Mind-reading scan locates site of meaning in the brain

Mind-reading scan locates site of meaning in the brain - health - 16 November 2012 - New Scientist

"This type of pattern recognition approach is a very exciting scientific tool for investigating how and where knowledge is represented in the brain," says Zoe Woodhead at University College London, who wasn't involved in the study. "Words that mean the same thing in different languages activate the same set of neurons encoding that concept, regardless of the fact that the two words look and sound completely different."

However, the brain patterns that Correia identified were unique to each person. Brains are like faces - the eyes, nose and mouth are all in the same place, but the details can be different, says Davis. "The meanings might be stored in the same area, but the actual neurons would be idiosyncratic." To read someone's mind, a machine would first need to learn that individual's unique representation of each word. "You would have to scan a person as they thought their way through a dictionary," says Davis.