Mind-reading BrainGPT Converts Thought-of Words into Text

There may be new hope for stroke victims and other "locked-in" people who are unable to communicate by conventional means. It comes in the form of the experimental new BrainGPT system, which is able to read users' thoughts and convert them into readable text...

Currently being developed by a team of scientists at the University of Technology Sydney, it simply requires users to wear an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap that's connected to a computer. No eye-tracking cameras or other additional hardware is required.

The custom DeWave software utilized by BrainGPT was trained by recording and analyzing the electrical signals produced by a total of 29 volunteers' brains as they silently read passages of text.

Putting it simply, DeWave's AI-based algorithms learned which specific EEG signals corresponded to which written words and phrases. more  video

The future of eavesdropping marches on.

FutureWatch: Meta Mind Reading

Meta’s mind reader - Meta wants to get to know its users inside and out.

The company filed a patent application for in-ear “spectroscopy” for “cognitive load estimation.” To put it simply, this uses an in-ear device to measure a user’s brain signals to better understand a user’s brain activity...

By understanding a user’s cognitive load, Meta can learn a lot about a user’s mental state, said Jake Maymar, VP of Innovation at The Glimpse Group. It’s essentially a stress tester, he said, indicating how exactly their mind is reacting to the content in front of them.

But with a company like Meta, “it’s all about advertising,” Maymar said. As you use the device, “It gets to know you. Your device starts to really understand you as a person and can customize these experiences for you, so they really appeal to you.” ... these ads will likely target you closer than just being placed in your favorite games, said Maymar. more

The future of surveillance is mind reading. We've been minding it for years.

FutureWatch: Mind Reading Marches On, Maybe

At first glance, the headset is unassuming. It almost looks like a pair of oversized headphones. There’s no outward indication that it can read signals in your brain and help alter your mood. But its creator, the startup Neurosity Inc., believes it’s at the forefront of a new wave of consumer products that will literally alter customers’ state of mind. 

Neurosity is one of a growing number of new companies making hardware that can read brainwaves. ... Startups with names like Emotive Inc., InteraXon Inc. and Earable Inc. are all working on devices that use EEG to measure everything from sleep to creativity...

It’s true that it’s early days for the intersection of brains and computers. “This is a huge area, and we’re going to see more of these devices,” Welle said. “Measuring your own brain signals is a cool thing to do." more   Previous mind reading news.

10 Best Spy Comedy Films, Ranked (According To IMDb)

There are better things to do other than watch CNN (Covid-19 News) 24/7.
Here are some suggestions. ~Kevin

• Mr. & Mrs. Smith (6.5)
• Burn After Reading (7.0)
• Red (7.0)
• Spy (7.0)
• Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery (7.0)
• Top Secret! (7.2) *****
• True Lies (7.2)
• The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (7.3)
• Despicable Me (7.6)
• Kingsman: The Secret Service (7.7)

***** (Personal favorite)

A Few Others

• Spies Like Us 
• The Man Who Knew Too Little 
• The Spy Who Dumped Me
• Despicable Me 2 / 3
• My Spy 
• Johnny English / Strikes Again / Reborn
• Keeping Up with the Joneses
• This Means War
• Central Intelligence
• Kingsmen: The Golden Circle
• The Spy Next Door
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me / Goldmember
• Get Smart 
• OSS 117 Cairo (subtitles)
• Casino Royale
• Spy Hard
• Knight and Day
• Agent Cody Banks / Destination London
• Spy Kids / 2 / All the time in the World (kids)
• Our Man Flint / In Like Flint
• Confessions of a Dangerous Mind 
• The Tailor Of Panama
• Undercover Blues  
• Undercover Brother
• The Man With One Red Shoe
• The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (subtitles)
  
• If Looks Could Kill
• Red 2
• The President's Analyst 
• Spies in Disguise (kids) 
• What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
• Gotcha! 
• Jumpin' Jack Flash
• My Favorite Spy 
• Real Men
• The Glass Bottom Boat
• The In-Laws
• Rio Rita
• A Southern Yankee
• The Tuxedo 
• One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing 
• Rendezvous
• The Fastest Guitar Alive (one star)

more (amazing, uh?)

FutureWatch: Mind-Reading Called Brain-Hacking - Food for Thought

The world is in the middle of a new technology arms race, according to best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari, who warns that the prize being fought over this time is not physical territory, but our brains. 

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Harari predicted a future where governments and corporations will be able to gather enough data about citizens around the world that, when combined with computational power, will let them completely predict – and manipulate – our decisions. Harari calls this concept "brain-hacking".

"Imagine, if 20 years from now, you could have someone sitting in Washington, or Beijing, or San Francisco, and they could know the entire personal, medical, sexual history of, say, every journalist, judge and politician in Brazil," said Harari.

"You could control a whole other country with data. At which point you may ask: is it an independent country, or is it a data colony?" more   Previous mind-reading posts.

FutureWatch: The Demise of the Common Spies

Not so long ago, Secret Agent Man could globe-hop with impunity (sing-a-long) and hide with undercover diplomatic immunity. Now, he may as well wear the Scarlet Letter "A", for Agent.

WTF happened? Quite a bit...

9/11, for one. It's not so easy to fly under the radar these days.

In 2014, U.S. spies were exposed when the Office of Personnel Management was hacked. About 22 million fingerprints, security clearance background information, and personnel records allegedly fell into Chinese hands. In 2015 it happened again.

One can be fairly sure this isn't just a problem for U.S. spies. Other countries get hacked, too. You just don't hear about it.

If all this wasn't bad enough, a spy's best friend turned on him in the 2000's. Technology.

Video cameras are planted everywhere, and facial recognition is becoming more accurate every day. It is being used at airports, in buildings, and with in conjunction with city surveillance cameras. This list will grow, of course.

The latest advancement is analysis of video streams using artificial intelligence logarithms.  Suspicious movements, packages left unattended, predictions of future movements and crimes are analyzed by mindless machines 24/7, waiting to trigger an alert.

On the communications side spyware is a concern. Smartphone and GPS tracking don't help spies hide either.

It has been reported that some countries are compiling real-time databases which incorporate the above-mentioned speed bumps with: taxis, hotel, train, airline, credit card, customs and immigration information. As soon as one enters the country, they know where you are—minute by minute. And, if one takes too long going between locations, or a dual timeline appears (being in different places at the same time), a security alert is generated.

Couple all this with countries sharing information, e.g. EU, being a spy who needs to make in-person contacts becomes nearly impossible.

Think staying out of view is a good spy strategy? For now, perhaps. However, progress is being made by constructing a person's face by the sound of their voice.

The future of spying (no, it won't go away) will be radically different out of necessity. One can only guess how, but I understand they are working very hard on mind-reading.

Be seeing you.

FutureWatch: Your Voice Can Give Away What You Look Like

Spying is multifaceted. It includes everything from plain old audio eavesdropping, to spycams (thus adding the visual element), to aggregating all the telltale data about us. Once science fiction, even facial recognition is coming to airports. Is it possible to squeeze more from a spy's cornucopia of tricks?

What if you want to know what a person is thinking, or what they look like?
These two challenges are the future of spying, and they are being worked on today.

We started covering mind reading advancements in 2006. And now, how to tell what a person looks like—and even their environment... just from the sound of their voice.

FutureWatch - Mind Reading - Thought to Speech

Scientists are reporting that they have developed a virtual prosthetic voice, a system that decodes the brain’s vocal intentions and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth.

“It’s formidable work, and it moves us up another level toward restoring speech” by decoding brain signals, said Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., who was not a member of the research group. more

Mind reading is a topic we keep an eye on here, as it's the future of eavesdropping. ~Kevin

The 10 Best Offbeat Spy Movies

You can see all the trailers here.

10. Casino Royale
9. Our Man Flint
8. The Man Who Knew Too Little
7. Burn After Reading
6. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
5. Spies Like Us
4. What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
3. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
2. Top Secret!
1. Spy

Enjoy the weekend! ~Kevin

The Future of Eavesdropping – Mind Reading

Imagine a world where all of your thoughts are visible – including to government agencies. This scenario might sound like it’s been plucked straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might think.

Devices that measure and interpret electrical signals from our brains can already detect things like whether we are drowsy while driving.



In this video for the World Economic Forum, Nita A. Farahany, Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University, discusses the potential but also the legal and ethical risks of these emerging technologies.

“We are not yet at the point where a little thought bubble above your head is something we can see, but we’re getting there,” she says. more

FutureWatch - Another Step Closer to the Future of Eavesdropping

...a new experiment at the University of Washington may be bringing ESP closer to the realm of reality.

According to University of Washington computational neuroscientist Rajesh Rao and UW Medicine neurosurgeon Jeff Ojemann, the combination of a brain implant and a complex algorithm has given researchers the ability to predict human thoughts with unprecedented speed and accuracy. In fact, the duo says, they’re able to track what we’re thinking as we’re thinking it, bringing us closer to mind reading than ever before...

 “We were trying to understand, first, how the human brain perceives objects in the temporal lobe, and second, how one could use a computer to extract and predict what someone is seeing in real time,” explained Rao to the UW NewsBeat. “Clinically, you could think of our result as a proof of concept toward building a communication mechanism for patients who are paralyzed or have had a stroke and are completely locked-in,” he said. more

Weird Science: Bugging Plants & Reading Minds

Spying on plant communication with tiny bugs...
Internal communications in plants share striking similarities with those in animals, new research reveals. With the help of tiny insects, scientists were able to tap into this communication system. Their results reveal the importance of these communications in enabling plants to protect themselves from attack by insect pests. (more)

Scientists explore possibilities of mind reading...
At Yale University, researchers recently used a brain scanner to identify which face someone was looking at — just from their brain activity. At the University of California-Berkeley, scientists are moving beyond "reading" simple thoughts to predicting what someone will think next. 

And at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just has a vision that will make Google Glass seem very last century. Instead of using your eye to direct a cursor — finding a phone number for a car repair shop, for instance — he fantasizes about a device that will dial the shop by interpreting your thoughts about the car (minus the expletives).

Mind reading technology isn't yet where the sci-fi thrillers predict it will go, but researchers aren't ruling out such a future.

"In principle, our thoughts could someday be readable," said Just, who directs the school's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. (more)

Yet Another Step Closer to Eavesdropping on the Brain

Science fiction has long speculated what it would be like to peek inside a person's mind and find out what they are thinking.

Now scientists are one step closer to such technology after forging a new brain monitoring technique that could lead to the development of 'mind-reading' applications.

The breakthrough comes from a Stanford University School of Medicine study that was able to 'eavesdrop' on a person's brain activity as they performed normal functions by utilizing a series of electrodes attached to certain portions of the brain.

The process, called 'intracranial recording', was tested... (more)

Eavesdropping on the Brain: Mind-Reading Devices Could be Possible in the Future

Could we read minds? Scientists are certainly one step closer after this latest study. Researchers have managed to collect the first solid evidence that the pattern of brain activity seen in someone performing a mathematical exercise under experimentally controlled conditions very similar to that observed when the person engages in quantitative thought in the course of daily life. The findings could lead researchers to a way to "eavesdrop" on the brain in real life. 

"This is exciting and a little scary," said Henry Greely who played no role in the study but is familiar with its contents, in a 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."

In order to examine the thought processes of volunteers, the researchers monitored electrical activity in a region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus. This part of the brain is known to be important in attention and hand motion. Previous studies have hinted that some nerve-cell clusters in this area are also involved in numerosity, the mathematical equivalent of literacy.

The scientists used a method called intracranial recording, which allowed them to monitor brain activity while people were immersed in real-life situations. The researchers tapped into the brains of three volunteers who were being evaluated for possible surgical treatment of their recurring, drug-resistant epileptic seizures; this involved removing a portion of the patient's skull and positioning packets of electrodes against the exposed brain surface. (more)

FutureWatch: Eavesdropping via Mind Reading

We continue to keep tabs on the next really big thing in eavesdropping - mind reading. Still way off in the future, advances are being made every year.  

Here is the latest...

By analyzing MRI images of the brain with an elegant mathematical model, it is possible to reconstruct thoughts more accurately than ever before. In this way, researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen have succeeded in determining which letter a test subject was looking at. The journal Neuroimage has accepted the article, which will be published soon. A preliminary version of the article can be read online.

‘In our further research we will be working with a more powerful MRI scanner,' explains Sanne Schoenmakers, who is working on a thesis about decoding thoughts. ‘Due to the higher resolution of the scanner, we hope to be able to link the model to more detailed images. We are currently linking images of letters to 1200 voxels in the brain; with the more powerful scanner we will link images of faces to 15,000 voxels.'  (more)

FutureWatch: Mindreading - Advances another step

Opening up the possibility that a sort of mind-reading might one day be possible, scientists say that through a kind of surgical wiretapping they were able to translate brain electrical signals back into single words overheard by patients, and to do it with 89 percent accuracy.

“We’re trying to figure out how the brain decodes acoustics into words,” says study senior author Bob Knight of the University of California-Berkeley...

“The real advance is that it shows we are closing in on the code that the brain uses to give meanings to words,” says New York University neuroscientist David Poeppel. (more) 

Meanwhile, at the Murray Associates, Countermeasures Compound lab... work is beginning on a new brain eavesdropping detection and prevention service.

The Case of the Spying Apps

Cellphone users say they want more privacy, and app makers are listening.

No, they're not listening to user requests. They're literally listening to the sounds in your office, kitchen, living room and bedroom.

A new class of smartphone app has emerged that uses the microphone built into your phone as a covert listening device -- a "bug," in common parlance.

But according to app makers, it's not a bug. It's a feature!

The apps use ambient sounds to figure out what you're paying attention to. It's the next best thing to reading your mind. (more) (the solution)

Inception - An Industrial Espionage Dream Job

Inception opens July 16th in theaters and IMAX

Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage... (more) (more)

As we've been saying all along, the final frontier of eavesdropping is mind reading. Think of the movie Inception the same way you think of _this one_ ...just with a shorter flash to bang.

The Future of TSCM - Mind Reading

... Why is it so hard to know other people's minds?
Or, better yet, why is it so easy?

MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe is trying to reconcile these two questions. She is studying the part of our brain called the right temporoprietal junction that is almost entirely specialized to think about and judge other people's thoughts.

Between age 3 and 5 children learn that people can have false beliefs, but only by age 7 have they developed the ability to apply moral judgments to other people's thoughts. It takes a while for the TPJ to develop, but by adulthood it lights up brightly in brain scanners when moral judgments run hot.

But Saxe's lab, using a machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, which applies an electromagnetic pulse to a targeted point in the brain, can temporarily disable the function in the TPJ and change what people think about someone else's actions.

Think of the possibilities for trial lawyers, spymasters and advertisers. The Pentagon has called Saxe, but she is not taking its calls. (more)

Employee vs. Boss = Spy vs. Spy

A cautionary tale, excerpted from...
Chained Exploits: Advanced Hacking Attacks from Start to Finish
"Phoenix knows that Mr. Minutia has been spying on him for some time now. Phoenix sees Mr. Minutia at his desk, shuffling through papers, whenever he leaves his desk to go to the copy machine. Phoenix notices Mr. Minutia walk over to his desk whenever he is on the phone to eavesdrop on his conversations. Now Mr. Minutia has taken it to the next step by reading all of Phoenix’s e-mails and reviewing the Web sites Phoenix views.

The word hypocrite echoes in Phoenix’s mind. He knows his boss spends the majority of his time at work surfing the Internet. Phoenix is not sure what his boss is looking at, but Phoenix is determined to find out because he suspects it might not be work related. Then Phoenix can approach Mr. Minutia with a taste of his own medicine and expose his Internet-surfing habits. Phoenix begins to plot how he is going to spy on his boss." (more)

Make sure your employees are not spying on you.
Hey, there are textbooks writing about this.
Inspect for electronic surveillance regularly.