The first thing that comes to mind when asked the genre of the movie Minority Report is fiction. The film dealt with a special security agency knowing what would happen even before the crime took place. However now a team comprising of German, British and Japanese scientists claim that they were able to read the mind by using sophisticated functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) and computer programs.

The team asked a group of volunteers to think about performing either of the two tasks: subtract or add two numbers. They were then asked to hold the thought in their minds while they analyzed the data. The research team said that they were able to know the intentions correctly in about 70 percent of the cases based solely on the subjects' brain activity.

Says John-Dylan Haynes, of Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the lead researcher of the study, "It has been previously assumed that freely selected plans might be stored in the middle regions of the prefrontal cortex, whereas plans following external instructions could be stored on the surface of the brain. We were able to confirm this theory in our experiments."

Haynes said that they were able to recognize the intentions by using a trick known as "multivariate pattern recognition", by which a computer recognizes characteristic activation patterns in the brain. Haynes added that the study shows that the front of the brain acts as a storage place in which the intentions are stored before they are executed.

"The experiments show that intentions are not encoded in single neurons but in a whole spatial pattern of brain activity. Intentions for future actions that are encoded in one part of the brain need to be copied to a different region to be executed", Haynes added.

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