming industry, the military, human-computer interactions and lie-detection)