Neuroscientists decoded people’s thoughts using brain scans

The method captured the gist of what three people thought, but only if they wanted it to

illustration of human heads

With external brain scans and a powerful computational model of language, scientists could detect the gist of stories that people heard, thought or watched.

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Like Dumbledore’s wand, a scan can pull long strings of stories straight out of a person’s brain — but only if that person cooperates.

This “mind-reading” feat, described May 1 in Nature Neuroscience, has a long way to go before it can be used outside of sophisticated laboratories.