From Brain Signals to Complete Sentences: Captioning the Contents of the Mind

I know a couple in their mid-70’s who moved recently into an older adult community. They opted for the independent living portion of the community because that is the way they think of themselves and in part because they wanted to continue to remain physically active. They looked at four or five older adult communities before committing to the one they ultimately choose, determining a livability score for each based on things important to them: sidewalks and roadway crossing, especially to nearby destinations; bicycle network completeness and stress level, access to public transit, permeability of the community to surrounding neighborhoods.

What helps a young person withstand adversity—and could supportive relationships help protect them from suicide? Dr Lynne Fullerton has spent much of her career investigating these questions, from the long-term effects of childhood abuse to the protective role of adults in young people's lives.

How the environments around us influence focus, behaviour and everyday decisions.

Some months ago I directed a short film for Stuart Kauffman on the emergence of complex life. It opens with him standing in a forest, Attenborough-style, gesturing at the green chaos around him — eighty years old and visibly delighted by all of it. That delight is the thing to hold on to in what follows. Kauffman — theoretical biologist, complexity theorist, one of the founding minds of the Santa Fe Institute — has spent half a century at the edge of what equations can describe. We spoke about a theorem that explains three hundred thousand years of human history, why life is not a machine, and the quiet demolition of the dream of a Theory of Everything. The conversation has been edited for length; we've tried to leave the rest of it alone.

Academia is increasingly being flooded with AI-generated research articles. Recently I was confronted with this in a very personal way, when such an “academic” article was posted online claiming to build on some of my own work. At first glance the article looked quite impressive, including many fancy mathematical equations. But a closer inspection quickly raised suspicion.

For centuries, the contents of our minds have remained fundamentally private—thoughts, memories, and mental images locked away until we choose to express them. But what if that barrier could be crossed? Neuroscientist Dr. Tomoyasu Horikawa has developed a technique called "mind captioning" that translates patterns of brain activity into written sentences. The research demonstrates something remarkable: by combining fMRI scanning with artificial intelligence, meaningful aspects of what we see and remember can be decoded directly from the brain, without speech or language production.