One of the incredible benefits of modern technology is our newly acquired ability to observe the human body in real time without having to harm it.  When it comes to brain research, the ability to scan and image the brain’s activity is giving quite a bit of new insight into how it functions.  In this TED Talk, we are presented with some of these images and findings.

Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demonstrates a new way to use fMRI to show brain activity — thoughts, emotions, pain — while it is happening. In other words, you can actually see how you feel.  Christopher deCharms is helping to develop a new kind of MRI that allows doctor and patient to look inside the brain in real time — to see visual representations of brain processes as they happen. With his company Omneuron, deCharms has developed technology they call rtfMRI, for “real-time functional MRI” — which is exactly what it sounds like. You move your arm, your brain lights up. You feel pain, your brain lights up.

How could we use the ability to see our brains in action? For a start, to help treat chronic pain with a kind of biofeedback; being able to visualize pain can help patients control it. And longer-term uses boggle the mind. Ours is the first generation, he believes, to be able to train and build our minds as systematically as a weightlifter builds a muscle. What will we do with this?

deCharms is also the author of the book Two Views of Mind, studying Buddhist theories of perception from a neuroscientist’s perspective.