Brains scans cannot read your mind

Shah, Vikas and Aristegi Urkia, Igor (2007) Brains scans cannot read your mind. In: 11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 23-25 Jun 2007, Las Vegas, NV.

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Abstract

There have been several reports demonstrating the capability to read the mental state of a subject using fMRI. Here we argue that these abilities will never reach the ultimate point of a priori mind-reading capability. The development of the brain into an organ capable of consciousness requires genetic specification of neuronal function, epigenetic specification of wiring, and history-dependent modification of connection patterns and wiring: learning. This path-dependent, non-state function process ensures that the firing patterns correlated with a particular mental content will be highly variable even across similar brains. This severely limits the ability to a priori read the details of a mental state from brain information. Because of this history-dependent process, it is clear that information about activation patterns severely underdetermines the information required to read the mental state; a particular activation pattern is meaningless outside of its neural context.

Comments/Discussion

Elucidates reasons for believing that there will be a hard ceiling on predictablity of mental content.

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