New Brain Machine Reads Minds in Modest Breakthrough

A new advance in brain-machine interfaces could enable scientists to one day decode what a person is thinking simply by monitoring brain cell activity. In the research, scientists connect the activity of single neurons to images on a computer screen and demonstrate how a person can fade these images in and out by simply thinking about the pictures. To find these image-specific neurons, the researchers scanned the brains of 12 participants as they looked at hundreds of images.
  
"Now  we actually are able to read people’s mind, on a very small subset of things, but you can still read their minds,” study co-author Moran Cerf, a computational neuroscientist at UCLA, told TechNewsDaily. The science of mind reading has made some impressive gains in the last few years. Researchers recently discovered how to tell what memory a person was recalling by looking at brain scans, and have speculated that a “mind-reading hat” device could be used to foresee and prevent mental hiccups. Tech News Daily