It would seem that researchers worldwide have a keen interest in developing technologies that can read the human mind, and show what an individual decides to do even before the person in question knows. And, in case you're wondering, yes, it's possible, as the human brain has been proven to make decisions seconds before the conscious mind becomes aware of them. Now, scientists in the UK have managed to devise a way of predicting a person's thoughts by simply measuring the blood flow to their brain, using a state-of-the-art monitoring equipment.

On Thursday, the British research team announced that, by using this method, they were able to figure out where volunteers were located inside a computer-generated virtual reality environment. That is to say, the investigators succeeded in “tapping” into the test subjects' spatial memories in real-time. “Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were,” University College London (UCL) Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging researcher Eleanor Maguire told reporters in a news briefing.

The find may have serious applications, especially in diseases that affect the memory, such as Alzheimer's. Studies conducted on people suffering from these conditions could shed light on how memories are processed in the hippocampus region of the human brain. Maguire said that the risk of some groups using the technology in order to “intrusively” scan someone's thoughts was still very low, on account of the fact that the technique had not yet been perfected.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was, again, used to detect the subtle changes that appeared in the brain of experiment participants, while they were playing a virtual reality (VR) game. The focus of the research consisted of several groups of neurons located in the hippocampus, an area of the cortex that had been associated with navigational skills and memory. The fMRI scans allowed the scientists to peer directly at those groups, as they became lit with activity.

“It's a long way off before that kind of technology is going [to] be possible where you can read someone's thoughts in a single short session, when they don't want to be cooperative,” Demis Hassabis, a fellow researcher at UCL, appeased concerns.