Mental Picture Discovered in Brain: How to Find Out if Someone is Thinking of You

Is that person really thinking about you? Researchers can now find out. A new study shows that by analyzing images of the brain, scientists can find out exactly who a person is thinking about.

The findings, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, were conducted by researchers at Cornell University. The scientists asked 19 young adults to learn about the personalities of four people who greatly differed on key personality traits. The 19 participants were then given different scenarios and asked to imagine how one of these four people would respond. The scenarios included sitting on a bus when an elderly person gets on and there are no seats available, and other situations where the key personality traits would show themselves. While conducting this task, the brains of the volunteers were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This technique measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

It turns out that different brain patterns were associated with different people. The researchers found that, in particular, different patterns of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were linked with each of the four different personalities. In other words, the person being imagined could be accurately identified merely by examining the brain activity.

So what does this mean for scientists? One of the researchers, Nathan Spring, said in a press release, "Prior research has implicated the anterior mPFC in social cognition disorders such as autism and our results suggest people with such disorders may have an inability to build accurate personality models. If further research bears this out, we may ultimately be able to identify specific brain activation biomarkers not only for diagnosing such diseases, but for monitoring the effects of interventions." Ultimately, the new findings could allow researchers further understanding when it comes to treating these diseases.