It’s a kind of mind-reader one always wants to have. Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto and Princeton University in New Jersey have identified some patterns in the pictures of the brain that indicate particular thought processes.

According to a report in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers scanned the brain regions involved in visual perception (mainly visual cortex) and recognised the thought processes their subjects were undergoing. A particular thought corresponded to a typical pattern of brain activity detected through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

“The new trick can someday probe a person’s awareness, focus of attention, memory and movement intention,” claim researchers Yukiyasu Kamitani and Frank Tong. According to them, this method of detecting the perception pathway of people may usher in the invention of a ‘consciousness-meter’.

In a separate study, also published in Nature Neuroscience, John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees at University College London (UCL), have shown two patterns of brain waves that reveal what is going on inside the subjects’ heads. A two-second measurement of activity in the brain’s visual cortex was enough for the team to predict with 80 per cent accuracy which of the two things was being viewed by the volunteers.

Using the same fMRI scanning technique, the UCL team measured brain activity in response to both consciously viewed images and indistinct images. The researchers could work out which type of images had been flashed in front of the volunteers. Rees, from UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, says, “If expanded, this technique can be applied to a device such as a lie detector. We need to explore which regions of the brain predict whether someone is lying.”