Reminds me of the now-old CIA tech of training a laser on a window to catch the vibrations caused by people speaking to “hear” inside a closed room. Based on this article, extending it just a tad, one day, a g-man could train a laser on your head and know you are about to commit a thought crime. Or is that old tech now, too?

Brain Reader Part 1

They still can’t read your thoughts just by looking at you, but researchers can now see what your brain is doing just by shining beams of light into your head.

It kind of looks like a motorcycle helmet from the future; divided into sections with colored stripes, drilled full of holes, and stuck full of fiber optic cables. But don’t be fooled — it’s actually a new brain imaging technique. Cognitive neuroscientists at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Gabriele Gratton and Monica Fabiani call it EROS and explain that it works by using harmless beams of light.

EROS stands for event related optical signal. It’s optical because it uses light reflections and it’s event-related because the signals it produces mirror events in the brain.

So how can light give you an accurate picture of what’s happening in the brain?

“Even though we are not transparent, light does penetrate into tissue,” Fabiani explains. So just like pressing a red laser pointer against your finger makes it glow red, shining light on your scalp also makes your brain give off faint reflections. As reported in “Scientific American Mind” magazine, EROS catches these reflections to create a picture of the activity in brain cells, or neurons.

After you finish reading Part 1 of this article, here is Part 2 which describes using EROS to learn that as we age, we get more distractable and…. Er, um… What was I saying?