AI Can Now Read Your Mind

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]In 2021, AI did something nobody thought was possible. It read a man's mind. 100 years ago, a German psychiatrist named Hans Berger spent 30 years trying to build a mind-reading machine. He failed.

[00:00:13]He died believing it was impossible. He was right though, because humans couldn't do it, but AI just did. Most people think that AI reading your mind is a future thing, a sci-fi scenario, something that only happens when the AI gets smart enough. That's totally wrong, because it's already happening as I'm speaking. And the question isn't whether AI will read your mind, it's how far this goes.

[00:00:37]Your mind is the last private place in the world. Right now, you're having thoughts that you would never say out loud. There's the version of you that the world sees, and there's a version that lives inside of your head. These two versions almost never match. And for 200,000 years, this was non-negotiable.

[00:00:53]Your thoughts were your own, locked inside of your head. Nobody, not even the closest people to you, not the smartest people on Earth, could reach inside and read your mind until 1924, when one strange man tried something nobody has ever tried before. His name was Hans Berger, a young soldier in the German army. In 1892, during a military exercise, his horse threw him on the ground and he almost died. The same day, hundreds of miles away, his sister suddenly felt that something terrible has happened to him. She begged her father to send a telegram. Berger spent the rest of his life trying to figure out how was that possible. He believed his sister read his mind, and he wanted to prove it scientifically. For 30 years, he worked in secret. People laughed at him. He buried himself in research nobody else cared about, the electrical activity of the human brain.

[00:01:43]Then, on 6th of July, 1924, he placed two electrodes on the head of a young man with a hole in his cranium. And for the first time in history, a person watched the electrical activity of a living human brain. He called it the electroencephalogram, EEG for short. The technology that lets us listen to the brain. You see, the human brain runs on electricity. Every thought, every emotion, every memory is just neurons firing tiny electrical impulses. 86 billion of them firing billions of times per second [music] to be more precise.

[00:02:15]EEG only picks up a faint echo of what's happening underneath your skull. The signal is around 1 millionth of one single volt. So, reading a thought from all of that mess is like trying to find one single face in a full stadium while you're standing in a parking lot outside. Berger never proved telepathy.

[00:02:32]He died believing he had failed. And for the next 100 years, his machine collected dust in hospitals all around the world. It could record the brain, but it couldn't understand [music] it.

[00:02:42]The signals were too messy and nobody understood how to actually decipher them. And for 100 years, that wall was there. Nobody could break it. A single second of brain activity contains millions of data points. researcher looking at that sees only the noise. It would take something that could read the patterns that no human can ever see. And the same way AI learned how to spot one single face from a million photos, it learned to spot the signature of one single thought [music] in an entire sea of brain signals. And that changed everything.

[00:03:12]There's a man named Casey Harrell, a man in his 40s, a father. He has ALS, the same disease Stephen Hawking had. A few years ago, his speech faded until even his own family couldn't understand him anymore. In 2023, surgeons placed four tiny chips into the part of his brain that controls speech. Casey thinks the words, the AI inside of his chip listens to his neurons firing and translates them into speech in real time in his own voice that's cloned all the recordings of him before the disease took it.

[00:03:41]Accuracy, 97%.

[00:03:44]Vocabulary, 125,000 words. A man who hadn't had a conversation in years is now talking again just by thinking with the help of AI. Then there's a woman named Anne. 15 years ago, a stroke took her ability to speak. At the University of California in San Francisco, scientists trained an AI to read the part of her brain that would have moved her mouth. Now Anne talks at almost 80 words per minute through a digital avatar of her face.

[00:04:10]The AI even reads her facial expressions, the smile, the frown, all of them pulled from her brain. In 2025, the same team broke another record.

[00:04:20]Brain to speech in less than 80 milliseconds. That's faster than you can blink. And then there's this company you've already heard of. It's called Neuralink. By the end of 2025, 12 people had Neuralink chips implanted in their brain. One of them is Nolan. Paralyzed from the shoulders down, Neuralink was implanted on his brain in January 2024.

[00:04:39]He plays chess, he plays video games for hours. AI watches the neurons in his motor cortex and turns them into clicks in real time, and he only needs his thoughts. We also have Paul from the United Kingdom who woke up from his Neuralink surgery, and within hours of opening his eyes, he was already moving a computer cursor with his mind. These are not lab experiments. They are people living their lives. 100 years ago, Hans Berger died believing that the human brain could never be decoded. [music] He was right because humans couldn't do it, but AI just did it, and it broke the wall. [music] And what goes through the wall next in this video is going to change everything you know about being a person.

[00:05:17]This is a headband. It costs less than a phone, and anyone can buy it. It uses the very same idea that Berger discovered 100 years ago. These sensors that pick up the electrical activity of your brain. But it has something Berger didn't. Inside of this band, we have four EEG sensors that pick up your brain's electrical activity, plus a five-point near infrared array that shines light through your forehead and measures the blood flow in your prefrontal cortex. Together, they give the AI a real-time picture of what's happening [music] up there. Electricity tells you what the brain is doing and blood flow tells you how hard. And until recently, this combination only existed on lab benches. Now, you can just find it on the internet. And the AI inside of this headband was trained on more than 80,000 brain sessions. Real human brains doing real things such as focusing, sleeping, panicking, calming down, running, so on and so forth. And when I'm putting this on, it knows what state I am in. It knows if I'm focused, if I'm anxious, [music] it knows when I'm sliding into sleep. It cannot tell you what words I'm thinking right now, but it can tell you what kind of mind I'm in right now. This right here is the entry level, the gateway. There's a whole ladder above it. This is the NeuroSky Crown, twice the sensors, an open developer platform. You can fly a drone with your mind using this thing. You can trigger AI without saying a word. And for the first time in history, your brain can press a button without your hand moving. And then, you reach the top of the ladder when the sensors don't just go on your head, they go inside of your brain. And that is the case for KC Ann and Nolan.

[00:06:52]What used to cost tens of thousands of dollars and required surgery is now collapsing into things you can just wear. What used to take entire hospitals can now fit on a desk. And what used to be impossible, such as taking words from somebody's brain, is now happening with the help of AI. The trajectory is one single direction, down in price and up in capability, out of the lab and into the normal life. Five years from now, the entry point is built into your headphones. [music] 10 years from now, you won't even notice it's there. And when that happens, when this entire technology stops being something that you must wear and starts being something that's just around you, three big things in your day-to-day life are going to break. And these three things have been true for as long as humans existed on planet Earth.

[00:07:36]The keyboard that you're typing on, it's based on an old layout from 1873. Every email, every search, every text, all of them go through your fingers. Your fingers are basically a slow translator between what's in your head and what ends up on the screen. And that translator is going to be cut out first.

[00:07:54]Mark Zuckerberg has built one of Meta's biggest bets around a wristband that reads the signals in your wrist as you intend to move your fingers and types for you in the air. He said on stage last year, "This is meant to replace your keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen."

[00:08:10]The first version is shipping now, and the version that types as fast as a keyboard by 2028. And Apple has already gone further. As of May 2025, brain input is officially a native input on the iPhone, iPad, and the Vision Pro.

[00:08:24]What that means in plain English, touch, voice, mouse, every iPhone treats them as standard inputs that are built inside of the operating system of your phone.

[00:08:33]Now, brain signals do, too. There's an official protocol that lets your brain-computer interface send signals to your phone the same way your finger does. For now, it still needs an implant on the user's side, but the door is open. Behind every one of these, Meta's wristband, Apple's protocol, the chips in Casey's head, we have the same thing, AI, which is finally smart enough to translate what your body and mind are trying to say. The world's most valuable company has quietly become a brain input company. The keyboard is not going to be replaced by another keyboard. It's going to be replaced by you.

[00:09:09]There's one question I deliberately didn't answer in this video. If an AI can read a human mind, does the AI have a mind of its own? I've debated the question, "Can AI become self-aware?" I highly recommend you to check it out.

[00:09:21]You can do so by clicking here on the screen. Right now, everything that we know about mental health comes from one single place, you telling someone about it. For all of human history, the inside of the mind has been like a black box that only the person inside could ever see. And most of the time, they cannot even it clearly. When AI can read brain states clearly and the consumer headbands are already doing that at a basic level, that's when mental health will stop being invisible. You will know if depression is starting to kick in, the same way the smartwatch warned millions of people about heart conditions they didn't even know they had and saved their lives. Brain data is going to do that, but for the mind.

[00:09:58]Depression, anxiety, Alzheimer's, burnout, all of these are conditions where today, by the time you notice, you're already deep in. And in the future, you can catch them early.

[00:10:10]This is the strongest one. Language is the most compressed version of how humans actually feel. Maybe you feel something complicated, sadness mixed with relief, mixed with old anger, and when somebody asks you how you feel, you just say, "Fine." Every translation between two people loses something.

[00:10:26]Every couple fight is just two people that are failing to compress thoughts correctly. When AI can read these brain states directly, that's when this gap will start closing. And the thing that humans wanted forever, to be understood without having to explain, for the first time becomes possible.

[00:10:45]This right here, this is just a headband, a piece of plastic with some sensors in it. It cannot read my thoughts yet, but Hans Berger, 100 years ago, would have called this miracle. 10 years from now, the AirPods in your ears would probably do more than this without you even noticing. The mind has been the last private place on Earth, and that is about to change. And the strangest part is the first mind that AI is going to read is yours. Don't forget to check out There's an AI for that, the biggest website for AI tools in the world with close to 50,000 listed AI tools. And while you're at it, subscribe to our newsletter and join close to 2.6 million daily readers. Thank you for watching.

[00:11:22]Have an amazing day.