Bogus Science Claim: Mind-Reading Researchers

While I am a big fan of science in general, I read and evaluate any specific claims made in the name of science with the same attitude of skeptical inquiry as I would claims made by so-called psychics. Yesterday I encountered a claim in a news release of recent research that made my skeptical siren wail:

These psychics really can read your mind

Can you believe it? Actually, the title read,

These researchers really can read your mind

Oh my gosh. I don’t know if I want to be in the same room as these researchers. It seems, at least from the article title, that they’d know what I was thinking. I’d feel naked. But wait a minute, what was the actual science involved? Good question.

Backtracking a moment here. Many “psychics” have been tested on their ability to read minds. The tests have typically gone like this: “Sending” subjects are given five cards, each with a different symbol on them. The subject looks at a random card and thinks about it. The “receiver” (i.e., “psychic”) then determines which of the five cards the person is thinking about. Answers are recorded, many trials made, then a tally computed. The results: the receiver/psychic tends gets it right a whopping 20% of the time! Which is accounted for by pure chance alone. Oops.

Not very impressive psychic abilities. And to think, they only had to select one of five possibilities to “read.” If they do have inner vision, that vision needs a major set of corrective lenses.

As for the scientists, they likewise didn’t just instruct a subject to think of any old thing, and then “read” what they had thought. The process was likewise of identification. They were able to identify, thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging technology (fMRI), one of three possible memories the subjects were recalling. But wait, it’s not even that impressive.

This is what happened.

First, the researchers “showed ten people each of three very short films before brain scanning.”

Second, “[t]he researchers scanned the participants’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the participants were asked to recall each of the films.”

Third, “[t]he researchers then ran the imaging data through a computer algorithm designed to identify patterns in the brain activity associated with memories for each of the films.”

And finally, “they showed that those patterns could be identified in independent fMRI data to accurately predict which film a given person was thinking about when he or she was scanned.”

In a nutshell, the scientists in question could “read your mind” if reading your mind basically consisted of giving you one of three things to think about, recording your brain activity while you thought about it, AND recorded the brain activity of a number of other people thinking about the very same thing, AND created an algorithm of the patters of brain activity, THEN matching yours with a pattern.

That’s not mind reading. Sure, it is a fascinating bit of research. And it may lead down a road toward an activity closer to mind reading. But for now, not mind reading. Not by a long shot.

In fairness, the title to the news release was not written by the researchers themselves. It’s the article writer him/herself that deserves a dope slap for grossly exaggerating the research. Gross exaggeration, by the way, is not very scientific behavior. Accuracy and precision, in research and communication, better represent the enterprise of science.

How would I have worded the title? This possibility comes readily to mind: Researchers identify select memories in subjects. Yah, much less sexy. But more accurate.

Tags: language