Neuroscientists at Washington University can use a brain scan to predict if a subject will succeed or fail at a simple videogame. Basically, the scan reveals whether the subject glimpsed a quick hint that might help them "win" the game. The scientists had a success rate of 70 percent. From a press release:
Eleven seconds before volunteers played the game – discriminating the direction of a field of moving dots – scientists showed them a hint: an arrow pointing to where the moving dots were likely to appear. The dots were visible only for one-fifth of a second and therefore were easy to miss if a subject was not paying attention to the right area.
After the hint and prior to the appearance of the moving dots, researchers scanned the volunteers with functional brain imaging, which reveals increases in blood flow to different brain areas indicative of increased activity in those regions. Based on brain activity patterns that reflected whether the subjects used the hint or not, scientists found they could frequently predict whether a volunteer's response would be right or wrong before the volunteers even had a chance to try to see the dots.
