Scientists Use fMRI To (Sort of) Read Minds 57
NigelTheFrog writes "Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers' hippocampuses. From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly where they were in a virtual reality landscape. 'Specific parts of each participant's hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn "predict" new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person's pattern of brain activity.'"
Related Work (Score:5, Interesting)
Tom Mitchell et al. have done some work on differentiating memory recall of nouns. Hearing him give a talk on the subject really made me rethink some things. To what extent are different human brains structured similarly? It seems as though two people thinking about a given noun (e.g. a hammer) really have similarities in their fMRI patterns.
Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529141354.htm [sciencedaily.com]
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1191 [sciencemag.org]
Re:Practical applications (Score:4, Interesting)
Employers are already looking into early-stage prototypes they can fit on their employees to predict their position and movement within buildings. This will save them time and money since they will never again have to ask, "where did Tom go?"
Unfortunately those early tests have shown a slight decrease in productivity after every computer within 10 feet of the 3 Tesla magnetic field failed to boot. There was also a serious setback when one of the testers forgot to remove the prototype before taking a train home and derailed it.