(Image: Daily Mail)

BY GARY COTTON

You're watching multisource science video news analysis from Newsy. 

Scientists have made a breakthrough that’s...well...mind boggling. They’ve found a way to recreate mental images by scanning people’s brains. TIME reports.

“It sounds like science fiction, but it's not, and according to the scientists, it represents a ‘critical’ step toward reconstructing everything from what we're thinking while awake to what's happening as we dream.”

Here’s how it works. Patients are attached to an MRI machine that scans their brain. The researchers then divided the brain’s regions up into segments called “voxels”. The signals from these voxels are then recorded like pixels on a television. Daily Mail quoted Shinji Nishimoto, the brain behind the brain scanner.

“We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity.' The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in a particular film with the corresponding brain activity."

So why all the fuss about some blurry brain images? A blogger for the Global Post says it could have a big impact in the medical field.

“The researchers said they hope to develop mind-reading technology into a way to help people like stroke victims, patients in comas and people with Lou Gehrig’s disease communicate.”

Before you start worrying about thought police, a writer for io9 says it’ll be a long time before anyone can read your mind on the go.

“It's probably worth stressing that we're decades away from using this tech to read people's thoughts and intentions, just in case that's something you're worried about."



Transcript by Newsy.