Did you know?
fMRI techniques were invented in 1990
Scientists can now ‘decode’ people’s thoughts without even touching their heads. Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples’ brains. The new method instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain, and because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen, this informationprovides an indirect measure of brain activity. By its nature, this scanning method cannot capture real-time brain activity, since the electrical signals released by brain cells move much more quickly than blood moves through the brain. But, remarkably, the study authors found that they could still use this imperfect proxy measure to decode the semantic meaning of people’s thoughts, although they couldn’t produce word-for-word translations. “If you had asked any cognitive neuroscientist in the world 20 years ago if this was doable, they would have laughed you out of the room,” senior study author Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said.