Scientists are using MRI scans to reveal the physical makeup of our thoughts and feelings

From CBS News.com (Nov. 24):

Advances in neuroscience have shown that, on a physical level, our thoughts are actually a vast network of neurons firing all across our brains. So if that brain activity could be identified and analyzed, could our thoughts be decoded? Could our minds be read? Well, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has spent more than a decade trying to do just that. We [60 Minutes TV show] started our reporting on their work 10 years ago, and what they've discovered since, has drawn us back.

In Carnegie Mellon's scanner room, two floors underground, a steady stream of research subjects come to have their brains and thoughts "read" in this MRI machine. It's a type of scanning called functional MRI, FMRI.

That looks at what's happening inside the brain as a person thinks.

Marcel Just: It's like being an astronomer when the first telescope is discovered, or being a biologist when the first microscope is-- is developed.

Neuroscientist Marcel Just says this technology has made it possible for the first time to see the physical makeup of our thoughts. 

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One of Dr. Just's main questions was whether he could find patterns for abstract ideas, so he did a study asking people to think about forgiveness, gossip, spirituality. Could they be identifiable in the brain the way the screwdriver was?

Remarkably, the answer was yes. This was the activation pattern when people thought about spirituality. And this was gossip.

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One difference between the two was in areas of the brain scientists had already shown become active when we think about other people. Circled in blue. Those areas lit up bright red when subjects thought about gossip; not so much for spirituality.

In another study, Dr. Just tested whether patterns are the same when people think in different languages. They are. And he's asked acting students to conjure up emotions in the scanner to see if feelings have distinctive activation patterns too. [read more]

Kind of unnerving. A totalitarian system like China, N. Korea, and Iran would love this technology. They could figure out which citizen was a dissident or not.