The Future of Language Decoding

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There's been a lot of work done on what we call invasive brain decoders. This involves having neurosurgery to put electrodes actually into your brain that can directly record neural activity. Most people are not going to undergo surgery to do this kind of thing. The other strand of research that we're kind of pulling on is fMRI, in functional magnetic resonance imaging. It doesn't require surgery. Anybody can go in an MRI machine and just get your brain scanned.

For the first time, researchers have found a way to non-invasively translate a person’s thoughts into text. Using fMRI scans and an AI-based decoder trained on a precursor to ChatGPT, the system can reconstruct brain activity to interpret the gist of a story someone is listening to, watching or even just imagining telling. Ian Sample speaks to one of the team behind the breakthrough, the neuroscientist Dr Alex Huth, to find out how it works, where they hope to use it, and whether our mental privacy could soon be at risk. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod