"Mind-Reading" with MRI-Computer Technology

An MRI machine that measures blood flow in the brain shows how spatial memories are recorded in the hippocampus, allowing scientists to "read" a person's mind and find where he is by what part of that brain area is energized, a recent study showed.

The hippocampus is a small area on both sides of the brain just under the cerebral cortex devoted to spatial memory, memory recall and imagining future events. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, was done by Demis Hassabis and Professor Eleanor Maguire at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
   
We “know” where we are through the activation of cells in the hippocampus called place cells. In the study, the research team used an fMRI scanner to follow the blood flow in each study participant’s hippocampus, which indicated how the place cells were activating as the subject navigated around a virtual-reality environment. Hassabis developed a computer algorithm to analyze the data they collected.

“We asked whether we could see any interesting patterns in the neural activity that could tell us what the participants were thinking, or in this case where they were,” explained Maguire. “Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data, we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual-reality environment. In other words, we could ‘read’ their spatial memories.”
   
In a study Maguire did some years ago, she discovered an enlargement of the rear areas of the hippocampuses of taxi drivers who have accomplished the extraordinary feat of memorizing the maze of London streets. Maguire and her colleagues reasoned that this brain area that governs spatial position and direction. The new study seemed to confirm this, because spatial-memory activity was found to occur in the same area.
   
Maguire also said her findings open up a range of possibilities of discovering how more-complex memories are stored across different areas of the brain, including memories of the past or visualizations of the future.
   
“Understanding how we as humans record our memories is critical to helping us learn how information is processed in the hippocampus and how our memories are eroded by diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” added Hassabis.
   
“It’s also a small step towards the idea of mind reading, because just by looking at neural activity, we are able to say what someone is thinking.”

An MRI machine that measures blood flow in the brain shows how spatial memories are recorded in the hippocampus, allowing scientists to "read" a person's mind and find where he is by what part of that brain area is energized, a recent study showed.

The hippocampus is a small area on both sides of the brain just under the cerebral cortex devoted to spatial memory, memory recall and imagining future events. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, was done by Demis Hassabis and Professor Eleanor Maguire at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
   
We “know” where we are through the activation of cells in the hippocampus called place cells. In the study, the research team used an fMRI scanner to follow the blood flow in each study participant’s hippocampus, which indicated how the place cells were activating as the subject navigated around a virtual-reality environment. Hassabis developed a computer algorithm to analyze the data they collected.

“We asked whether we could see any interesting patterns in the neural activity that could tell us what the participants were thinking, or in this case where they were,” explained Maguire. “Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data, we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual-reality environment. In other words, we could ‘read’ their spatial memories.”
   
In a study Maguire did some years ago, she discovered an enlargement of the rear areas of the hippocampuses of taxi drivers who have accomplished the extraordinary feat of memorizing the maze of London streets. Maguire and her colleagues reasoned that this brain area that governs spatial position and direction. The new study seemed to confirm this, because spatial-memory activity was found to occur in the same area.

More recent studies at Carnegie Mellon report even more amazing results. In their experiments researchers studied brain activity of a subject while looking at a word such as “car” or “apartment”. Not only was the computer-MRI scan able to recognize similar brain activity of the initial subject, but was able to accurately tell when another subject was looking at the same word when compared to another word. T

he implications are startling in that it seems to demonstrate that we each create similar brain activity when thinking similar thoughts or seeing similar impressions.

Will it be possible in the coming years for computers and MRI and other scanning technologies  to actually read our thoughts.  The potential already has wags talking. Could it help in quickly weeding out potential terrorists at airports? Would just thinking the thought become the crime? To what extent would it be the ultimate invasion of privacy?

The Brave New World may soon be upon us.