At Yale University, researchers recently used a brain scanner to identify which face someone was looking at — by simply tracking their brain activity. At the University of California-Berkeley, scientists are moving beyond "reading" simple thoughts to predicting what someone will think next. And at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just finding a phone number may one day be as simple as using a device that can interpret your thoughts and dial the number for you.
 

"In principle, our thoughts could someday be readable," said Just, who directs the school's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. "I don't think we have to worry about this in the next 5-10 years, but it's interesting to think about. What if all of our thoughts were public?"
 

Yale researcher Marvin Chun, writing last month in the journal Neuroimage, said he envisions the potential for mind reading, at least with current functional-MRI technology, which measures blood flow to infer what is happening in the brain.
 

"I think we can make it a little better. I don't think we'll be able to magically read out people's faces a whole lot better," he said.
 

In his research, a student working in his lab developed a mathematical model to allow a computer to recognize different parts of faces. Then, by scanning the brains of volunteers as they looked at different faces, the researchers trained the computer to interpret how each volunteer's brain responded to different faces — and could accurately distinguish which of two faces they were observing.
 

"This will allow us to study things we haven't studied before about people's internal representation of faces and memories and imagination and dreams — all of which are represented in some of the same areas we use to reconstruct faces," said Alan Cowen, who led the research as a Yale undergraduate and is now a graduate student researcher at Berkeley.
 

"It's a little fantastical, but it'll be fun to try," Chun said. "This really is bringing science fiction closer to reality."