It’s the stuff of science fiction, and yet it could soon become reality–at least down the road, if not today.
NPR reports that a new computer program analyzing brain activity figured out which of three short films 10 volunteers were thinking about–with perfect accuracy.
Here how it works: the program analyzes the hippocampus, a part of the brain that appears to index memories of events, and searches it for traces of these events in brain scans. The volunteers watched the three short films over and over–word is they weren’t just cat videos–and then were asked to recall the movies when hooked up to the scanner.
Not only did the program get every single case correct, but scientists also discovered that the pattern for each movie was similar across all 10 brains, the report said. Yikes. The study originally appeared in the journal Current Biology. (Image credit: Barco Coronis medical LCD)