Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Read Your Thoughts

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants access to your brain, and he’s confident that he will get it within the next 50 years, he revealed during an on-site Q&A on Tuesday. Zuckerberg – who denied being a lizard during the same session – has made no secret of his desire to read our thoughts, and specifically for Facebook users to be able to manage their profile on the social network with the power of their minds, in a similar Q&A almost exactly a year ago.

“It’ll probably be decades down the line, but you know,” Zuckerberg told the Q&A participants, “there’s this team at Berkeley, right around here, that’s doing this research where they can take an MRI of your brain and do an image of it and they can take an MRI of you watching different things, watching different TV programs, looking at a dog, a cat, doing different activities, and then they can take those activities away and just do an MRI of your brain and then, they tell you – then they can predict what you’re thinking about, what image you’re seeing in your mind’s eye just by doing the MRI and looking at the brain pattern.”

“There’s also some pretty crazy research, I think there was a paper – I forget where I read this – but I think that the government was doing some research on memories and mice,” he added. “Where basically they had a mouse go through a maze, and it encoded the memory of how to go through the maze in its head, and then they were actually able to take the representation of that memory and zap another mouse and put that memory into another mouse.”

“That’s pretty crazy stuff. And then that mouse, without ever having been through the maze, was able to go do it. That’s just straight out of the Matrix, right? That’s really far-off. No one’s doing that on humans,” Zuckerberg lamented. “But I think that it’s, uh… in the future, there are all these ethical questions and all these interesting questions about how you do that well, and how you give people power so that they can do this in a way that they want. But having the ability, the raw ability over time, to be able to share a pure thought or feeling, in the way that you want, and give you control over that, 50 years from now – that might not be a crazy thing to think about.”