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The US will announce a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions before next month's UN climate summit, according to a White House official.
The target is expected to be in line with figures contained in legislation before the Senate - a reduction of about 17-20% from 2005 levels by 2020.
The absence of a US target has widely been seen as the single biggest obstacle to agreement at the summit.
President Barack Obama has not yet decided whether to attend the talks.
At the weekend, the hosts of the Copenhagen conference announced that more than 60 heads of state and government had pledged to take part in the two-week negotiating session.
Hopefully, the negotiations will see everyone coming up with more ambitious targets - otherwise there's no point in going to Copenhagen
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Mr Obama will join them if it appears that his presence would increase chances of the 192 parties reaching agreement, the official indicated.
"There's been recognition that if we want to keep momentum going, numbers have to be put on the table," said Peter Bahouth, executive director of the US Climate Action Network, a network of organisations lobbying for action on the issue.
"There's been pressure for the US to come (to Copenhagen) with its hands full rather than empty, and I think what we're seeing are the results of that."
In the last week, Mr Obama has discussed climate change with a number of other world leaders including Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President Hu Jintao of China and Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.
Domestic delays
Although Mr Obama campaigned on a promise to cut emissions, and pledged global leadership on climate change on assuming office, the US position has been constrained by delays in putting legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions through Congress.
COPENHAGEN SUMMIT
Planning to attend:
Leaders of Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Japan, Indonesia and Brazil
Yet to commit:
Leaders of the United States, China and India
Where countries stand on summit
Climate: A defining issue
The House of Representatives passed a bill in June that would cap emissions and establish a national carbon trading scheme.
But progress of a similar bill through the Senate is not likely before March at the earliest.
Administration officials have indicated that the targets are being discussed with senior senators in an attempt to ensure that the Senate will back whatever target Mr Obama takes to Copenhagen.
It is not clear when the target will emerge, but there are now less than two weeks before the summit opens on 7 December.
There will also be pressure internationally for the US to say how much money it is prepared to transfer to poorer countries to help them fight climate change, as it is bound to do under the UN climate convention.
Cutting edge
In the UN climate process, targets are conventionally given in comparison with 1990 levels of emissions.
On that basis, the likely US figure amounts to a cut of just a few percent, as emissions have risen by about 15% since 1990.
This is much less than the EU's pledge of a 20% cut over the same period, or a 30% cut if there is a global deal; and much less than the 25-40% figure that developing countries are demanding.
CLIMATE CHANGE GLOSSARY
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EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said at the weekend that the EU should pledge 30% now as a way of showing commitment.
But Saleemul Huq, a climate change specialist with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) who works closely with a number of developing country governments, suggested the target would be well received as a worthy first step.
"I think it's an extremely good signal that the Obama administration is willing to put a target forward and not wait for Congress," he told BBC News.
"The targets that everyone is taking to Copenhagen are the bases for negotiation; and hopefully, the negotiations will see everyone coming up with more ambitious targets - otherwise there's no point in going to Copenhagen, we could leave it all up to the US Congress.
"The other important factor is whether President Obama is willing to go to the summit - if he does, that would be a very good sign."
The list of confirmed attendees includes UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
But neither Mr Obama nor Chinese President Hu Jintao - leaders of the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters - are yet among them.
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WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind.
In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing – and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering.
Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading “neural decoder” at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field’s most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.
Understandably, such developments are raising concerns about “mind reading” technologies, which might be exploited by advertisers or oppressive governments (see “The risks of open-mindedness”). Yet despite – or perhaps because of – the recent progress in the field, most researchers are wary of calling their work mind-reading. Emphasising its limitations, they call it neural decoding.
The development of ‘mind-reading’ technologies is raising concerns about who might exploit them
They are quick to add that it may lead to powerful benefits, however. These include gaining a better understanding of the brain and improved communication with people who can’t speak or write, such as stroke victims or people with neurodegenerative diseases. There is also excitement over the possibility of being able to visualise something highly graphical that someone healthy, perhaps an artist, is thinking.
So how does neural decoding work? Gallant’s team drew international attention last year by showing that brain imaging could predict which of a group of pictures someone was looking at, based on activity in their visual cortex. But simply decoding still images alone won’t do, says Nishimoto. “Our natural visual experience is more like movies.”
Nishimoto and Gallant started their most recent experiment by showing two lab members 2 hours of video clips culled from DVD trailers, while scanning their brains. A computer program then mapped different patterns of activity in the visual cortex to different visual aspects of the movies such as shape, colour and movement. The program was then fed over 200 days’ worth of YouTube clips, and used the mappings it had gathered from the DVD trailers to predict the brain activity that each YouTube clip would produce in the viewers.
Finally, the same two lab members watched a third, fresh set of clips which were never seen by the computer program, while their brains were scanned. The computer program compared these newly captured brain scans with the patterns of predicted brain activity it had produced from the YouTube clips. For each second of brain scan, it chose the 100 YouTube clips it considered would produce the most similar brain activity – and then merged them. The result was continuous, very blurry footage, corresponding to a crude “brain read-out” of the clip that the person was watching.
In some cases, this was more successful than others. When one lab member was watching a clip of the actor Steve Martin in a white shirt, the computer program produced a clip that looked like a moving, human-shaped smudge, with a white “torso”, but the blob bears little resemblance to Martin, with nothing corresponding to the moustache he was sporting.
Another clip revealed a quirk of Gallant and Nishimoto’s approach: a reconstruction of an aircraft flying directly towards the camera – and so barely seeming to move – with a city skyline in the background omitted the plane but produced something akin to a skyline. That’s because the algorithm is more adept at reading off brain patterns evoked by watching movement than those produced by watching apparently stationary objects.
“It’s going to get a lot better,” says Gallant. The pair plan to improve the reconstruction of movies by providing the program with additional information about the content of the videos.
Team member Thomas Naselaris demonstrated the power of this approach on still images at the conference. For every pixel in a set of images shown to a viewer and used to train the program, researchers indicated whether it was part of a human, an animal, an artificial object or a natural one. The software could then predict where in a new set of images these classes of objects were located, based on brain scans of the picture viewers.
Movies and pictures aren’t the only things that can be discerned from brain activity, however. A team led by Eleanor Maguire and Martin Chadwick at University College London presented results at the Chicago meeting showing that our memory isn’t beyond the reach of brain scanners.
Movies and pictures aren’t the only things that can be discerned from brain activity
A brain structure called the hippocampus is critical for forming memories, so Maguire’s team focused its scanner on this area while 10 volunteers recalled videos they had watched of different women performing three banal tasks, such as throwing away a cup of coffee or posting a letter. When Maguire’s team got the volunteers to recall one of these three memories, the researchers could tell which the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of about 50 per cent.
That’s well above chance, says Maguire, but it is not mind reading because the program can’t decode memories that it hasn’t already been trained on. “You can’t stick somebody in a scanner and know what they’re thinking.” Rather, she sees neural decoding as a way to understand how the hippocampus and other brain regions form and recall a memory.
Maguire could tackle this by varying key aspects of the clips – the location or the identity of the protagonist, for instance – and see how those changes affect their ability to decode the memory. She is also keen to determine how memory encoding changes over the weeks, months or years after memories are first formed.
Meanwhile, decoding how people plan for the future is the hot topic for John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany. In work presented at the conference, he and colleague Ida Momennejad found they could use brain scans to predict intentions in subjects planning and performing simple tasks. What’s more, by showing people, including some with eating disorders, images of food, Haynes’s team could determine which suffered from anorexia or bulimia via brain activity in one of the brain’s “reward centres”.
Another focus of neural decoding is language. Marcel Just at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleague Tom Mitchell reported last year that they could predict which of two nouns – such as “celery” and “airplane” – a subject is thinking of, at rates well above chance. They are now working on two-word phrases.
Their ultimate goal of turning brain scans into short sentences is distant, perhaps impossible. But as with the other decoding work, it’s an idea that’s as tantalising as it is creepy.
The risks of open-mindedness
The feats of decoding brain scans to predict someone’s thoughts are undoubtedly dazzling (see main story), but “neural decoding” techniques are also limited in how they can be applied. Right now, they only work if someone’s brain has already been scanned multiple times, and in very specific circumstances. So can we really call this mind reading? And should we worry about potentially creepy uses for such technology?
To some extent it’s a question of semantics, but many researchers, including neuroscientist Russell Poldrack at the University of Texas at Austin, say it’s clear that the work done to date is a far cry from what most people think of as mind reading, such as predicting whether a terrorist has plans to detonate a bomb on an aircraft.
Yet even if such applications are a very distant possibility, we should start thinking about the ethical issues now, says John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.
Some companies already claim that brain scans can help to pick out liars and determine whether an advert works or not, and there may be some truth in such claims. Haynes says standards are needed to spell out what neural decoding can and cannot reliably do, so as not to erode public trust in the field.
Neuroscientist Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. He says that neural decoding could be a double-edged sword. If his hopes for the technology ever come to fruition, he says, the same machine that reads the thoughts of patients with a neurodegenerative disease may well find more nefarious applications at some point.
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