Question: is there any way that you can tell what people are thinking by using the brain in some way? like looking into peoples thoughts via their brain?

Melanie Stefan answered on 18 Mar 2011:

Not directly. But if you put someone in a brain scanner, and you tell them to think about something specific, e.g. a tennis match, a specific region in the brain will light up, and if you tell them to think about something else, a different region will light up etc. Only the regions that light up are different in every single individual, so you can’t draw any general conclusions. But if you had a full map of how someone’s brain reacts when they are thinking about different things, you could kind of read their minds.