【英译中】神经科学:“我知道你在想什么”1——2014年7月19日

What are you looking at? 

Scientist Jack Gallant can find out by decoding your thoughts, as Rose Eveleth discovers.

Jack Gallant can read your mind. Or at least, he can figure out what you’re seeing if you’re in his machine watching a movie he’s playing for you.
杰克·加伦特可以知道你在想什么。或者至少可以在当你坐在他的机器看着他给你播放的电影时，他知道你在想着什么。

Gallant, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has a brain decoding machine – a device that uses brain scanning to peer into people’s minds and reconstruct what they’re seeing. 
加伦特是一个在加利福尼亚洲伯克利市某所大学的研究员。他研发出了一个大脑解码装置，这个装置可以利用对大脑的扫描来窥探一个人的思想，甚至可以重建他们眼前的图景。

If mind-reading technology like this becomes more common, should we be concerned? Ask Gallant this question, and he gives a rather unexpected answer.
如果像这样的读心术越来越普及，我们应该为此而担心吗？当问到加伦特这个问题的时候，他给出了让我们意想不到的答案。

In Gallant’s experiment, people were shown movies while the team measured their brain patterns. 
在加伦特的试验当中，被窥探的人们是经过我们谨慎地测量过他们的大脑模式之后的。

An algorithm then used those signals to reconstruct a fuzzy, composite image, drawing on a massive database of YouTube videos. In other words, they took brain activity and turned it into pictures, revealing what a person was seeing.
每一个解码的方法都是通过这些个信号来构建一个模糊的、混乱的图像，然后利用他们来构建一个像YouTube网络视频库那样的庞大的影像数据库。换句话说，就是他们将大脑活动转换成图像，从而得知一个人的想法。

For Gallant and his lab, this was just another demonstration of their technology. While his device has made plenty of headlines, he never actually set out to build a brain decoder. 
对加伦特和他的实验室来说，这是这项技术的另一种展示。而当他的这个装置博得了大量的头条新闻时，他并没有真正地制作出这样一个大脑解码器。

“It was one of the coolest things we ever did,” he says, “but it’s not science.” 
“这是我们做过的一件最酷的事情，”他说，“但这并不是科学。”

Gallant’s research focuses on figuring out how the visual system works, creating models of how the brain processes visual information. The brain reader was a side project, a coincidental offshoot of his actual scientific research. 
加伦特的研究重心是在于搞清楚视觉系统是如何工作的，大脑是如何处理那些视觉信息的。这种对大脑的解码将是一个庞大的工程，并且他巧妙地与其他科学研究相结合的了。

“It just so happens that if you build a really good model of the brain, then that turns out to be the best possible decoder.”
“事情就是这样，如果能成研制出这样一个完美的大脑模型，那么这将会是一个最棒的解码器”。