Jiansen Lu
Mind reading using functional magnetic resonance imaging
July 16th 2011 16:15
Have you ever tried to read other people's mind? Yes, it is possible to read someone's mind by measuring their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. fMRI is a specialized MRI scan used to measure the change in blood flow related to neural activity in the brain. An MRI machine uses a powerful magnetic field to align the magnetization of some atoms in the body and provides good contrast between the different soft tissues of the body.
Record Brain Activity using fMRI
The mind activity is processed by neurons in different area of the brain. When we see an image, we take the image projected onto our eyes and store the color, depth, location, shape and time of the image in different neurons in our brains. By employing computer models of various theories, scientists can build the relation between neural signals in different brain areas to reconstruct cohesive perception. For example, Kay et al. (Nature 2008) used receptive-field models to build a visual decoder from fMRI data. They established how the activity of each voxel in the visual cortex responded to the images.
Video: Reading Your Mind
Neuroscience has learned much about the brain's activity and its link to certain thoughts. As Lesley Stahl reports, it may now be possible, on a basic level, to read a person's mind.
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