Psychic Science? Scientists Read Monkeys' Inner Thoughts
Friday, July 20, 2012 - 13:10
in Psychology & Sociology
Brain activity is a complex cipher but researchers were recently able to 'decode' monkey thoughts and determine how the little primates were planning to approach the same task - before they moved a muscle.Watching large groups of neurons doesn't reveal much but a group of scientists recently took it to another level; they demonstrated that multiple parameters can be embedded in the firing rate of a single neuron and that certain types of parameters are encoded only if they are needed to solve the task at hand. Interesting enough, but they also discovered that the population vectors could reveal different planning strategies. They could, in effect, read the monkeys' minds. read more