'Images' from brain blood analysis

KYOTO:Tinfoil hats at the ready - researchers in Japan have developed a method of "seeing" what you see by analysing the blood flow in your brain.

The scientists first built up information by asking people to look at various black-and-white pixellated images and measuring the signature brain activity for components within each image using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

When the people then looked at previously unseen images, the analysis technique drew on the stored signatures to work out what the person was looking at - such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N - and displayed it on a computer screen.

The beauty of the approach is that it can take into account the complexity of our perception, according to the paper in the journal Neuron last month.

It's a long way off mind-reading, but New Scientist quotes researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani from the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, on the potential consequences of being able to extract such information directly from the brain: "If the image quality improves, it could have a very serious impact on our privacy and other issues. We will have to discuss with many people - not just scientists - how to apply this technology," he says.