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http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/06/medicalresearchScary or sensational? A machine that can look into the mind
Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.
The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.
The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person's dreams or memory.
Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time."
It will inevitably also raise fears that a suspect's brain could be interrogated against their will, raising the nightmarish possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes". The researchers say this is currently firmly in the realm of science fiction because the technique can only be applied to visual images and, to date, the experiments rely on cumbersome MRI scanning equipment and extremely powerful magnets. The software decoder itself has to be adapted to each individual during hours of training while in the scanner.
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