Scientists have used brain scans to delve into people’s minds and predict what films they are thinking about from one moment to the next.
This is the first time brain imaging has been used to decipher such complex thoughts, which take place in the base of the brain in a region known as the medial temporal lobe.
The work follows an earlier study in which neuroscientists at University College London showed they could read a person’s thoughts about where they were standing in a virtual reality simulation.
“In the previous experiment, we were able to predict where someone was in a simple, stark virtual reality environment. What we wanted to know is can we look at ‘episodic’ memories that are much more naturalistic,” said Eleanor Maguire, who led the study at the university’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. “The kinds of memories we form day-to-day are far more complex — they involve people and buildings and all kinds of actions.”
The scientists recruited six women and four men, with an average age of 21, to watch three film clips, each lasting seven seconds. All three films were similar, and showed an actress performing a particular activity in a street. In one film, for example, a woman drank a coffee before throwing away the cup, while in another, a different woman mailed a letter.
After watching the clips, the participants practiced recalling the three films as vividly as they could.
The scientists then used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to look for memory traces in the participants’ brains when they thought about each of the films in turn. At first, they were told which film to recall while the scanning was in progress.
Using a computer program, Maguire’s team was able to identify consistent and characteristic memory traces for the three films in each participant.
In a second series of experiments, the volunteers were asked to remember the movie clips at random while having their brains scanned.
The computer program was not good enough to predict which film a person was thinking about every time. With three films to choose from, a blind guess would be right 33 percent of the time on average. The computer predicted the right film 40 percent to 45 percent of the time.
The memory traces associated with each film stayed the same throughout the experiment, suggesting the memories were fixed, at least for the duration of the study. More striking was the finding that the memory traces for each of the three films looked similar in all 10 volunteers.
“The patterns of neurons that are able to represent these different movies are certainly in a similar place across the group,” Maguire said.
The researchers recorded memory traces from three different areas of the medial temporal lobe, including the parahippocampal gyrus, the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. Of these, the hippocampus was the most important for recording everyday memories and held the most reliable memory traces.
The study appears in the journal Current Biology.
The researchers are now trying to understand which aspects of people’s memories they were reading.
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