“Mind—Reading” AI Produces a Description of What You

石斯琳

A new research project of Japan can analyze2 a persons brain scans3 and provide a written description of what they have been looking at.

日本一个新型研究项目能够分析人类大脑的扫描结果，并得出一份书面报告，描述了人们看到的东西。

When a person is looking at a picture， the artificial intelligence is given an fMRI brain scan image. It then produces a written de-scription of what they think the person was viewing. It can offer a description like： “A dog is sitting on the floor in front of an open door.” or “A group of people standing on the beach.” Both of those turn out to be quite accurate4.

当受试者看一张图片时，人工智能就接受来自功能性磁共振成像得来的脑部扫描图像。紧接着它输出一份关于人们认为受试者正看见的东西的书面描述。這个人工智能得出的书面描述精准程度如下：“一只狗坐在敞开着的门前的地板上”或者“一群人站在沙滩上”。经确认，这两个描述都十分精准。

“Our goal is to understand how the brain represents5 information about the real world，” Ichiro Kobayashi， one of the researchers from Japans Ochanomizu University， told Digital Trends. “Toward such a goal， we showed that our algorithm6 can model and read out perceptual7 contents from human brain activity. And the algorithm do this in the form of sentences. So we modified8 an existing network model. It could generate sentences from images.

小林一郎是来日本御茶水女子大学的研究人员之一。他向《电子趋势》透露：“我们的目标是了解大脑是怎样呈现现实世界传递给它的信息的。设定这个目标之后，通过演示，我们的（计算机）算法能够以句子的形式模拟并读出大脑活动中的感知内容。所以我们对一个现有的网络模型作出修改。它（模型）能够用句子的形式呈现从图像中读到的内容。”

However， Kobayashi points out that it still a long way away from real-world application9. “So far， there are not any real-world applica-tions for this，” Kobayashi continued. “Howev-er， in the future， it might be used widely.”

然而，小林一郎指出，要将这个模型运用到现实中还需要做很多工作。他说：“目前该模型还无法进行实际运用。然而，将来这种技术可能会被广泛使用。”

As a next step， Shinji Nishimoto， another researcher on the project， told Digital Trends that the team wants to use it to better under-stand how the brain processes10 information.

西本真治作为该项目的另一位研究人员向《电子趋势》透露，研究组下一步要利用这个技术更进一步了解大脑是怎样加工信息的。

“We would like to understand how the brain works under naturalistic11 conditions，” Nishimoto said. “Toward such a goal， we are planning to find out how various forms of in-formation—vision12， languages， impressions， etc.—are encoded13 in the brain. In particular， we will work on generating descriptions about what a person thinks.”

“我们想要了解大脑在自然条件下是怎么运作的。因此，我们计划深入研究各种信息（视觉、语言、印象等等）在大脑中是怎样加工的。我们特别致力于这个技术（以句子形式）对人类大脑中所想的书面描写。”

【fMRI （functional magnetic resonance imaging）： 功能性磁共振成像是一种新兴的神经影像学方式

Digital Trends：《电子趋势》是一个科技新闻和信息网站，包括科技新闻、评论、指南、how-to文章，关于技术和消费电子产品的视频和播客的描述。】

Notes：

1. description n. 描述

2. analyze vt. 分析；解析

3. scan n. 扫描

4. accurate adj. 准确的；精确的

5. represent vt. 代表

6. algorithm n. 算法

7. perceptual adj. 感性的；知觉的

8. modify v. 修改

9. application n. 应用；应用程序

10. process v. 加工；处理

11. naturalistic adj. 自然的

12. vision n.洞察力

13. encode vt. 编码