Scanning the lifeworld: toward a critical neuroscience of action and interaction

A recent report published in Neuron, a leading journal of neuroscience, by researchers at Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories (Miyawaki et al., 2008) has been the basis for a claim that new technology able to analyze signals in the brain "can reconstruct the images inside a person's mind and display them on a computer monitor." Although claims made in the actual research paper were much more modest, in the media the standard, optimistic predictions were quick to come. "These results are a breakthrough in terms of understanding brain activity. In as little as 10 years, advances in this field of research may make it possible to read a person's thoughts with some degree of accuracy."