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In America, they've been able to recreate the image that appears in a person's mind
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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In the United States, a joint effort by employees from three universities has succeeded in creating visual images of experiment participants using a brain scanner. Such new technologies, according to the inventors themselves, will help in the future to visualize human thoughts.
The experiment is described in detail in one of the American scientific journals. Six people took part in the experiment, who were connected to MRI and then scanned the brain, by measuring the blood flow it was possible to record the activity of different parts of the brain. All the subjects were shown photographs and after some time the scientists were able to create an image quite similar to the pictures that were shown to the participants of the experiment. One of the authors of the research project, Alan Cowan, noted that, in essence, their experiment is reading a person's thoughts.
This research project is the first attempt to recreate the images that appear in a person's head. The images obtained as a result of brain tomography, in which faces are clearly visible, are very similar to the photographs that were shown at the beginning of the experiment. At the same time, the tomographs correctly recreated the skin color in all images; out of thirty images, twenty-four had a complete match of the mood of the person depicted in the photograph (the presence or absence of a smile). However, it was quite difficult to determine the gender and hair color; in this case, the hair color matched only in half of the cases, and the gender - in 2/3.
As Cowan stated, in the future, the development of such technologies will help analyze the causes of mental deviations in humans. For example, such images will help in studying the consciousness of autistic people. At the same time, a brain activity tomograph allows you to create not a real image, but an image perceived by a person, because it has long been known that people with various mental deviations see the world in their own way. With the development of these technologies, it will be possible to create images that people see in their dreams.
As the authors of the research project note, in the future such scanners will also help in solving crimes, since with the help of witnesses it will be possible to obtain reliable images of offenders. However, such methods will not be usable for at least 10 years.
The researchers believe that this type of technology cannot currently establish remote memories. For the image to be successfully recreated, a person must think intensely about a certain topic, imagining a given image. For this reason, in the coming decades, people have no reason to worry about someone being able to penetrate and read their thoughts. The lead author of the study noted that if technology does reach this level, it will not be for at least a couple of centuries.
While American specialists are trying to read people's thoughts, Swiss scientists have already created a device that helps to recognize the thoughts of pets. Currently, the collar-like device helps to detect only the basic feelings of animals, such as hunger or joy, but the inventors plan to improve the device to better understand pets.
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