Scientists use MRI machines to read minds... kinda

NigelTheFrog writes: Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers' hippocampi (hippocampuses?). From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly wher they were in a virtual reality landscape.

"Specific parts of each participant's hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn "predict" new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person's pattern of brain activity."