Scientists Use fMRI To (Sort of) Read Minds

NigelTheFrog writes "Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers' hippocampuses. From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly where they were in a virtual reality landscape. 'Specific parts of each participant's hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn "predict" new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person's pattern of brain activity.'"

Comments

Re:Tin foil hat

[deglr6328]

Well it would be simillar to that. aluminum is not magnetic so you wouldn't notice anything when getting into the machine, but as soon as the scan started, the ultrafast sweeping of the gradient magnet's fields that's needed to perform echo sequences with the time resolution relevant to fMRI would create HUGE ohmic heating in the conductive metal and severely burn you, if not light your hair on fire.