The research is young and the tech has only been used experimentally on three

patients, but neurologists at Stanford say they are officially able to eavesdrop on the
human brain [http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2013/october/parvizi.html] in
real-life (not just clinical) situations. What's more, they say their new method of
recording brain activity opens the door to devices that can not only read but also
manipulate the mind.
"We are now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life," says Josef Parvizi, associate professor of neurology.
(Credit: Stanford University)
"This is exciting, and a little scary," Henry Greely, steering committee chair of the
Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who observed but did not work on the study,
said in a school news release. "It demonstrates, first, that we can see when someone's
dealing with numbers and, second, that we may conceivably someday be able to
manipulate the brain to affect how someone deals with numbers."
The researchers call their novel method intracranial recording, and they tested it on
three patients who experience recurring, drug-resistant epileptic seizures and were
being evaluated for possible surgical treatment. Unfortunately, the method requires
by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore | October 15, 2013 4:52 PM PDT
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1 of 5 10/16/2013 1:19 PM
temporarily removing a chunk of a patient's skull to position packets of electrodes
against the exposed surface of the brain to measure the brain's electrical activity. They
did this for as long as a week, capturing the patients' seizures to learn the exact spot
where the seizures were originating.
The researchers were particularly interested in a region of the brain called the
intraparietal sulcus, which is currently understood as playing a role in attention and
eye and hand motion. Because previous studies have suggested that some nerve-cell
clusters in this region are also involved in numerosity (i.e. math literacy) the
researchers asked the patients to perform mathematical calculations and monitored the
region when the patients were both performing those calculations and when they were
engaging in quantitative thought in the course of daily life (concepts such as something
being "more than" something else).
The volunteers were asked some questions that required calculation (i.e. is it true or
false that 2+4=5?) and other questions that required episodic memory (i.e. is it true or
false that you had coffee this morning?). They were also asked to stare at the center of a
blank screen to capture the brain's baseline resting state.
Their novel brain-monitoring technique did involve volunteers being tethered to a
monitoring apparatus and mostly confined to their beds, but had benefits over the
other standard monitoring approach called fMRI -- where patients are stuck in a dark
and intermittently noisy tubular chamber. In the journal Nature Communications
[http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131015/ncomms3528
/full/ncomms3528.html] on Tuesday, the researchers unveiled the first solid
evidence that the pattern of brain activity is very similar when someone is performing a
mathematical calculation and when they are engaging in more general quantitative
thought.
"We're now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life," Josef Parvizi, senior author of
the study and associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences, said in the
release. With fMRI, he added, "You're not in your room, having a cup of tea and
experiencing life's events spontaneously." What they wanted to know, he said, is "how
does a population of nerve cells that has been shown experimentally to be important in
a particular function work in real life?"
IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
[http://www.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57344881-52/ibm-mind-reading-
is-less-than-five-years-away-for-real/]
Samsung thinks up mind-reading brain implant [http://www.cnet.com
/8301-17938_105-57421278-1/samsung-thinks-up-mind-reading-brain-
implant/]
New mini sensor can measure brain's magnetic activity
[http://www.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57418103-76/new-mini-sensor-
can-measure-brains-magnetic-activity/]
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While the findings may not seem like a giant step, it allowed the researchers to observe
that electrical activity in a specific bundle of nerve cells spikes when a patient is
engaged in a range of quantitative exercises, from actual math work to using terms such
as "many" and "bigger than the other one" -- what Parvizi describes as both direct
calculating and more oblique references to quantities.
"These nerve cells are not firing chaotically," he said. "They're very specialized, active
only when the subject starts thinking about numbers. When the subject is reminiscing,
laughing or talking, they're not activated." So by listening in on the brain's electrical
chatter, the scientists were able to know whether a patient was engaged in quantitative
thought.
While the researchers say these findings could ultimately lead to mind-reading
applications -- be they of the therapeutic variety, such as helping a stroke victim
communicate through passive thought, or of a more dystopian bent, such as chip
implants that control one's thoughts -- they acknowledge that the research is incredibly
young.
"If this is a baseball game, we're not even in the first inning," Parvizi said. "We just got a
ticket to enter the stadium."
[http://www.cnet.com/profile/ejamoore/]
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is based in Portland, Ore., and has written for Wired, The
Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include
climbing, billiards, board games that take up a lot of space, and piano.
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The New Stanford Alliance? (nsa)
It can hardly be called "eavesdropping" if you have to have electrodes implanted inside your
skull for it to work.
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