No More Secrets...Brain Researchers Know Who You Are Thinking About

When you have a moment to daydream during the day, do you think about someone special in your private thoughts? If so, you better stay away from these brain researchers because they’ll pluck that person right out of your brain and into their data. Yup, as technology continues to progress, it seems soon even our thoughts won’t be completely our own anymore.

For now, I guess our minds are still the last frontier of privacy, and our thoughts are safe for the most part. After all, this procedure I’m about to describe isn’t exactly a mind meld. Brain researchers at Cornell University have been testing this technology on volunteers.

To oversimplify it, they basically go through a procedure where they ask the volunteers to think about certain people. While the volunteers are doing that, the researchers scan their brains using a fMRI. What they discovered is that certain personalities are associated with certain brain activity. This led to the discovery of being able to take someone’s brain activity and associate it with a specific person. In other words, the brain researchers could soon determine who the volunteers were thinking about.

Here’s the interesting thing about this – each person in our mind has his or her own fingerprint in our mental image so to speak. Our brain activity is different for each person we think about. As we interact more with a certain person, the brain activity associated with that person might change a bit, but it’s still unique to that person.

You may wonder how this type of technology and discovery can help people. Brain researchers believe that if someone is unable to build these mental personality models of other people in their minds, they could develop certain disorders. This research can help identify and treat those disorders. For example, it could assist with the treatment of autism. You can click over to Txchnologist for more detailed information about this fascinating discovery.