Death. Cruelty. Trouble. Carefree. Good. Praise.
Using just those six words, and a brain's response to them, researchers were able to identify suicidal individuals with 91% accuracy. It's a rather macabre success for a machine-learning algorithm, but the implications are fairly profound.
Words like death and cruelty differentially activated the left superior medial frontal area and the medial frontal/anterior cingulate in the individuals with suicidal ideation – these are areas associated with self-referential thought. Using a machine-learning algorithm the researchers successfully identified 15 of the 17 brains from those with suicidal ideation and 16 of the 17 controls.
"It would be nice to see if we could possibly do this using EEG, if we could assess the thought alterations with EEG. It would be enormously cheaper. More widely used."
The other thing to remember is that these volunteers told us they had suicidal ideation. That's the gold-standard that the computer was learning on. But, as I noted above, people who admit they are having suicidal thoughts are the easy ones – we need ways to figure out who is suicidal and not telling us. Just pointed out that mind-reading, so to speak, is a long way off for a simple reason: