• Question: Is it possible to access peoples' thoughts? Can you record what goes on in the brain and read peoples emotions?

    Asked by mylifeisacatalyst to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Using something called a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner (MRI), you can observe signals going through the brain. This has been used a lot to start figuring out where certain feelings happen in the brain and how certain areas of the brain work.

      However, it does not allow you to read peoples thoughts and often several emotions will use the same route so it’s very hard to understand what’s going on.

    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Certain people can train themselves to read people’s emotions by small changes in their face. Most people do this all the time to some level – you can tell when your friends are sad, for example. But people like Derren Brown have trained themselves to be better at reading these people’s body language and manipulating them into doing certain things by understanding how people think.

      Like Rob says, people are starting to use MRI scanners to find places in the brain that light up when people are thinking certain things, but it’s not proper mind-reading – you can’t just go up to someone and tell what they’re thinking. That said, this could happen sometime – there’s even a headset that a company Emotiv Systems has made that you can train to control computers with your thoughts! It’s all early days for this technology, though.

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