Can Brain Scans Read Your Mind?

Can neuroscience read people’s minds? Some researchers, and some new businesses, are banking on a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal hidden thoughts, such as lies, truths or deep desires.

New research by neuroscientists at UCLA and Rutgers University provides evidence that fMRI can be used in certain circumstances to determine what a person is thinking. At the same time, the research suggests that highly accurate “mind reading” using fMRI is still far from reality. The research is scheduled to be published in the October 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science.

By Lockergnome

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Can a machine change your mind?

There are in fact even more extreme examples than those in the Times article of how neuro-science and social science increasingly overlap. Alan Sanfey, of the Neural Decision Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona, for example, describes a neuro-economic analysis of an Ultimatum Game in which one person is given the power over another to make an offer to split £100. If the other rejects the offer, no one gets anything. So far so familiar — to other behavioural economics experiments that study the norms of fairness. One neuro-twist to the story, though, is that experimenters can make subjects more or less willing to accept unfair offers by subjecting their brains to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), non-invasive and painless stimulation of the brain.

By Jane O’Grady (Open Democracy)

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How Technology May Soon “Read” Your Mind

How often have you wondered what your spouse is really thinking? Or your boss? Or the guy sitting across from you on the bus? We all take as a given that we’ll never really know for sure. The content of our thoughts is our own – private, secret, and unknowable by anyone else. Until now, that is.

By CBS

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Reading Your Mind

Interesting Video by 60 minutes:

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.

By CBS News Video

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Power of the mind drives technology

Interaxon team harnesses brainwaves to operate video games, gadgets and even levitating chairs.

While they ready the chair you can levitate with your mind, there’s time for a little concert.

Water squirts and pools on the floor as Steve Mann’s fingers fly across his “hydraulophone,” coaxing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” out of the tadpole-shaped instrument.

By Joseph Hall (thestar.com)

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The mind reading machine

Boffins have discovered a way to read minds – using a hospital scanner, it was revealed yesterday.

And they claim they could invent a machine to see into our thoughts within ten years.

By Emma Morton (The Sun)

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