Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

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)