Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about

This is one jaw dropping and may be the beginning of adios privacy, thanks to on-going neuroscience research. Today's article on New scientist:

"WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind.
In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing - and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering.
Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field's most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans - and even to diagnose eating disorders."

"A brain structure called the hippocampus is critical for forming memories, so Maguire's team focused its scanner on this area while 10 volunteers recalled videos they had watched of different women performing three banal tasks, such as throwing away a cup of coffee or posting a letter. When Maguire's team got the volunteers to recall one of these three memories, the researchers could tell which the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of about 50 per cent.
That's well above chance, says Maguire, but it is not mind reading because the program can't decode memories that it hasn't already been trained on. "You can't stick somebody in a scanner and know what they're thinking." Rather, she sees neural decoding as a way to understand how thehippocampus and other brain regions form and recall a memory.
Maguire could tackle this by varying key aspects of the clips - the location or the identity of the protagonist, for instance - and see how those changes affect their ability to decode the memory. She is also keen to determine how memory encoding changes over the weeks, months or years after memories are first formed.
Understandably, such developments are raising concerns about "mind reading" technologies, which might be exploited by advertisers or oppressive governments (see "The risks of open-mindedness"). Yet despite - or perhaps because of - the recent progress in the field, most researchers are wary of calling their work mind-reading. Emphasising its limitations, they call it neural decoding."

"Another focus of neural decoding is language. Marcel Just at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleague Tom Mitchell reported last year that they could predict which of two nouns - such as "celery" and "airplane" - a subject is thinking of, at rates well above chance. They are now working on two-word phrases."

I simply don't want to debate the pro's and con's of neural decoding since I see a debate of all debates coming soon. So I am not going to sweat on that but I envision someday, when someone enters the domain of cognitive dissonance, a loud siren going off and flashing blue lights over their head. That's one awesome scene, I would love to witness before kicking the bucket.