Contact:
Julian Mattocks
Phone: +43-1-81140-308
E-Mail: mattocks@pressetext.com
| Pressbox | 
|
London (pte021/25.04.2005/11:00) - A simple brain scan can read a person's unconscious thoughts, scientists claim. Functional MRI scans plot brain activity by looking at brain blood flow and are already being used by researchers. As the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, a team from the University College London http://www.ucl.ac.uk found that using fMRi, they could tell what a person was thinking deep down even when the individual was unaware themselves. According to the experts, the findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, offer exciting new ways to probe the subconscious.
In the experiment, Geraint Rees and John-Dylan Haynes measured brain activity in the visual cortex - the part of the brain that deals with information sent by the eyes - while volunteers looked at different test objects on a computer screen. By looking at the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan results, the scientists were able to predict what had been displayed on the computer screen better than volunteers themselves. When two images were flashed in quick succession, the volunteers only consciously saw the second one and were unable to make out the first. However, the brain scans clearly distinguished the patterns of brain activity created by the "invisible" images.
A separate study by Japanese researchers published in the same journal found that when people were shown stripes tilted in different directions, there were subtle differences in the pattern of brain activity obtained by fMRI. The scientists built a computer program to recognise these different patterns and found that they could predict what direction stripes had been shown with remarkable accuracy. When volunteers were shown a plaid pattern made up of two different sets of stripes but asked to pay attention to only one set, the program was able to tell which one the subjects were thinking about.
"This is the first basic step to 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," said Rees. "The technique is bringing out information that has not been available from MRI scans before," added Adrian Burgess, from the department of cognitive neuropsychology at Imperial College London. "It could potentially be used to find out people's latent attitudes and beliefs that they are not aware of. You could use it to detect people's prejudices, intuition and things that are hidden and influence our behaviour," he said. According to Burgess, it might be possible to dip into people's repressed memories or even see people's hidden fears and phobias. "That's a long way off, but it is exciting," he said.
(end)
|
|
