Can't hide where you've been - Brain scan reveals memories of where you've been

NewScientist - March 12, 2009, by Ewen Callaway

Scans of the part of the brain responsible for memory have for the first time been used to detect a person's location in a virtual environment. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers decoded the approximate location of several people as they navigated through virtual rooms.

This finding suggests that more detailed mind-reading, such detecting as memories of a summer holiday, might eventually be possible, says Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London.

Her team trained its scanner on the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to the formation and storage of memories. It is known that in animals, specialised place cells in the hippocampus fire regularly as they move from place to place.

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