Think mind reading is science fiction? Think again. In the study, scientists hooked participants up to an fMRI brain scanner – which determines activity in different parts of the brain by measuring blood flow – and showed them images of faces. Then, using only the brain scans, the scientists were able to create images of the faces the people were looking at.
 
“It is mind reading,” said Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley who co-authored the study with professor Marvin M. Chun from Yale and Brice A. Kuhl from New York University.
 
“I’m applying more sophisticated mathematical models [to the brain scan results], so the results should get better,” he said.
To tease out faces based on brain activity, the scientists showed participants in the study 300 faces while recording their brain activity. Then they showed the participants 30 new faces and used their previously recorded patterns to create 30 images based only on their brain scans.
 
Once the technology improves, Cowen said, applications could range from better understanding mental disorders, to recording dreams, to solving crimes.
 
“And you can even imagine,” Cowen said, “way down the road, a witness to a crime might want to come in and reconstruct a suspect’s face.”
 
How soon could that happen? “It really depends on advances in brain imaging technology, more so than the mathematical analysis. It could be 10, 20 years away.”
 
For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information.
“This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said.