A recent competition at the University of Pittsburgh asked various scientific teams to read the minds of people who watched episodes of the television comedy show "Home Improvement." After gathering brain data during the first two episodes, many researchers were able to predict test subject ratings for things like humor, music, characters and onscreen faces while the subjects watched the third episode. Norman’s team was one of the winners.
In other studies, scientists successfully figured out when people are looking at pictures or sentences as well as when they are viewing ambiguous or non-ambiguous sentences. Researchers have also predicted when a person is lying about the identity of a playing card.
"MVPA analyses hold out the promise of our being able to non-invasively track the flow of information in the human brain and see how it is transformed at different stages of neural processing," said Norman.
Norman points out this ability could be used in the medical field. He explains once scientists can characterize information processing in normal populations, they should be able to recognize differences among those with memory problems or other cognitive disorders, including schizophrenia.
Frank Tong, assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, also conducts research analyzing multi-voxel patterns to read out what people are seeing or perceiving. He says he "strongly agrees" with "the view of the promising nature of this emerging field."
While both Norman and Tong envision a fruitful future for mind-reading studies, Norman points out there are limits to how far the research can — and should — advance.
"We are still a very long way off from the kind of mind reading that you see on sci-fi shows where you can read arbitrary thoughts without the person’s knowledge or consent," he said.
