Brain scan can read people's thoughts: researchers

[daveOS]

Looks like they're willing to tell us they've gone a step beyond assessing emotional impact of stationary images on the brain to reading the thoughts resulting from viewing motion pictures.

Iacoboni's research usually has little to do with politics. At UCLA, he uses a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to do brain mapping.

However, in 2004, he and a political scientist studied the brains of supporters of
President Bush and Sen.
John Kerry during the presidential campaign.

When the test subjects saw a picture of the candidate they supported, the medial orbital frontal cortex of the brain - the area behind the eyeballs associated with empathy - lit up.

When they were shown a picture or TV ad for the candidate they opposed, the island-shaped insula in the middle of the brain lit up along with other areas "associated with distaste," Iacoboni said. Then, other parts of the brain activated, as if the participants were "using their rational brain areas to get upset at the other guy; they were using it to find a reason" to dislike the candidate, Iacoboni said.

And now we have the algorithms running to accurately predict storylines running through peoples heads, Brain scan can read people's thoughts: researchers.


[quote author=AFP - Brain scan can read people's thoughts: researchers]In the study, Maguire and her colleagues Martin Chadwick, Demis Hassabis, and Nikolaus Weiskopf showed 10 people each three very short films before brain scanning. Each movie featured a different actress and a fairly similar everyday scenario.

The researchers scanned the participants' brains while the participants were asked to recall each of the films. The researchers then ran the imaging data through a computer algorithm designed to identify patterns in the brain activity associated with memories for each of the films.

Finally, they showed that those patterns could be identified to accurately predict which film a given person was thinking about when he or she was scanned.[/quote]