New wave of research leads towards ‘mind-reading device’

Brief recordings of brain activity have enabled scientists to predict what objects volunteers were viewing, a new study has revealed.

A team of scientists from University College London (UCL), who believe that they have made the first steps towards creating a ‘mind-reading device’, conducted the study, which is published in the latest issue of ‘Nature Neuroscience’.

An experiment conducted by UCL researchers Dr Geraint Rees and Dr John-Dylan Haynes from UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, measured activity in the brain’s visual cortex, while volunteers viewed a grating slanted either to the left or the right. The researchers found that they were able to predict – with 80% accuracy – which of the two gratings the volunteer was viewing using a single two-second measurement of brain activity.

The researchers found that even when the objects were masked to appear invisible to the volunteer, they could still use their brain activity to predict which of the objects was present. The researchers said that this suggested that the unconscious processes in the brain were registering the object.

Commenting on the findings of the research, Dr Rees said: “This is the first basic step towards reading somebody’s mind. If our approach could be expanded upon, it might be possible to predict what someone was thinking or seeing from their brain activity alone.”

Dr Rees said that the technique could possibly be applied to devices such as lie detectors, but said that more research would be needed to explore which regions of the brain might predict whether someone was lying. He said: “These could be very different to the visual cortex and might not carry strong enough signals. A lie detector would also need to generalise across subjects, whereas we were basing our predictions on the brain activity of each individual.”

Dr Rees added: “Our study also shows that an object can be registered subliminally by the brain even when the individual is not conscious of it. The next stage of our research is to explore whether brain activity can be used to predict how our stream of consciousness changes over time.”

(KMcA/SP)