arXiv:2610.33093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Functional ultrasound could image cortical blood volume through the temporal bone, but the skull leaves a weak signal, and task-evoked cortical imaging through the intact adult skull has not yet been shown. We built a voxel-specific Monte Carlo link-budget simulation of a probe on the left temple and used it to degrade public fMRI of three people who heard 15 hours of stories. On the same anatomical voxels we trained a published state-of-the-art fMRI language decoder (Tang et al., 2023) and two verifiers that only check a candidate text. In clean data the verifiers needed far less training (11 to 12 minutes against 3.2 to 6.6 hours), but all three learned at a similar rate. Noise changed this qualitatively: the verifiers kept gaining evidence while the decoder slowed and, under simulated transcranial physics, stalled, whereas the verifiers still reached their goal under a favorable simulated link budget. This asymmetry suggests that low-SNR modalities such as transcranial ultrasound may support verification well before decoding.