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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYour Brain Scans Show Who You're Thinking About
Scientists scanning the human brain can now tell whom a person is thinking of, the first time researchers have been able to identify what people are imagining from imaging technologies.
Work to visualize thought is starting to pile up successes. Recently, scientists have used brain scans to decode imagery directly from the brain, such as what number people have just seen and what memory a person is recalling.
They can now even reconstruct videos of what a person has watched based on their brain activity alone. Cornell University cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Spreng and his colleagues wanted to carry this research one step further by seeing if they could deduce the mental pictures of people that subjects conjure up in their heads.
We are trying to understand the physical mechanisms that allow us to have an inner world, and a part of that is how we represent other people in our mind, Spreng says.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/brain-scans-show-who-youre-thinking-about-2013-3
If you can decode, you can encode...
marions ghost
(19,841 posts)From the link:
Scientists have made impressive gains recently when it comes to reading minds. For instance, through brain scans, researchers can tell what number a person has just seen, figure out what letters a person wants to type, and determine where people were standing within virtual reality environments.
To see if they could discern even more complex information during mind-reading, scientists more recently had 10 volunteers watch three films, each seven-seconds long and featuring a different actress in a fairly similar everyday scenario on a typical urban street. For instance, in one movie, a woman rifled through her purse to find an envelope she then dropped into a mailbox, while in another, an actress finished her cup of coffee, which she then dropped into a trashcan. Participants watched the films 15 times.
The researchers scanned the participants' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the participants were asked to recall the films. The data was run through a computer algorithm to identify brain activity patterns linked with memories for each of the movies. Using these patterns, the researchers could accurately predict which film volunteers were recalling as they had their brains scanned.
"The algorithm was able to predict correctly which of the three films the volunteer was recalling significantly above what would be expected by chance," explained researcher Martin Chadwick at University College London. "This suggests that our memories are recorded in a regular pattern."
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drm604
(16,230 posts)Paul E Ester
(952 posts)What are you hiding? Thinking bad thoughts? Using that imagination again? Thinking outside the box?
We can't have that.
I think you need some television therapy...
Zoeisright
(8,339 posts)Just think where science could be if not for the ignorant repukes and "Christians" opposing it every step of the way.