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Scientists Use fMRI To (Sort of) Read Minds

Posted by kdawson on from the penny-for-your-thoughts-nevermind-we'll-just-take-them dept.

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. Re:Volunteer? by Hecatonchires · · Score: 5, Funny

    The paw the ground once for yes, and eat you for no.

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    Yay me!

  2. Related Work by bazald · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Tom Mitchell et al. have done some work on differentiating memory recall of nouns. Hearing him give a talk on the subject really made me rethink some things. To what extent are different human brains structured similarly? It seems as though two people thinking about a given noun (e.g. a hammer) really have similarities in their fMRI patterns.

    Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529141354.htm
    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1191

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