The other day when reading my new favorite book, Mind Hacking, I learned something new that I never knew before. That famed inventor Nikola Tesla once came up with plans to invent something that was decades ahead of his time: a thought camera. What exactly is a thought camera?! History explains:
“Tesla believed it could be possible to photograph thoughts. The inspiration came while he was doing experiments in 1893, Tesla told a newspaper reporter decades later: ‘I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought must, by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might possibly be read by suitable apparatus.’ The inventor conceived of reflecting an image on an artificial retina, taking a photograph and projecting the image on a screen. ‘If this can be done successfully, then the objects imagined by a person would be clearly reflected on the screen as they are formed,’ he said, ‘and in this way every thought of the individual could be read. Our minds would then, indeed, be like open books.'”
Flash forward to 2021 and there are indeed scientists working on ways to read our thoughts. There is even a new project that enlists the help of Artificial Intelligence to help decipher what our neurons are doing and convert it into text. As Big Think puts it:
“Right now, it’s a bit like seeing through a heavy fog, but researchers at the Chang Lab at the University of California at San Francisco have trained a machine-learning algorithm to extract meaning from neuronal data.
Joseph Makin, co-author of this research tells The Guardian, ‘We are not there yet, but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis.'”
Not exactly what Tesla had in mind but not that different either. Farther into the future even more technological trickery may be possible such as the ability to record and play back our dreams or communicate with one another telepathically through brain implants or neural laces. And you don’t need a thought camera to know that most people will think that these concepts are super cool.
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