Science in the News

             Scientist have discovered how to read peoples minds. They are able to have a person look at an image and by reading their brain activity they can have the image they see appear on a screen. At the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University in The Netherlands, scientist have been able to use a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fmri) to see what people are seeing. The scientist put people in the scanner and monitored their brain activity in the occipital lobe as they looked at the letters B, R, A, I, and N on a screen. The machine would then translate the brain activity into an image. This could have many applications in the future. Since this is just a developing research area the technology does not currently produce a clear detailed picture. In the future when technology advances we will be able to see images more clearly. One of the things that i think this science would be interesting for would be in the area of dreams. The occipital lobe is very active even more so when you are dreaming, so this could be used to make videos of your dreams. That to me is very interesting.