I’m watching an episode of House (s. 6, ep. 16) and they have some gadget that can show images from the patient’s subconscious mind. I’ve never known this to be a science-fiction show, and hospitals have lots of stuff I could never imagine, but is this based on actual, existing medical technology? Or am I being whooshed?
It vaguely exists in research labs, but it didn’t at all when the episode came out.
Images?
Like, what they are thinking about (say, a photo of a ham sandwich?)?
If so - no, nothing like that even remotely exists.
No it doesn’t.
Can we say that the technology exists, but the application is yet nowhere near well developed enough that it can gather the specific data from the brain and convert it into meaningful output? We already have the technology necessary, but don’t yet know how to access the correct parts of the brain and process and interpret what it tells us.
I remember reading this article after the show aired and it was the first thing I thought of.
How long until the reader realizes the nature of The Daily Mail?
No, we can’t say that. We can say that we are able to determine which of a limited set of options a subject is thinking about at the moment, but we are nowhere near producing images as described in the OP, nor do we have any practical idea how to do that.
Sigh. OK, then google “Professor Jack Gallant” if you want other sources. Here is one from the BBC:
The first link had a nice selection of screen shots for anyone who doesn’t want to wait for a video to load.