Can brain scans read your mind?(le in court for example. Our stu...),Health

"Our study suggests that the kinds of things that some people have talked about in terms of mind reading are probably still pretty far off," Poldrack said. "If we are only 80 percent accurate with eight very different thoughts and we want to figure out what you're thinking out of millions of possible thoughts, we're still very far away from achieving that."

Poldrack's study is one of the first to show that neuroscientists can make these kinds of predictions on new people, whose brain patterns the researchers have never seen before. In most previous studies, researchers made predictions about a person's mental state after having already studied that person's brain to understand its particular patterns.

"Our study indicates that different people's brains work very similarly," Poldrack said. "We often tend to focus on how different each person's brain is, but our study suggests that most healthy people's brains work in very similar ways; otherwise, this approach wouldn't work.

"We can tell a lot about what you're thinking using functional MRI, even though we have never seen your brain before," he said. "However, it is limited in that there are only eight things that we are letting you think about in this study."

The tools used in this research come from a scientific field known as machine learning, which is related to statistics and computer science, said Poldrack, who noted that this technology is heavily employed by companies like Amazon to predict what people will buy based on their previous purchases.

Nearly 10 years ago, neuroscientists showed that if they take brain images with fMRI while people look at different objects, such as faces, houses and chairs, they can use the tools of machine learning to predict with high accuracy what object the subjects are looking at if the scientists first know from studying brain activity how each subject's brain responds to those
'/>"/>