‘Mind-reading’
‘This “mind-reading” experiment, is quite a sensationalist term,’ says Dr Demis Hassabis reflecting on the media response to a recent experiment, ‘but it’s not entirely incorrect either.’ Hassabis is one of a group of Wellcome Trust researchers based at University College London, who have been looking at how memory is stored in the brain. ‘I am interested in auto-biographical memory, events in our lives, what makes us who we are,’ says Hassabis. ‘That is the type of memory that goes first in Amnesia, in Alzheimer’s, it’s the most vulnerable because it is also the most complex memory.’  The team is looking for what is encoded by memory when people experience something, and are exploring the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical for memory.

Higher-level thinking
‘People have done experiments,’ says Hassabis, ‘where they have shown participants pictures of cars and people, and they worked out from their brain activity what they were looking at.’ What they haven’t been able to identify is higher-level thinking, such as spatial memory. Before he completed his Doctorate, Hassabis was a well-known computer games developer, and he brought this expertise to this project.

‘We basically created an experiment with a virtual reality environment,’ says Hassabis, ‘which people navigated around, like playing Quake. The only task you had to do is walk from A to B to C to D, four pre-described positions in a green room and a blue room.’ When participants reached the assigned point they pressed a button, eyes down to the floor so they weren’t registering any image in particular, while brain activity was being scanned the whole time.

Spatial memory
‘We showed,’ explains Hassabis, ‘that just from activity in the hippocampus, we can predict where somebody was standing in the room. We are in some sense looking at the internal representation of space in the person’s brain. The only difference in each position is the person’s internal map of where they are. We were the first to show a high-level thought, a high-level memory, and investigate the nature of that in the human brain.’ The key says Hassabis, is that if you know what makes something memorable, you could develop a therapy to, ‘emphasize those aspects that we know are good for something being memorable.’