Actually you can, in limited cases.

If you have prior knowledge of the person's brain activity when looking at an image, it's possible to predict (reconstruct an image of) what they're looking at.

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/figures?id=10...

That is not reading thoughts. That is via the occipital Cortex which has a highly structured representation of what is projected on to the retina. This is much easier as the organisation of the data is maintained relative to the retina, just regrouped according to visual field rather than eye.

If we're reading data from the brain isn't that by definition reading thoughts, regardless of where in the brain they originate from?

Part of the study involved decoding images from memory/recall. I did say _limited_.

It depends how tightly you want to define "thought", but being able to think of an object and having a computer display a reasonable representation of it seems like a good start.

10 years ago I watched a national geographic documentary about something quite similar to this one. The results were also apperantly impressive. It's weird they haven't progressed much during this period. Sadly I can't find any resources about that project anywhere.

Probably because of this little important detailed not mentioned in the title "Five participants underwent chronic implantation of a high-density, subdural electrode array over the lateral surface of the brain as part of their clinical treatment for epilepsy"