The idea that your brain contains information that ‘you’ cannot access is, of course, not new … what is new, is the demonstration by scientists (in 2005 by Haynes, J-D. & Rees, G.) that they can use a scan to read off information from your brain that you are unable to access yourself.
In 2006, lead researcher Leun Otten reports that they can use measures of the brain’s surface electrical activity to predict whether someone will remember a word that they’re about to look at.
“It sounds a bit like clairvoyance in the sense that we’re able to predict whether someone will remember a word before they even see it. That’s really new – scientists knew that brain activity changes as you store things into memory but now we have found brain activity that tells how well your memory will work in advance”. Spooky.
I don’t know the answer to this question, but I wonder what implications these findings have for the way software developers design software for Tablet PCs?
Haynes, J-D. & Rees, G. (2005). Predicting the orientation of invisible stimuli from activity in human primary visual cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 686-691.
Otten, L.J., Quayle, A.H., Akram, S., Ditewig, T.A. & Rugg, M.D. (2006). Brain activity before an event predicts later recollection. Nature Neuroscience. In Press. DOI: 10.1038/nn1663.