Can we read minds?

For those of you who follow the media around neuroscience, it certainly seems like it.

You've seen articles and heard things about mind reading.

So what is it?

Could we run mind reading in airports so that we know who is carrying a bomb or hatching a plot?

Where are we right now with this technology? How close or far are we from being able to know if you were thinking about some particular thing you did or intend to do?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos.

I'm David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford.

And this podcast is all about the intersection of brain science with our lives, both now and in the future.

Okay. brain science with our lives, both now and in the future. Today's episode is about mind reading. What does it mean? Where are we with it now?

Will we be able to read your mind by measuring something from your brain?

So strap in for a wild ride today.

So imagine this, 20 years from now, you walk into the airport to take a flight across the

nation, but there are no metal detectors here anymore,

or those scanners that rotate around you looking for things hidden on your body. Instead of

simply knowing what you have on your body, you find the airport now has portable brain scanning,

such that the authorities can tell who is thinking about bringing

a bomb onto the airplane. And don't picture a big clunky fMRI machine like we have now, because in two

decades, brain scanning could certainly be done at a distance, getting some

signature of brain activity of every person walking through. Now, could this work? I want to put

aside any legal and ethical conundrums for just a moment because I want to ask, would this be technically possible?

So let's start with, what do we mean by mind reading?

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