Brains, brains, scanning brains

Researchers would be wasting their time, and their patrons’ money, scanning my brain. They’d quickly find nothing but World of Warcraft Auction House strategies and an incredible amount of space devoted to translation Marca, A Bola, La Gazzetta Dello Sport, and France Football every morning. Maybe if they’d scan, say, the brains of Fez Whatley or Vince McMahon, then they’d find something interesting.

The deal is that researchers now believe that a simple brain scan reveal far more than what was previously thought, including thought patterns. “Man, this guy thinks about sandwiches an awful lot.”

It’s not so much reading your mind, Psycho Mantis-style, but rather observing how your brain works when it’s recalling memories. Like, “oh, activity increases in this region, then increases in that region.”

That will not stop the Drudge-linked readers from freaking out, and somehow blaming the liberal media for the scientific development.

Says the author of the study responsible for the findings:

We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory—to look at actual memory traces. We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time.

Maybe science can next tell us why Techmeme is so important.