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Mind reading 'a step closer to reality'

Mind reading has come a step closer to reality after scientists used a brain scanner to decipher memories in the brains of four volunteers.

Researchers said the development meant it could be possible to tell whether someone was telling the truth or a lie by observing their thought patterns. However, the technology is thought to be at least 10 years away.

The British scientists were able to tell where an individual had been "standing" inside a virtual reality room from records of their brain activity.

Using a computer keypad, four young male volunteers navigated virtual reality rooms, choosing to "stand" in one of four locations marked by a rug.

Their heads had been placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, allowing their brain activity to be monitored.

Focusing on the hippocampus, the small area of the brain vital to navigation, memory recall and imagining future events, the scientists measured blood flow related to neural activity.

A sophisticated computer program was then used to work out the locations the subjects had visited in virtual space based on their brain activity.

Patterns were detected which reflected the participants' memories of where they had been.

Professor Eleanor Maguire, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, said: "Just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality environment. In other words we could 'read' their spatial memories. With this kind of research, we are approaching the realm of mind reading.

"By looking at activity over tens of thousands of neurons, we can see there must be a functional structure - a pattern - to how these memories are encoded," said Prof Maguire. "Otherwise, our experiment simply would not have been possible to do."