Health & Science

A machine that reads minds; How the election makes us smarter; The price of relief; Snowflakes or germflakes?; A false sense of security

A machine that reads minds

By decoding signals to a key part of the brain, researchers have come as close as anyone ever has to reading a person’s mind. Using a sophisticated type of magnetic resonance imaging that detects minute blood flows within the brain, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley were able to highlight which parts of test subjects’ brains’ visual cortexes were triggered when they looked at various images. Once those brain patterns were associated with specific objects, such as a horse or bicycle, scientists were able to accurately determine what the subjects were looking at based solely on their brain activity. “Our research makes substantial advances toward being able to decode mental content,” study author Kay Kendrick tells New Scientist. Scientists say the technology has great potential for diagnosing brain areas damaged by strokes, testing the effectiveness of psychotropic drugs, and even helping paraplegics one day operate machines with only their thoughts. There’s also a darker side, researchers acknowledge. “No one,” researchers said, “should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, covertly, or without complete informed consent.”

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