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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.'"

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Attention Comrades of the Untied Kingdom! by owlnation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Our Glorious Leader Gordon Brown-shirt is pleased to announce a major victory on he war against: terror/crime/pedophiles/obesity/knife culture/the Royal Bank of Scotland. (delete as applicable)

    We are please to announce that new mind reading technology will now be installed into all 5 million cctv cameras, airports, public houses, and anywhere else we want to.

    Thank you for your continued obedience (or else).

  2. Re:Now they want to understand what they read. by value_added · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Electricity can be measured in excruciatingly fine detail so reading minds has been possible for some time now.

    Perhaps you could explain how that's so. Seems to me that while the study is interesting enough, the results are sufficiently crude to dismiss any notion of "reading minds". Put another way, we're still at the "poke it with a stick and see what happens" stage of inquiry. Carefully calibrated poking, perhaps, but not much more.