“In one of our early studies, we showed people words representing tools and words representing buildings,” Mitchell said. “We found that we could train our model so that it could successfully distinguish new tool words from new building words.” Having developed a model able to categorize objects correctly approximately 90 percent of the time, the team sought to determine the effect that viewing an object as a picture, as opposed to viewing an object as a word, has on a person’s brain activation patterns. The team therefore trained their model on fMRI data collected from subjects looking at pictures, and then tested the model on fMRI data collected as subjects read corresponding words.

“The accuracy was almost the same,” Mitchell said. “The fact that it doesn’t matter whether we use a word or a picture means that we are really capturing the neural activity associated with the meaning of an item, and not just the [item’s representation].”

Yes, but can they see the thought? I very much doubt.

Give it time and they will...

Material science has not been around for long, so how much time do you think?

In less than a decade at the rate research is going.