Have you ever thought about revealing your thoughts? When it comes to opening our minds to the world, we refuse without really thinking about it. But, the reality is that humanity is constantly searching for ways to be able to read other people’s minds.
Most of us enjoy fantastic internal monologues to make sense of or explain what we experience physically. We construct ideas, thoughts, and even social fakery related to real life. Now, imagine all those ideas coming to light. In itself, the notion of discovering what the mind is hiding is like a betrayal of our inner voice. But, when it comes to reading the minds of others, it doesn’t seem so invasive to us.
From our perspective, both actions are against the innermost being. It is in the soul where we build and deconstruct the meaning of being, the place where there is absolute freedom. We are one way or another because we allow ourselves to evaluate and think about situations, environments, and people.
In our mind, the greatest perceptions, sensations, illusions, knowledge, reflections, etc. originate. The mind allows us to be us, as well as to explore and define ourselves in the real world. Mysterious and wonderful things happen in this tiny but infinite mental space. However, science (hungry for knowledge) wants to reveal the dark secrets of how the brain works, and for that, there is nothing better than reading the mind.
Mind-reading, a step towards brain translation
Although at first glance, it seems that science threatens to make us paranoid about the content of our private thoughts. This is happening through a brain implant designed by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, that could have access to our minds. Such technology would translate thoughts into an audible voice.
According to Edward Chang, professor of neurological surgery and a member of UCSF’s Weill Neuroscience Institute, the purpose of the research is not to pry into people’s secret thoughts. Rather, it is to find a way for people who have lost the ability to speak to communicate. Translating mental sentences is a viable and very hopeful possibility for those who are unable to communicate.
After all, science believes that technology should work to improve the lives of human beings. In this sense, building this mind-reading device is not an alarming invasion. So far, this device is a machine that translates encoded internal thoughts to convert them into speech. Under this premise, the implant only works for internal dialogue and not for all our thoughts (mental images would enter here).
The spectrum of the inner voice can be divided into images, sentences, dreams, or perhaps feelings. Not everything inside is linguistic, and that is the magic that is still intact. Still, imagine how many intimate conversations this device could reveal.
Text courtesy of Ecoosfera
Photos from Unsplash: Joshua Fuller
Translated by María Isabel Carrasco Cara Chards
