Sometimes an article comes out with a title that makes me think, “Wait a second. It’s not even April 1st yet.”

Joe Tsien’s NR2B overexpression experiment and John Chapin’s “Rats control robots with minds” were pretty amazing articles, and now Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence comes out with a technique that can detect “whether you are thinking about a calculation, a place, a colour or even what you want to eat for dinner…but it’s not good enough yet to detect exactly what colour you’re thinking of.” I believe they’re using Bayesian analysis, a great statistical learning technique which I’ve seen being used more and more often, to look for “EEG patterns embedded in the continuous EEG signal associated with different mental states.” Here’s a summary .pdf describing the technique.