Chapter 6 5. Telepathy

The unthinkable can only be achieved by those who strive to try ridiculous things. AE van Vogt's novel Slan captures our darkest fears about telepathy. Jommy Corss, the protagonist of the novel, is a "Slan", an extinct race with extraordinary telepathic abilities. His parents were brutally murdered by an angry mob of humans, who fear and despise all mind readers due to the immense power these slans wield who can penetrate their most private and ulterior minds.Humans hunt down and kill the Slam race as mercilessly as they do animals.Slans are easily identified by their distinctive tendrils that grow from their heads.In the book, Jomi tries to make contact with other slans who may have fled into space to avoid being hunted by humans determined to exterminate them.

Historically, mind reading has been considered so important that it has often been associated with the gods.One of the fundamental powers of all gods is to read our thoughts, and thus answer our deepest prayers.A mind reader who is truly able to read minds at will could easily be the richest man on earth, able to enter the mind of a Wall Street banker, or blackmail and coerce his competitors; Threat; he could steal a country's most sensitive secrets with little effort.Like Silan, he will be feared, and perhaps destroyed. The immense power of a true mind reader was brought to prominence in Isaac Asimov's landmark Foundation series, often touted as one of the greatest science fiction epics of all time.A galactic empire that has ruled for thousands of years is on the brink of collapse and destruction.A secret society of scientists known as the Second Foundation used complex equations to predict the eventual demise of the Empire and plunge civilization into darkness for 30,000 years.The scientists drew up an elaborate plan based on their equations, seeking to reduce the collapse of this civilization to just a few thousand years.But then disaster struck suddenly.Their equations alone failed to predict one event, the birth of a mutant named Mule, who was able to control minds from a distance and thereby seize control of the Galactic Empire.The galaxy is doomed to chaos and disorder for 30,000 years unless this mind reader can be stopped.

While science fiction is full of fantasies about mind readers, the reality is much more prosaic.Since thoughts are personal and invisible, charlatans and charlatans have exploited our naivety and gullibility for centuries.One of the simple household tricks used by magicians and telepaths is to use a decoy - an accomplice who lurks in the audience, whose mind is then "read" by the telepath. Some magicians and fortune tellers have actually built their careers on the famous "hat trick".People write private messages on slips of paper, which are then put into a hat.The magician next proceeded to tell the audience what was written on each slip, surprising everyone.This elaborate trick has a very simple explanation.

One of the most famous instances of telepathy involved not a fellow con artist but an animal—"Clever Hans," a marvelous horse that astonished European audiences in the 1890s.Clever Hans wowed audiences with his ability to perform complex mathematical calculations.For example, if you asked Clever Hans to divide 48 by 6, he would stamp his hoof 8 times.Clever Hans can actually divide, multiply, add fractions, spell words, and even identify musical tunes.Fans of Clever Hans claim that either he is smarter than many humans, or he can read people's minds telepathically. But Clever Hans is not the product of some clever gimmick.Clever Hans's uncanny ability to do numbers fooled even his trainer.In 1904, the eminent psychologist Professor C. Strumpf was brought in to analyze the horse, but failed to find obvious tricks and secret signals to the horse, and only increased public opinion. A fascination with clever Hans.Three years later, however, Strumpf's student, the psychologist Oskar Pfungst, put the horse to more rigorous tests and finally discovered Clever Hans' secret.All it really does is observe the subtle facial expressions of his trainer.It can keep stomping until its trainer's facial expression changes slightly, at which point it will stop stomping.Clever Hans can't read people's minds or do math, he's just a keen observer of people's facial expressions.

There have been other "mind-reading" animals throughout history.As early as 1591, a horse named Morocco became famous in England, earning his owner a fortune by picking people out of spectators, pointing out letters of the alphabet and summing numbers on a stack of dice. sum of money.It caused such a stir in England that Shakespeare immortalized it as "the dancing horse" in his play Love's Labour's Lost. Gamblers can also read people's minds to a limited extent.When a person sees something that pleases him, the pupils of his eyes usually dilate; when he sees something unpleasant (or performs a mathematical operation), his pupils shrink.Gamblers can read the emotions of their deadpan opponents by watching their pupils dilate or shrink.This is why gamblers often wear colored goggles that cover their eyes - to cover their pupils.You could also shoot a laser into a person's pupil and analyze where it's reflected from to determine exactly where the person is looking.By analyzing the movement of the laser reflection point, you can determine how a person glances at a picture.By combining these two techniques, you can determine the emotional response of a person when they glance at a picture without their permission.

The first scientific investigation of telepathy and other paranormal phenomena was conducted by the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 (the term "mental telepathy" was coined that year Created by FW Myers, a partner of the Research Institute).The past presidents of this research society included some of the most prominent figures of the 19th century.Research societies still exist today, successfully debunking the deceptions of many scammers, but often divide between spiritualists who are staunch believers in the supernatural and scientists who wish to take their science more seriously.

A researcher associated with the Research Society, Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, began the first systematic and serious study of spirituality in the United States in 1927, founding at Duke University in Northern California established the Rhine Institute (now known as the Rhine Research Center).For decades, he and his wife, Louisa, conducted a number of the first scientifically controlled experiments in the United States of parapsychological phenomena of all types and published them in peer-reviewed publications.It was Laing who coined the term "extrasensory perception" (ESP) in one of his earliest works.

Laing's laboratory virtually set the standard for spiritual research.One of his partners, Dr. Karl Zener, developed a system of five modeling cards, now known as "Zener Cards," for analyzing telepathic stress.The vast majority of experimental results showed absolutely no evidence of telepathy, but a small number of experiments showed small but unusual correlations in the data that could not be explained by mere coincidence.The problem is that these experiments often cannot be replicated by other researchers. Although Lane tried to build a reputation for rigor, his reputation was damaged in part by his encounter with a horse named Lady Wonder.The horse can perform telepathic feats like knocking over toy alphabet blocks to spell out the word someone in the audience is thinking.Laing apparently didn't know how "Wise Hans" would end. In 1927, Rhein analyzed "Wonder Lady" in several details, and concluded: "There remains, then, only the explanation of telepathy, the transfer of mental influences by an unknown process. There is nothing inconsistent with it." Circumstances were discovered, and from the results no other hypotheses seemed to be credible." Later, Milbourne Christopher revealed the true source of "Wonder Lady's" mind-reading abilities - the subtle movements of the whip held by the horse's owner .The slight movement of the whip was the cue for Ms. Wonder to stop stomping her hooves (Even after the true source of Ms. Wonder's powers was revealed, Rein continued to believe that the horse could indeed read minds, but due to some For unknown reasons it has lost its ability to read minds, forcing its owner to resort to blindfolding).

But when Laing was about to retire, his reputation suffered the final blow.He is looking for an honorable successor to continue his work at the Institute.The most promising candidate was Dr. Walter Levy, whom he hired in 1973.Dr. Levy was a rising star in the field, reporting sensational research that seemed to prove that rats could telepathically alter a computer's random number generator.However, skeptical lab workers discovered that Dr. Levy had sneaked into the lab at night to falsify the results of experiments, and he was caught falsifying the data.Further testing revealed that the rats had no telepathic abilities at all, and Dr. Levy was disgraced and forced to resign from the Institute.

Interest in the supernatural turned dead-end at the height of the Cold War, with a spate of secret experiments in telepathy, mind control, and remote viewing Place). "Star Gate" is the code name for a string of secret CIA-sponsored research such as Sun Streak, Grill Flame, and Center Lane.The enterprise began around 1970, when the CIA concluded that the Soviet Union spent up to 60 million rubles a year on "spiritual" research.There were concerns that the Soviets might be using ESP to locate American submarines and military installations, identify spies and read secret documents.

Research grants for the CIA began in 1972 with Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park responsible for this.Initially, they attempted to train a core group of psychics who could engage in "spiritual warfare."Over 20 years, the United States spent more than $20 million on Stargate, with more than 40 workers, 23 remote viewers, and 3 psychics on the payroll. As of 1995, with an annual budget of $500,000, the CIA has hosted hundreds of intelligence gathering projects involving thousands of remote viewing events.In particular, remote viewers are required to: In 1995, the CIA asked the American Institute for Research (AIR) to evaluate these programs. AIR recommends discontinuing these projects. "There is no evidence that it was of any value to the intelligence community," wrote AIR's David Goslin. Stargate proponents boast that they have achieved "eight martini" results over the years (the conclusion is so good that you have to go out and drink eight martinis to calm down).Critics, however, insist that the vast majority of remote viewing produces worthless, irrelevant information that wastes taxpayer dollars, and that the few "hits" they achieve are vague and vague. so that they can be used in any situation. The AIR report stated that the most important "successes" of Stargate involved remote viewers who already had some knowledge of the operations they were learning, and from which they probably made some educated guesses that sounded reasonable. Ultimately, the CIA concluded that Stargate failed to produce a message that could help them direct their intelligence efforts, so the CIA terminated the project (despite rumors that the CIA used remote viewers in the Gulf War to find Saddam Hou Saddam Hussein, even though all efforts were unsuccessful). At the same time, scientists are beginning to understand the physics behind some of the brain activity.In the 19th century, scientists suspected that electrical signals were being sent through the brain. In 1875, Richard Carton discovered that placing electrodes on the surface of the head could detect tiny electrical signals emitted by the brain.This eventually led to the invention of the electroencephalograph (EEG). Basically, the brain is a transmitter through which our thoughts are broadcast in the form of tiny electrical and electromagnetic waves.But using these signals to read someone's mind is problematic.First, these signals are extremely weak, in the milliwatt range.Second, these signals are fuzzy and largely indistinguishable from randomly occurring noise, and only rough information about our thinking can be gleaned from such random intercepts.Third, our brain cannot receive similar information from other brains through these signals, that is, we lack an antenna.In the end, even if we can pick up these ambiguous signals, we can't sort them out.Telepathy via radio appears to be impossible using conventional Newtonian and Maxwell theories. Some believe that telepathy is mediated by a fifth force known as the "mind" force.Yet even advocates of psychic science admit that they have no real, reproducible evidence for such psychic powers. But this raises a question: what about telepathy using quantum theory? In the past 10 years, for the first time in history, new quantum devices that allow us to peer into the thinking brain have become available.Leading this quantum revolution are PET (positronemission tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans. A PET scan is done by injecting radioactive sugar into the blood.These sugars accumulate in parts of the brain that can be activated by thought processes, where energy is needed.Radioactive sugars emit positrons (anti-electrons) that can be easily detected by instruments.In this way, by tracing the shapes that antimatter makes in a living brain, we can also map thinking, isolating exactly which part of the brain is involved in that activity. An MRI machine works the same way, except it's more precise.The patient's head is placed in a giant ring magnetic field.The magnetic field aligns the atoms in the brain parallel to the field lines.A radio pulse is sent into the patient, causing the atoms to vibrate.When the nuclei switch directions, they emit a faint detectable "echo" that signals the presence of a particular substance.For example, brain activity correlates with oxygen consumption, so an MRI machine can isolate thought processes by targeting the concentration of oxygenated blood.The higher the concentration of oxygenated blood, the more active thinking is in that part of the brain (today's "functional MRI machines" [fMRI] can target tiny areas of the brain in less than a second, making these machines ideal can accurately describe the thinking picture of a living brain). With MRI machines, there's the possibility that scientists may one day be able to decipher the rough outlines of a living brain's mind.The simplest "mind reading" test is to determine whether a person is lying. According to legend, the world's first lie detector was invented centuries ago by an Indian priest.He will put the suspect and a "magic donkey" in a closed room. According to the instructions, the suspect should hold the magic donkey by its tail.If the donkey started talking, the suspect was lying; if the donkey remained silent, the suspect was telling the truth (however, the priest would secretly put ashes on the donkey's tail). After the suspect is taken out of the room, he usually proclaims his innocence because the donkey didn't speak when he pulled its tail.But the priest would then examine the suspect's hands.If the hands are clean, that means he is lying (sometimes the psychological threat of using a polygraph is more effective than the polygraph itself). The first modern "Magic Donkey" was built in 1913.Psychologist William Marston discusses the analysis of how a person's blood pressure rises when they are lying (this observation of blood pressure actually goes back to ancient times, where suspects have to be tested by an investigator questioned while holding his hands).The idea caught on so quickly that soon even the Ministry of Defense was setting up its own polygraph institute. But it's increasingly clear that lie detectors can be fooled by sociopaths who show no remorse for their actions.The most famous case is that of CIA double agent Aldrich Ames, who pocketed huge sums of money from the Soviet Union by sending a large number of American spies to death and leaking the nuclear secrets of the US Navy.In more than ten years, Ames successfully passed a lot of CIA polygraph tests.The same happened to serial killer Gary Ridgway, the infamous "Green River Killer," who murdered as many as 50 women. In 2003, the US National Academy of Science published a caustic report on the reliability of lie detectors, listing all of the things that can fool a lie detector and make an innocent person mistaken for a liar. method. But if polygraphs can only measure anxiety, what about the brain itself?The idea of ​​looking at brain activity to debunk lies goes back 20 years to the work of Peter Rosenfeld at Northwestern University.He observed that the EEG scans of a person who was telling a lie showed a different shape to the P300 wave (the P300 wave is usually fired when the brain encounters novel or unusual things) than a person who told the truth. The idea of ​​using MRI scans to detect lies was the brainchild of Daniel Langleben at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1999 he stumbled upon a paper about children with Attention Deficit Disorder having trouble lying, but he deduced from experience that this was false, such children had no difficulty lying, the real problem was their It's hard to hide the truth. "They would just blurt out the truth," Langelben recalls.He speculates that for the brain to lie it must first stop it from telling the truth and then create a lie."When you're careful about telling a deliberate lie, you have to hold the truth in your mind first. So understandably that means more brain activity," he says. In other words, lying is hard work. Experimenting with college students and asking them to lie, Langelben quickly found that lying produced more brain activity in several areas, including the frontal lobe (where more thinking is concentrated), the temporal lobe, and the limbic system ( emotions are processed here).In particular, he noticed unusual activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with conflict resolution and response inhibition. He announced that he had a 99% consistent success rate in analyzing controlled experiments in which students could tell whether they were lying (for example, he had college students lie during a poker game). The benefits contained in this technology are obvious, and two commercial companies have been established and operated to provide this service to the public.In 2007, a company called No Lie MRI (No Lie MRI) took its first case, a man was suing his insurance company because the company said he deliberately set fire to his deli (fMRI Scans showed he was not an arsonist). Proponents of Langelben's technique say it's far more reliable than old-fashioned lie detectors because altering the EEG is outside of anyone's control.Although people can be trained to control their pulse and sweat, it is impossible for them to control their EEG.In fact, advocates point out that in an age of rising fears about terrorism, the technology could save countless lives by detecting terrorist attacks on the United States beforehand. While acknowledging the technology's apparent success rate in lie detection, critics point out that fMRI does not actually detect lies, but merely the increased brain activity that occurs when someone is lying.The machine could give false results, such as when a person is telling the truth in an anxious state. By design, fMRI will only detect anxiety and falsely show that the person is lying. “There is an uncanny desire to have tests that separate truth from deception, and science has been abandoned,” warns Harvard neurobiologist Steven Hyman. Some critics also claim that a true lie detector, like a true mind reader, can make everyday social interactions as uncomfortable as a certain amount of lying is "social lubricant" that helps The wheels of society roll.For example, our reputations might be damaged if all the compliments we gave our bosses, superior spouses, lovers, and co-workers were exposed as lies.A true polygraph can also reveal virtually all of our family secrets, hidden emotions, repressed desires, and private plans.As science columnist David Jones puts it, a true lie detector "is like an atomic bomb, best kept as the ultimate weapon. If widely used outside the courtroom, It would interfere with the normal functioning of social life." Some people rightly condemn brain scans because all their complex pictures of the thinking brain are too crude to measure isolated, individual thoughts.When we perform the simplest brain activity, millions of neurons may fire at once, and fMRI can only detect this activity as a small dot on the screen.One psychologist likened brain scans to listening to the person sitting next to you at a loud football game, whose voice is drowned out by the noise of a thousand spectators.For example, the smallest piece of tissue in the brain that can be reliably analyzed by an fMRI is called a voxel.But each voxel is equivalent to millions of neurons, so an fMRI machine simply isn't sensitive enough to isolate individual thoughts. Science fiction sometimes uses a "universal translator," a device that can read one person's thoughts and then beam them directly into another's brain.In some science fiction, alien mind readers plant the thoughts of another into your head, even if they don't understand your language.In the 1976 sci-fi film, a woman's dreams are projected onto a television screen in real time.In the 2004 Jim Carrey film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, doctors pinpoint the exact location of painful memories and erase them. "That's a fantasy that everyone in the field has," says neurobiologist John Haynes of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, "but if that's you If you want to make a device, then I'm pretty sure you have to start recording from a single neuron." Since detecting signals from individual neurons is currently impossible, some psychologists have turned to the next best thing: reducing noise and isolating the fMRI patterns produced by individual objects.For example, it might be possible to identify fMRI patterns evoked by individual words, and create a "dictionary of thought." For example, Marcel A. Just of Carnegie-Mellon University successfully identified fMRI patterns from a small selection of objects (such as carpentry tools). “We have 12 categories and can tell which of the 12 categories are being thought with 80 to 90 percent accuracy,” he announced. His colleague Tom Mitchell, a computer scientist, is using computer techniques, such as neural networks, to identify complex EEG patterns detected by fMRI scans that correlate with specific experiments. "One of the experiments I'd like to do is to find the words that produce the most discernible brain activity," he emphasizes. But even if we could create a dictionary of ideas, it would still be a far cry from creating a "universal translator".Unlike a general-purpose translator, which transmits thoughts from another brain directly into our own, an fMRI mental translator involves many tedious and lengthy steps: First, it recognizes specific fMRI patterns and translates them into English words , and then say the words according to the object.In that sense, such a device wouldn't be the same as the mind meld featured in Star Trek (but it would still be useful for striking enemies). Another stumbling block to practical telepathy is the frightening size of fMRI.It's a gigantic contraption, worth millions of dollars, taking up an entire room and weighing tons. The heart of the MRI machine is a ring-shaped magnet, several feet in diameter, that creates a huge magnetic field several tesla (so strong that several workers have been flown through the air because the power was accidentally turned on) severe injuries from hammers and other implements). Recently, physicists Igor Savukov and Michael Romalis of Princeton University proposed a new technology that may finally make portable MRI a reality, making it possible Slash the price of an fMRI machine to 1%.They announced that giant MRI magnets could be replaced by a supersensitive atomic magnetometer that can detect weak magnetic fields. First, Savkov and Romanis made a magnetic sensor by suspending hot potassium vapor in helium.They then used a laser to align the electron spins of the potassium.They then created a weak magnetic field (to mimic a human body) in a sample of water.Next they sent a radio pulse into the water sample, causing the water molecules to tremble.The "echo" caused by the quivering water molecules causes the potassium electrons to vibrate as well, and this tremor can be detected by the second laser.They came to an important conclusion: Even a weak magnetic field can create "echoes" that their sensors can detect.Not only can they replace the huge magnetic field of a standard MRI machine with a weak field, but they can also obtain instant pictures (whereas an MRI machine can take up to 20 minutes to generate a picture). Eventually, they theorized that taking an MRI picture could be as easy as taking a picture with a digital camera. If portable MRI machines become a reality, they might be linked to tiny computers that could contain software that can decipher certain phrases, words or sentences.Such a device will never be as mature as the telepathic devices that appear in science fiction, but it can come close. But could someday some future MRI machine be able to read precise thoughts, word by word, picture by picture, like a true mind reader?It's not very clear.Some argue that MRI machines can only make out the vague outlines of our thoughts because the brain isn't really a computer at all.In a digital computer, calculations are localized and obey a set of extremely strict rules.A digital computer obeys the rules of a "Turing machine," a machine with a central processing unit (CPU), input and output devices.A central processing unit (such as a Pentium chip) implements a set of well-defined operational procedures for input and output, and the "ideas" are thus localized within the CPU. However, our brain is not a digital computer.Our brains have no Pentium chips, no CPUs, no Windows operating system, and no subroutines.If you took away a single transistor from a computer's CPU, it's quite possible to seriously damage the CPU, but in some cases half of the human brain is gone, and the remaining half of the brain can still take over. The human brain is actually more like a learning machine, a "neural network" that constantly rewires itself after learning a new task. MRI studies can confirm that thinking in the brain is not localized at one point, as in a "Turing machine," but is spread out over large parts of the brain, a typical feature of neural networks. MRI scans show that thinking is actually like a game of ping-pong, as dots of activity bounce around in the brain and different parts of the brain light up in sequence. Since thinking is so diffuse, and spreads out to many parts of the brain, perhaps the best scientists can do is compile a lexicon of thinking, that is, between specific thoughts and specific EEG or MRI scan patterns Establish a one-to-one correspondence.Austrian biomedical engineer Gert Pfurtscheller, for example, trained a computer to recognize specific EEGs and thoughts by focusing his efforts on the mu waves found in EEGs.Apparently, mu waves are associated with the intention to perform certain muscular actions.He asked his patients to lift a finger, smile or frown, and then used a computer to record which mu waves were activated.Whenever the patient makes a mental activity, the computer carefully records the μ wave pattern.This process is difficult and tedious, because you have to carefully identify fake swings.But Fuschler eventually managed to find exciting correspondences between simple activities and specific EEGs. Over time, this effort, combined with the MRI results, may lead to a comprehensive "dictionary" of ideas.By analyzing specific patterns in an EEG or MRI scan, a computer might be able to identify such patterns and reveal what a patient is thinking, at least in common words.Such "mind reading" creates a one-to-one correspondence between specific μ waves, MRI scans, and specific thoughts.But it's doubtful that the dictionary will be able to tell specifics from your thoughts. If one day we can read the broad outlines of another person's mind, is it possible to achieve the opposite action, projecting your thoughts into another person's head?The answer seems to be a qualified "yes".Radio waves can be shot directly into the brain, exciting areas of the brain known to control certain functions. Research in this direction began in the 1950s when Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed brain surgery on epileptic patients.He found that when patients stimulated certain areas of the temporal lobe of their brains with electrodes, they began to hear speech and see ghostly things.Psychologists have known that epilepsy damage to the brain can cause patients to feel that supernatural forces are at work, that demons and angels control things around them (some psychologists have even theorized that stimulation of these areas may lead to many A semi-mystical experience based on religion. Some psychologists speculate that perhaps Joan of Arc, who single-handedly led the French army to victory in battle against the British, was plagued by such injuries, caused by a blow to the head caused by). Based on these speculations, neuroscientist Michael Persinger of Sudbury, Ontario, built a helmet specially modified with wires that beam radio waves into the brain to induce specific thoughts and emotions, such as a sense of religion.Neuroscientists know that certain injuries to the left temporal lobe can blind the left brain so that the brain might interpret activity in the right hemisphere as coming from another "self."Because the brain does not realize that this image is actually just another part of itself.Because of their religious beliefs, patients may interpret this "other self" as a devil, an angel, alien beings, or even God. In the future, it may become possible to project electromagnetic signals onto precise parts of the brain known to control specific functions.By projecting such signals to the corpus callosum, a person might be able to generate certain emotions; by stimulating other areas of the brain, a person might be able to generate virtual visual images and thoughts.However, research in this direction is still in its infancy. Some scientists are advocating a "neuron-mapping project," similar to the Human Genome Project—a project that would detail all the genes in the human genome.一项神经元图谱计划将确定每一个人类大脑中的神经元位置，并且绘制显示它们之间所有联系的三维地图。它会是一项真正丰碑式的计划，因为大脑中有超过1 000亿个神经元，每个神经元都与其他数千个神经元相联系。假设这样一项计划实现，一个人就能可信地确认某种思想如何刺激某些神经通路。与使用MRI扫描和EEG波获得的思想词典相结合，或许能可靠地破译某些想法的神经构造，我们用这一方法或许可以确定哪些具体单词或者大脑影像对应哪些具体被激活的神经元。如此，我们就能实现在一个具体意念，它的MRI表达和为了在大脑中制造这样的意念所被激活的具体神经元之间的一一对应。 这个方向的小小进步是2006年艾伦脑科学研究所（Allan Institute for Brain Science，由微软的联合创始人保罗·艾伦［Paul Allen］创办）宣布他们已经成功制造出老鼠大脑内基因表达的三维图谱，详细列出细胞水平上21万个基因的表达。他们希望能用一个相似的人脑图谱跟进这一成果。“艾伦脑图谱的完成代表了医药科学中最伟大的前沿之一的巨大跃进。”研究所的主席马克·泰希尔—拉文尼（Marc TessierLavigne）宣布。这一图谱对任何希望分析人脑内神经联系的人来说都是必不可少的，尽管“脑图谱”是在非常缺少一个真正的神经图谱计划的情况下绘出的。 总的来说，在科幻小说和幻象中经常被提及的那种天然的心灵感应目前是不可能实现的。MRI扫描和EEG波仅可用来读取我们最简单的思想，因为思维是以复杂的方式散布到整个大脑的。但在未来的数十年到数百年中，这一科技将如何前进？不可避免地，科学家探究思维过程的能力将按指数增强。随着我们的MRI和其他传感装置的灵敏性增加，科学家将可以高度精确地把大脑依次处理思维和情绪的路径局域化。有了更强的计算机能力，我们将得以用更高的精确程度分析这些海量的数据。一本思维的词典也许能够把大量思维图形分类，使MRI显示屏上的不同思维图形与不同的想法和感受对应。尽管完整的MRI图形和思维一一对应或许永远都是不可能的，但一本思维词典可以正确地鉴别出关于某些对象的大致想法。MRI思维图形能依次标出一个神经图谱上精确表示大脑中哪个神经元被激活以产生某种具体的思想。 但是，由于大脑不是一台计算机而是一个神经网络，思维在整个大脑中扩展，最终我们会撞上一块绊脚石：大脑本身。因此，尽管科学家会越来越深入地探测思考中的大脑，使破译我们的一些思考过程成为可能，但像科幻小说那样精准地“阅读你的思想”则不可能实现。考虑到这一点，我会把阅读大致感受和思维图形的能力定义为“一等不可思议”，更为精确地读取思维中更深层次工作方式的能力将不得不被归类为“二等不可思议”。 不过，要接近大脑的巨大力量或许有另一种更为直接的途径。一个人能够直接进入大脑神经元，而不是使用微弱又容易分散的无线电吗？如果能，我们或许可以解放一种更为强大的力量：意志力。