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Scientists Predicting Intentions
An anonymous reader writes to tell us German scientists claim to have the means of predicting decisions of high level mental activity. "In the past, experts had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements in advance. But researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity _ in this case, adding versus subtracting."
Also, fMRI will never be able to predict intentions in real time due to the hemodynamic lag, and is currently practically impossible to analyze online due technical limitations. What they did was use information which occured before the decision to predict which decision was later made. However, this analysis was done after the decision was made . That is to say, after the scans were over, the data from the few seconds before the decision was found to be predictive of which way the decision went. So it's not like they really knew what was going to happen before it did.