Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have created a “semantic brain decoder” to guess someone’s thoughts based on brain activity.

During tests, it captured the gist of what someone was thinking, rather than a literal translation. And if participants resisted, it produced gibberish.

The decoder, written about in the journal Nature Neuroscience in May, is novel, said Edmund Lalor, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester. But its threat to privacy is minimal.