Here's a link to the actual manuscript, instead of a strange summary that somehow drags Elon Musk into this:<p><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/27/193987" rel="nofollow">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/27/193987</a>
The male zebra finch, like many other songbirds, purposely attempts to sing the same song over and over without any variation, including in pitch and volume. This is because singing is primarily a courtship ritual, and females are attracted to high song stereotypy in males. A random song can be selected out of the hundreds sung daily and 80 to 90 percent of the other songs will be pretty much exactly the same.<p>While the research is of course impressive, it's a bit premature to extrapolate it to humans, or any other animal.
"We implanted 16/32 site Si-probes in male, adult zebra finches and recorded simultaneously their song and neural activity in HVC; then we used these data to train a long-short-term memory network (LSTM 5) to translate neural activity directly onto song. The goal of the network is to predict the spectral components of the song at a time bin ti, given the values of neural activity features over previous time bins"
Extrapolating this to humans is scary (given the mental privacy we are used to), but perhaps inevitable. In some sense, the security of our thoughts is only through obscurity, and that may make them intrinsically insecure. Untangling that obscurity may be some years away, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility. I wonder if the brain has evolved some internal methods of encryption - I would imagine not, as I can not think of a solid evolutionary advantage for brain based encryption.<p>A very interesting topic, and I can't quite decide if a mind-machine interface would end up having a net positive or negative effect on our society...