i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

According to this article, Microsoft researchers have seen some limited success is reading subjects' minds and extracting some tagging info. That is, when exposed to images of human faces, the subjects' brains fire off in certain areas more so than when shown images of cars, non-human animals, etc. The researchers think that though this is greatly limited and specific at the same time, it shows a possible way to add tag info to images in a more rapid and "automatic" way.

From what I've read in the past, it is well known that human brains do have certain areas that respond to images of human faces (involuntarily and rapidly, before conscious action). More so when the faces exhibit strong emotions, or are of a parent -- perhaps that's next on the research queue. And from my own work for a psych prof *mumblemumble* years ago as an undergrad, in which we measured perception times of right- or left-facing chevrons (using a six-channel tachistoscope), basic conscious perception can register in far shorter times than the 500 ms used in this experiment. Though we didn't use a distraction task.