Dream recorder may become reality

A Laboratory in Japan is claiming to have created a prototype that can read and visualy record human thoughts. The ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories first move was to "tune" the device by showing test subjects 400 images and measuring their cerebral responses.

Then they carried out their first, successful test. The letters of the word "neuron" were shown to their test subjects and a blurry but definitive image of those letters was then reconstructed by the device.

It is effective but actually relatively simple technology, examining the electrical signals sent to the visual cortex and then converting them into graphics on a computer screen. In practice, if perfected, it has the potential to act as a dream and thought recorder, a device that could look directly into our subconscious and see what we really think.

The implications of this technology are quite wide ranging from advertising to psychological therapy and law enforcement, potentially, opens the door to one of the big science fiction ideas of the last century being made manifest in this one machine.