Maybe soon, perhaps never, but recent advances have brought mind reading closer to reality.
An fMRI is a machine that takes pictures inside your body, like the familiar CAT scanner but in much greater detail. While you are in the machine scans your brain and can see which areas of your brain are getting more blood flow.
Had you sat in the machine while you looked at images or thought specific thoughts, a computer attached to the fMRI could learn which parts of your brain get active when you look at a specific photo or think a specific thought. Then the next time you entered the machine and thought those same thoughts it could recognize the pattern.
All our brains are different, not unlike our finger prints and so don’t all behave exactly the same. But they are a like enough that in time, with lots and lots of data, researchers might some day have a general mind map.
Perhaps your defense could be that you store murder weapons in a different part of your brain than the average person and so therefore are not guilty as charged. It’s too soon to know, but perhaps not as far away as we’d like.
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