Scientists have discovered that mind-reading is essentially possible through MRI scans of the brain. Yale University researchers used data from the MRI brain scans of six people to reconstruct the human faces they were thinking about--recreating the faces in subjects' minds with an uncanny accuracy, Gizmodo reported.
"It is a form of mind reading," Marvin Chun, professor of psychology, cognitive science and neurobiology, said in a school news release.
Then Yale junior Alan S. Cowen came up with the idea, wondering if a human face could be reconstructed solely based on brain patterns.
MRI scans have grown increasingly sophisticated, and they had previously been used to predict if people were looking at various scenery or animals.
"But they can only tell you they are viewing an animal or a building, not what animal or building," Chun, an author of the study published in the journal Neuroimage, said in the news release. "This is a different level of sophistication."
People detect other faces in great detail, using large parts of their brain to process the human visage.
"We perceive faces in a much greater level of detail than we perceive other things," Cowen said.
The research team worked with six subjects, who were shown 300 "training" faces while their brains underwent MRI scans. The subsequent data was compiled into a library of sorts to catalog how their brains responded to different faces.
After the statistical library was in place, the participants were shown new sets of faces and underwent scans again. The researchers were able to reconstruct the faces viewed by the subjects, coming up with imperfect but still amazingly accurate results.
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