Augmented reality is advancing apace. When one trains his phone’s camera on someone, a balloon will appear over the subject’s head containing his thoughts. It will be like having “I’d tap that in a second” tattooed on one’s forehead.

It’s certainly interesting research. I am skeptical about the scientists projection that we will be able to read fairly sophisticated thoughts in five years. My feeling is that they are going to find it is much more complicated than they thought as they get into areas of feelings and images and concepts are being mashed together.

Reality is subjective. There is the reality from which we all sprang and there is the reality in each person’s head. But there’s also the reality we all agree upon, which can’t be exactly the same as the reality we sprang from. (because that would imply there is no knowledge beyond mankind)

Now I have three types of reality contradicting each other and all I’m still certain of is that life is subjective and communication is impossible. (we FIT because we’re similar and adaptive but we don’t truly communicate because we can’t)

And reality can be like something Yogi Berra said, or the AFLAC duck.
No question in my mind this technology will advance at a rate similar to the microprocessor architecture. Money and power always drives science and technology.

When someone has a thought, it is very complex. It involves many areas of the brain such as the hippocampus for memory, the limbic system for emotions, the frontal cortex for planning, etc. fMRI technology might be able to show simple objective objects that a person is thinking of, e.g. hammer or house, but it would be very hard to show what a person subjectively thinks about that object, and we would need the latter in order to really read someone’s mind. The technology might advance far enough to reach this level of detection, but I don’t think it will be a reality for many many years. If every single object or feeling in the world was represented by one neuron (e.g. a blue clock neuron, a sad neuron) then we would certainly be able to accurately read people’s minds (see The Grandmother Cells Theory). However, this theory has been falsified simply because there are many more experiences/feelings and characteristics of objects than there are neurons in the brain. Instead the theory of Population Coding has become popular opinion, and basically states that our brains constantly do a statistical analysis of all the inputs from the outside world and averages the inputs in order to process and think about an idea or thought. This is further complicated by what @Zyx brought up about subjective reality: even if we could detect a specific object or feeling, it would be evermore difficult to judge what a person subjectively thinks about that object or feeling. In essence we would need to know not only a person’s entire life history, but also how they subjectively felt about that history, and no system or technology to my knowledge exists that could accomplish this massive task. This subsequently makes mind reading an amazingly complex task.

This research really is intriguing though, and if scientists can figure out how to read people’s minds it would forever change our law enforcement, job interviews, dating, etc. I guess only time will tell.

Wow Red, you sure gave me an abundance of material to read up on-you went sky high over my head on the subject, I must admit. I admire your knowledge on the subject

@Garebo Thank you very much. My apologies for getting too esoteric with the subject, but I’m fascinated with how the human brain works, and it’s difficult to arrive at any accurate answers without delving into many complicated ideas, after all human behavior is so damn complex! If you have any other questions about the brain, human behavior, psychology, neuroscience etc. just let me know. I think you can even send private messages on Fluther but I’m not sure.