FutureWatch: Eavesdropping via Mind Reading

We continue to keep tabs on the next really big thing in eavesdropping - mind reading. Still way off in the future, advances are being made every year.  

Here is the latest...

By analyzing MRI images of the brain with an elegant mathematical model, it is possible to reconstruct thoughts more accurately than ever before. In this way, researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen have succeeded in determining which letter a test subject was looking at. The journal Neuroimage has accepted the article, which will be published soon. A preliminary version of the article can be read online.

‘In our further research we will be working with a more powerful MRI scanner,' explains Sanne Schoenmakers, who is working on a thesis about decoding thoughts. ‘Due to the higher resolution of the scanner, we hope to be able to link the model to more detailed images. We are currently linking images of letters to 1200 voxels in the brain; with the more powerful scanner we will link images of faces to 15,000 voxels.'  (more)