Science & Technology

Scientists use machine to read minds

By T.K. Randall
March 30, 2014

Image: Inside My Head
Credit: Andrew Mason / CC BY 2.0 (adapted) Researchers at Yale University conducted an experiment in which the brains of 30 volunteers were scanned using an MRI scanner while they were browsing through a selection of 300 photographs of people's faces.

Using nothing more than the neural activity data from the scans, the team was able to then reconstruct the specific faces that each volunteer was thinking about. The results were nothing if not remarkable with the reconstructed faces consistently bearing a close resemblance to the actual photographs."It is mind reading," said graduate student Alan S. Cowen. "You can see how people perceive faces depending on different disorders, like autism - and use that to help diagnose therapies."

Despite the success of the technique however there is still a long way to go before such a system could retrieve any memories you wanted from a person's mind.

"This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain," said Cowen. "So you couldn't read passive memories - you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it."

Source: New York Daily News

Tags: Mind Reading, Brain