Scientists reading your mind!?

If you’re a paranoid individual who thinks big brother is always watching, or you wear tin foil on your head all day long in fear of alien mind control, you may wish to stop reading this article for the sake of your sanity.

It appears that scientists are on the verge of creating the technology to read your mind, thoughts, and even visualize what you see in your dreams. “Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed a new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor.”

The scientists at ATR studied changes in subjects cerebral blood flow with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging machine). Subjects were shown 400 random 10x10 pixel, black & white images for 12 seconds each. A computer monitored changes in the blood flow throughout the brain and was able to “learn” to associate changes in brain activity with different images. Following this task the scientist showed the subjects the letters  “N-E-U-R-O-N” and the system was remarkably able to display what the subjects saw from the knowledge of their brain activity.

This in itself is astonishing; yet the researchers remain optimistic that the technology will improve and be able to see images in color, even view what people dream of.

The use for this technology isn’t meant to spook all the suspicious people in the world. Rather this could be used to study and possibly treat psychiatric disorders like hallucinations. So you can take the foil off your head for now, resting assured that this technology is still in the development phase. Yet the possibilities are endless.