Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.

The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.

The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person's dreams or memory.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time."

It will inevitably also raise fears that a suspect's brain could be interrogated against their will, raising the nightmarish possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes". The researchers say this is currently firmly in the realm of science fiction because the technique can only be applied to visual images and, to date, the experiments rely on cumbersome MRI scanning equipment and extremely powerful magnets. The software decoder itself has to be adapted to each individual during hours of training while in the scanner.

However the team have warned about potential privacy issues in the future when scanning techniques improve. "It is possible that decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications downstream in, say, the 30 to 50-year time frame," said Prof Gallant. "[We] believe strongly that no one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, covertly, or without complete informed consent."

This is an excellent piece. Two points:

1. The means of understanding minds' inner workings are not bad by themself. Like with aeroplanes, uranium fission or synthetic chemistry, it depends what one does with them. There has been nightmarish scenarios about the abuse of biology and medicine that fortunately did not come to be, yet.

2. SSRIs can cause great deal of damage: When the HMO insurance companies are cutting corners, they hire  "cognitive behaviour therapists" with a psychology degree to do the mental health work because they are cheaper than doctors. With help of a nurse to write the prescription, a psychologist puts a borderline-bipolar patient on a high-dose of short-acting SSRI like Citalopram and the patient promptly swings into episodes of frank mania.

Also, the fact that a sizable percentage of adult population and teenagers here in US is on antidepressants for long periods of time is troubling. An antidepressant as a part of therapy can be a helpful boost to someone who is procrastinating, apathetic, withdrawn + unwilling to deal with his real and accumulated problems that are progressively making him more unhappy and withdrawn. But to maintain a normal unhappy man on mood brighteners for years while telling him that nothing is ever his fault and his problems are due to a set of negative circumstances, is a diaper morality.

I think you are a bit harsh in your evaluation of anti-depressants, but you nailed our human tendency to hail the Easy (or Easier) Answer as the Next Messiah.  We do not value suffering as we ought.  Orwell’s Soma numbs us both to sorrow and to joy.  Would anyone bother with the difficult and disconcerting effort it takes to stop making oneself miserable, if one were comfortable with the here and now?  Anguish, fear, loneliness, shame—we discount them to our loss.  The shallow Self Esteem movement that was so popular in the 1980s has produced young adults who lack authentic joy, courage, intimacy, and satisfaction.  Don’t blame the pill, however.  It is the impulse behind the pill that is to blame.

Milkshake, cognitive behavioural therapy, as I understand it and have encountered it, is not drug orientated.......in essence it tries to change peoples behaviour by changing the way they think.  This seems to me to be a very enlightened approach, though that is not to say that it always works.

In my professional capacity I often meet people who have the most incredibly negative outlooks, if they are negative about themself this becomes depression of whatever degree, if they are negative about others it often develops from unsociability to out right anti-social behaviour.