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Canadian scientists scan your brain, know how you want to hold your hand
O Canada -- your wacky scientists are at it again. And this time, the bright minds over at the University of Western Ontario have their third eye set on a certain precognitive prize. Avoiding the messier open-skull, electrode-imbedding alternative, researchers at the Centre for Brain and Mind employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to successfully predict the action of participants' hands before they'd moved a muscle. After a year of brain-scanning trials, scientists learned to accurately foretell which signals were linked to one of three set actions: grabbing the top of an object, its bottom, or simply reaching out to touch it. Like our clairvoyant cousin's previous beverage-predicting breakthrough, the spoils of this study go to prosthetic limb motion control and the paralyzed who'll use it. We know what you're thinking, but we're not going to make the obvious Thing joke here. Instead, we have to wonder -- What Would Ms. Cleo Do? Full release after the break, but you already knew that.
Mind reading gets closer to real thanks to Canadian scientists
Hate to break it to you, but that clairvoyant you've been paying daily to read you fortune cookies while blindfolded actually isn't some sort of medium. Tough to swallow, we know. That said, researchers at Canada's largest children's rehabilitation hospital are getting closer to equipping entrepreneurial individuals with the tools they need to read minds. By measuring the intensity of near-infrared light absorbed in brain tissue, scientists were able to decode a person's preference for one of two drinks with 80 percent accuracy, all without a single minute of training on the human's behalf. This research gives promise to finding out true feelings of those who can't speak or move due to physical limitations, though there's no word on how close it is to becoming viable outside of a lab. As an aside, we hear Professor X is pretty perturbed.
