Scanning Images of Familiar Objects

A broad step forward in understanding how patterns of the brain change during thought:

Carnegie Mellon Study Identifies Where Thoughts Of Familiar Objects Occur Inside the Human Brain
A team of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists, combining methods of machine learning and brain imaging, have found a way to identify where people's thoughts and perceptions of familiar objects originate in the brain by identifying the patterns of brain activity associated with the objects. An article in the Jan. 2 issue of PLoS One discusses this new method ... A dozen study participants enveloped in an MRI scanner were shown line drawings of 10 different objects - five tools and five dwellings -one at a time and asked to think about their properties. Just and Mitchell's method was able to accurately determine which of the 10 drawings a participant was viewing based on their characteristic whole-brain neural activation patterns. To make the task more challenging for themselves, the researchers excluded information in the brain's visual cortex, where raw visual information is available, and focused more on the "thinking" parts of the brain .. "