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March 12, 2010

Scientists Learn to Read Minds

Posted by Van Helsing at March 12, 2010 8:58 AM

Once liberals have established that absolutely nothing falls outside the purview of the nanny state, it will be time for regulators to move on to the next frontier: our private thoughts. Already technology is under development to read our minds:

British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone.

"We've been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces," said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire. …

The results reinforce the findings of a 2008 US study that showed similar scans can determine what images people are seeing based on brain activity.

It shouldn't be hard to win government funding for studies on how to determine which brains harbor "racist" or otherwise incorrect thoughts. After that, scientists will delve into techniques for erasing such thoughts. At least it's more constructive than cooking up phony climate data.

On a tip from Incitatus.