Some scientists, using techniques from artificial intelligence, can train a software program to recognize many, many brain scans of people experiencing different emotions (say, anger and fear). The program computes a statistical pattern that summarizes each emotion category and then—here’s the cool part—can actually analyze new scans and determine if they are closer to the summary pattern for anger or fear. This technique, called pattern classification, works so well that it’s sometimes called “neural mind-reading.”
