CMU Intelligent Seminar: Decoding conscious and unconscious mental states from brain activity in humans

John-Dylan Haynes
Max-Planck Institute CNS, Leipzig, Germany

Faculty Host: Tom Mitchell

Recent advances in human neuroimaging have shown that it is possible to accurately decode a person's conscious experience based only on non-invasive multivariate measurements of their brain activity. Such 'brain reading' has mostly been studied in the domain of visual perception, where it helps reveal the way in which individual experiences are encoded in the human brain. Here several studies will be presented that directly address the relationship between neural encoding of information (as measured with fMRI) and its availability for awareness. These studies include comparisons of neural and perceptual information, unconscious information processing, decoding of timecourses of perception, as well as decoding of high-level mental states related to the control of attention and action. A number of fundamental challenges to the science of "brain reading" will be presented and discussed.