'Thoughts read' via brain scans

Teams at University College London and University College L.A. say they have been able to monitor people's thoughts via scans of their brains. They could tell what images people were looking at or what sounds they were listening to.

In the UK experiment, people were shown two images at the same time - a red one in front of the right eye and a blue one in front of the left. The volunteers wore special goggles which meant each eye saw only what was put in front of it.

While people's attention switched between the two images, fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain scanning was used to monitor activity in the visual cortex. It was found that focusing on the red or the blue patterns led to noticeably different patterns of brain activity. So the fMRI scans could reliably be used to predict which of the images the volunteer was looking at.

The US study used electrodes placed inside the skull to monitor the responses of brain cells in the auditory cortex of patients as they watched a clip of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".

The study's findings proved that fMRI scans could "read thoughts". Pr. Itzhak Fried, who led the research, said: "We were able to tell one part of a scene from another, and we could tell one type of sound from another."

"One day, someone will come up with a machine in a baseball cap," said Dr John-Dylan Haynes from UCL. "Our study represents an important but very early stage step towards eventually building a machine that can track a person's consciousness on a second-by-second basis. These findings could be used to help develop or improve devices that help paralyzed people communicate through measurements of their brain activity.

But he stressed: "We are still a long way off from developing a universal mind-reading machine."

Via BBC News.