While there remains no scientific evidence that clairvoyance or E.S.P. exists, scientists have announced this month that they are one step closer to being able to read minds. On December 11, researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories announced that they had successfully used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. They showed the subjects many images at random from a set of 400 images, and they were able to detect which design they were focusing on with remarkable clarity. They speculate that this could be the first step to being able to record a person’s dreams or read feelings and emotional states. I can sense a very sophisticated lie detector in the future. Still, this is a far reach from having a portable and cheap device, or for reading someone’s mind at a distance. But, it does indicate that we are able to learn much more about how the brain processes and stores information, which will no doubt help scientists better model the brain and that elusive thing we call consciousness.
