No One Is Actually Doing Thought-Reading by Scanning Brains or Reading Brain Signals

Elon Musk's company Neuralink has recently announced that it has implanted a chip in a human brain. The press has many an untrue headline about this, such as headlines talking about mind-reading brain chips. No one has done any such thing as reading thoughts by scanning brains. 

You might expect to get the real scoop on this topic by reading an article on it in the prestigious journal Nature. But a recent article in that journal misinforms us on this topic. The article is entitled  "Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip: what scientists think of first human trial." We read this:

"Neuroscientists have long argued that data from individual neurons are needed for sophisticated thought-decoding. But research indicates that averaged signals can allow decoding of complex cognitive processes, such as inner speech."

No, that isn't true. It is impossible to figure out what a person is thinking by scanning his brain signals or brain states.  The quote above has a link to the paper "A high-performance neuroprosthesis for speech decoding and avatar control." The paper describes a device that helps decode what a paralyzed woman is trying to say. But that paper states this:

"For speech decoding, the participant was presented with a sentence as a text prompt on a screen and was instructed to silently attempt to say the sentence after a visual go cue. Specifically, she attempted to silently speak the sentence without vocalizing any sounds. This differs from imagined or inner speech because she was trying to engage her articulators to the best of her ability, although substantial orofacial weakness prevents her from naturally mouthing words."

The paper describes a woman paralyzed so badly that she is unable to make intelligible speech. What the device was doing was responding to muscle signals that occur when a person is trying to speak. Picking up such signals is not an example of reading thoughts from brain signals. As the quote above confesses, it is not an example of "inner speech."

The Nature article has misled us by claiming that some decoding of brain signals can "allow decoding of complex cognitive processes, such as inner speech." The first paper it cites in support of this claim denies that claim, as the quote above shows. 

Besides having a link to the paper above, the Nature quote above also had a reference to the paper "Generalizable spelling using a speech neuroprosthesis in an individual with severe limb and vocal paralysis." That paper is also a paper that relies on attempted speech in a severely paralyzed person, rather than pure thought that makes no attempt at muscle movement. We read this in the paper: 

"Here, we demonstrate that real-time decoding of silent attempts to say 26 alphabetic code words from the NATO phonetic alphabet can enable highly accurate and rapid spelling in a clinical-trial participant (ClinicalTrials.gov; NCT03698149) with paralysis and anarthria. During training sessions, we cued the participant to attempt to produce individual code words and a hand-motor movement, and we used the simultaneously recorded cortical activity from an implanted 128-channel electrocorticography (ECoG) array to train classification and detection models. After training, the participant performed spelling tasks in which he spelled out sentences in real time with a 1152-word vocabulary using attempts to silently say the corresponding alphabetic code words. A beam-search algorithm used predicted code-word probabilities from a classification model to find the most likely sentence given the neural activity while automatically inserting spaces between decoded words. To initiate spelling, the participant silently attempted to speak, and a speech-detection model identified this start signal directly from ECoG activity.".

The second paper cited by the Nature article also gives no support for the article's claim that some decoding of brain signals can "allow decoding of complex cognitive processes, such as inner speech." To the contrary, what we have is another case of picking up attempted muscle movements. 

The ideologically neutral diagram below may help you understand the situation better:

What the two papers above are doing are picking up brain signals from the motor cortex. Such papers do nothing to show that the Mind Core (thought, recall, will, imagination, self-hood, etc.) comes from the brain. Virtually no one disputes that there can be increased activity in the motor cortex area of the brain when someone is engaging in muscle activity or attempting to move his muscles. 

Real thought-reading using neural devices would require picking up something when no one was attempting to move their muscles. Such a thing has never been done. There have been some misleading "mashup"-technique studies that have included attempts to read brain signals and also the use of computer databases and AI (artificial intelligence). Such a mixture can be an extremely confusing "smoke and mirrors" affair in which results coming not from thought-reading by brain scans are mixed up with some brain scanning activity, with the results misleadingly passed off as some breakthrough in "neural mind reading." For a discussion of some of the resulting misleading studies see my two posts below:  

Misleading Tricks of the Latest Claim of Mind-Reading by Brain Scans

Suspect Shenanigans When You Hear Claims of "Mind Reading" Technology

Elon Musk's company Neuralink may produce something of benefit to paralyzed people, but brain implants will never produce any great benefit to the general public. The brain is not the source of your thoughts or your imagination, and is not the storage place of your memories. The idea that people will be able to enhance their intelligence or learn more quickly by brain implants is an idea based on the incorrect idea that your brain is the source of your mind, and the incorrect idea that the brain is the storage place of human memories. To discover the reasons why those ideas cannot be correct, read the posts on this blog. 

I read that Neuralink is now claiming that a human with a Neuralink chip implant is controlling a mouse "by thoughts alone." To the contrary, all that is occurring is such a chip picking up intended muscle movements, which are not thoughts. Previously we got from Neuralink or one of its chief investors the inaccurate claim that no monkey had died from one of Neuralink's chip implants. A story in Wired showed that the claim was not correct, and details the specifics of how monkeys had died from Neuralink implants. In November the Reuters news agency reported that "Four U.S. lawmakers have asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Elon Musk committed securities fraud by allegedly misleading investors about the safety of a brain implant being developed by the billionaire’s firm Neuralink, according to a letter to the regulator."

In the history of neuroscience there have been endless misstatements. They have included the following:

• The very massive current occurrence of misleading university press releases, very often announcing new research and making claims about such research not matching anything shown by the research (with the press release claims very often not matching anything even claimed in the corresponding scientific paper). 
• The extensive use of deceptive brain scan visuals, which "lie with colors" by using misleading coloring effects in which very tiny brain activity differences are depicted in bright colors, leading people to think that particular regions of the brain "light up" and are much more active during certain cognitive activities, when in reality the difference is only about 1 part in 200 (the type of difference we might expect from random fluctuations, even if brains do not produce minds and do not store memories). 
• The massive occurrence in scientific papers of inaccurate citations, claiming that some paper showed or supported some claim that it never showed or supported, typically made by scientists who never read the paper they are citing (a scientific paper estimated that only 20% of people citing a scientific paper actually read the paper they are citing). 
• Inaccurate descriptions of what was stated by people who were brain zapped to try to produce an out-of-body experience, in which the subjects hesitating and ambiguous responses (often in response to "leading" questions) are described as reports of an out-of-body experience, when such a report was not given by the subject. 
• Deceptive papers in which purely software implementations are passed off as things that help to explain human memory, by means of outrageous language abuses in which sections or layers of software code are improperly given anatomical names corresponding to parts of the human brain, and in which tricky equivocation occurs involving mixing up the human definition of memory (involving mental experiences) and the computer definition of memory (not involving mental experiences). 
• A very large number of misstatements and misrepresentations by psychiatrists, very carefully documented in Peter Gøtzsche’s "Critical Psychiatry Textbook" that can be read here, with the misstatements often occurring to try to bolster weakly supported or unfounded claims that various types of mental illness are caused by brain states rather than life histories or socioeconomic conditions or personal life conditions. 
• The massive current occurrence of both misleading titles in scientific papers and misleading claims in scientific paper abstracts, with paper titles very commonly making claims not matching anything established by the research in the main body of the paper, and abstracts also frequently claiming the research showed something it failed to show. 
• Extremely misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict neuroscientist dogmas, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, often claiming very large bodies of solid evidence gathered over decades or centuries are "no evidence," combined with misleading stereotypical, mudslinging or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Many decades of poor research practices in neuroscience, such as the use of way-too-small sample sizes of fewer than ten subjects, failure to follow blinding protocols, lack of pre-registration, and the use of an unreliable "see-whatever-you-want-to-see" method for trying to measure animal recollection ("freezing behavior" estimation) rather than the reliable measurement techniques discussed here.  
• The repetition by neuroscientists of utterly absurd claims that it takes hours for a human to form a long-lasting memory, claims that are contrary to every person's experience, which is that permanent memories can form instantly, with the claims being made because the people making such claims want us to believe that memories are formed through synapse strengthening known to take at least hours.  
• The frequent appearance of highly speculative "brain functional map" charts suggesting some knowledge that particular parts of the brain produce cognitive functions, suggestions that are unwarranted (see here for evidence against one of the standard elements of such charts). 
• The extremely severe lie by materialists that a split-brain operation (severing the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) results in two separate human minds, contrary to the facts that no such thing occurs, and that such an operation leaves people with a single self.   
• The use in neuroscience experiments of tortuous extremely convoluted analysis pathways in which brain scan data or biological data is passed through a series of programming iterations, often involving poorly documented gobbledygook code that no one but the original programmer could have ever understood, with the effect of the rigmarole iterations being some "black box" manipulation that not even the original programmer can now understand, and the resulting mess (perhaps having some desired pattern) being passed off as some enhancement of the original data, even though there is every season to suspect the result is a corruption, distortion or contortion of the original data. 

In general, you should be suspicious about some neuroscientist trumpeting his own research, because that person is a vested interest who stands to gain financially and career-wise the more you believe his or her claims. And when corporations issue  neuroscience-related claims that are controlled by the desire of such corporations to maintain high stock prices and the desire to attract more investors, then perhaps you should be suspicious to the second power. 

The erring Nature article I quoted above is not the only erroneous article Nature has published making the false claim that minds are being read by brain devices.  A recent Nature article has the misleading title "Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets," a claim it provides no evidence to support.  The article starts out like this:

"Moving a prosthetic arm. Controlling a speaking avatar. Typing at speed. These are all things that people with paralysis have learnt to do using brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) — implanted devices that are powered by thought alone."

No, none of these things is "powered by thought alone." They are all devices reading brain signals to detect muscle movement attempts rather than pure thoughts. 

We hear that the Broca's region supposedly involved in speech contains no actual information about words:

"They also found that Broca’s area, a brain region thought to have a role in speech production and articulation, contained little to no information about words, facial movements or units of sound called phonemes. 'It seems surprising that it’s not really involved in speech production per se,' says Willett."

The article makes this claim, which is not backed up any good research:

"His team developed a BCI implant capable of generating speech in real time when participants either whisper or imagine speaking without moving their lips or making a sound. The brain signals picked up by the BCI device in both whispered and imagined speech were similar to those for spoken speech. They share areas and patterns of activity, but are not the same, explains Herff."

In the quote above we have a reference to the paper here which has the misleading title "Real-time synthesis of imagined speech processes from minimally invasive recordings of neural activity." We have a study involving a single subject who was not paralyzed. The study has got brain wave readings of the subject while she was told to speak, whisper, and just imagine. From the combination of all three readings, some better-than-chance prediction is made about the words spoken or whispered or imagined.  But since data is being gathered in all three ways, no claim can be made to have read pure thoughts. And we don't know whether the subject kind of halfway-mouthed some of the words during the cases of supposedly "just imagining."  The authors refer to "the inherent difficulty of knowing how the participant internally performed imagined speaking,"  Exactly: we don't know whether the claimed "imagined speaking" really was pure thought.  

The Nature article's claim that the "BCI implant" was "capable of generating speech in real time when  participants either whisper or imagine speaking without moving their lips" is not correct. The study merely guessed about the words its single subject had spoken, whispered or imagined, and made guesses with a success rate slightly above chance,  a result we might expect to get by chance given 100 experiments trying such a thing.  You can plausibly explain the reported results easily without supposing any actual reading of thoughts, by simply imagining that the single subject faintly vocalized a few of the small number of words she was asked to imagine.  

Since the experiment was a rapid-fire affair, with very quick responses required, an experiment requiring responses to 100 random words in a period of only five minutes, it would have been very plausible that a subject might have done such a thing, despite being told to only imagine the displayed word. Reliable neuroscience experiments involving correlation effects require at least 15 subjects, and an experiment based on data from a single subject should not be taken very seriously. The authors claim that their one-subject experiment "demonstrates real-time speech synthesis from imagined neural activity" is unfounded.

What kind of design would a study like this need to have to provide credible evidence of thought-reading by a neural device? For one thing, you would need to test at least 15 subjects. Also, steps could be taken to prevent subjects from doing something like attempts at muscle movements in tests in which pure thought was required. You could have the subjects wear a mouthpiece that would prevent muscle movement in the mouth. Or you could have subjects wear in their mouth a device that would detect faint muscle movements or attempted muscle movements when a subject was supposed to be engaging in pure thought. Whenever such a detection was made, that response would be removed from the data, with a warning flashed not to whisper the displayed word. You would also make sure to have a decent time interval between each word test, such as 30 seconds. You might have the display of each word preceded by a warning such as "Now make sure not to speak the next word -- just THINK it."

Don't be fooled by claims of mind-reading technology in the science news. Today's "Science News" pages and sites are a boastful cesspool of glitzy goofy semi-true clickbait-infected razzle-dazzle razzmatazz that largely serve to promote the vested interests of corporations, elitist institutions, click miners and glory  seekers. 

Postscript: In an article we learn about the person who has received the first Neuralink chip. He is a person paralyzed from the shoulders down, who can speak and move his head normally (as we can see from the video here).  We read that he could play Civilization VI (a PC strategy game) for hours before having the brain chip implanted. There are a variety of ways in which technology could pick up intended game movements from such a patient.  Without even having a chip inside the brain, you could have technology that could translate head muscle movements into the equivalent of game controller movements.  We should not be impressed by the ability of such a patient to play a video game after having a brain chip implant. What is probably going on is that some system is receiving a variety of inputs, only some of which are signals from the motor cortex.  Calling such a thing a case of "reading thoughts from the brain" is very misleading. 

What would be impressive would be if someone were to have a brain chip implant, and were then to silently imagine some novel scene, such as a blue sphere sitting on top of a green cube, resting on a red table, with a computer then creating exactly such a scene.  You'll never see that, because brains are not the source of our thinking and imagination.  

The latest untrue news on this topic comes in the form of an untrue headline at www.thedebrief.org, a headline of "ROUNDBREAKING NON-INVASIVE UNIVERSAL BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE LETS PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES USING ONLY THEIR MIND." The story recycles an untrue press release issued by the University of Texas, one claiming "Universal Brain-Computer Interface Lets People Play Games With Just Their Thoughts."  A look at the scientific paper  tells us that "Subjects were instructed to mentally rehearse the kinesthetics, not the visualization, of a movement without overtly causing any contraction of their muscles."  Given such instructions, people will make small muscle movements corresponding to how they want to move in a video game, and it is those small muscle movements that are being mined, rather than "just thoughts."  The subjects were wearing EEG caps, and it is well known that EEG signals are very sensitive to muscle movements.  Lacking controls and laden with statistical fog, the paper does not even give clear intelligible evidence the subjects performed above chance.