• Question: is it possible to scan someones brain to access photographic representations of memories?

    Asked by 07gilpinm to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Drew Rae

      Drew Rae answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      They can do studies now using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) live, so that they can see which parts of your brain activate during different thoughts or when looking at different images. The weird thing is that the same neurons are used for lots of different things. This makes your brain more like a computer that can recreate the images than a hard drive that stores them intact.

      If you wanted to scan someone’s brain to get their memories, you would need to bombard them with images, and measure how their brain reacts to those images. This might work in principle, but we certainly don’t know how to do it at the moment.

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Dont think they would be able to do this… It’d be like plugging a tv into your head and scrolling throgh your memory to find images..

      The fact is there is actually no area in the brain that scientists have designated to the memory zone. there are no filing cabinets or storage areas… so scientists dont evern know how we know…or i dont know iff they do… 🙂

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      As Julia said scientists have not worked out everything to do with memory yet so this seems an unlikely thing to be able to do! Good question though – you sure are thinking! 🙂

    • Photo: Kimberley Bryon

      Kimberley Bryon answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      It would only work if you did a test where you looked at lots of photos of your memories whilst being scanned and then were asked to think of one of the images that you just saw. They might then be able to work out which memory you were thinking of by looking at which different parts of your brain were activated.

      It is definitely not possible to look into someone’s brain and see all their memories. Would be a great crime fighting tool if it was possible as we could just look and see if they were the criminal.

    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi 07gilpinm. I think the others have hit the major points well. The main issue is that we just don’t know where memories are stored in the brain or more importantly how. Our brain operates as a bunch of electrical impulses. How these read-out we just don’t know!! If we could figure out how to access the appropriate electrical signal our brain generates when we recall a memory and figure out some way to read that out we could probably scan a brain for memories. So, if our technology becomes advanced enough I don’t think we even need the pictures – the information is in our brains, we just don’t know how to access it. It’s sort-of like accessing a computer memory but way more complicated. Our brains are super supercomputers!

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