Brain Science Podcasts: MRI Scans Now Reveal “Thoughts And Feelings” (60 Minutes)

Who among us hasn’t wished we could read someone else’s mind, know exactly what they’re thinking? Well that’s impossible, of course, since our thoughts are, more than anything else, our own. Private, personal, unreachable. Or at least that’s what we’ve always, well, thought.

Advances in neuroscience have shown that, on a physical level, our thoughts are actually a vast network of neurons firing all across our brains. So if that brain activity could be identified and analyzed, could our thoughts be decoded? Could our minds be read? Well, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has spent more than a decade trying to do just that. We started our reporting on their work 10 years ago, and what they’ve discovered since, has drawn us back.