Researchers at Princeton University and Intel Labs have developed software that can interpret people's thoughts in real time while their brains are being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The goal is to reveal how neural activity corresponds to learning, memory and other brain functions. In the video, Nicholas Turk-Browne, professor of psychology, explains a typical experiment in which the researchers in the control room can monitor the ability of a volunteer, who is lying in the fMRI scanner, to pay attention to figures in a picture of a busy café scene. The experiment was designed by J. Benjamin Hutchinson, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute who is now an assistant professor at Northeastern University. Yida Wang, who earned his doctorate in computer science from Princeton in 2016 and now works at Intel Labs, helped design the software that makes real-time analysis of the fMRI data possible. Also present in the video is graduate student Anne Mennen, who is using the real-time analysis capability to study learning and memory. (Video by Danielle Alio, Office of Communications)
