Endless Memory; Mind Reading; Mindfulness | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

it's often said that we are our memories that web of experiences relationships thoughts and feelings that make us who we are we don't remember it all of course that would be impossible or would it there's been a discovery in the field of memory recently so new you won't find it in any textbook so hard to Fathom there are some Who Remain unconvinced for the moment the scientists studying it are simply calling it Superior autobiographical memory and unless you happen to know one of the handful of people discovered so far who have it get ready to

be amazed Louise Owen is 37 years old and a professional violinist living in New York City City but she has another gift too one that is far more rare let me give you a date let's say January 2nd 1990 right now I'm remembering the jogging class that I started that morning and you're actually back there I'm I'm I can feel it I can remember the coach saying keep going that was more than 20 years ago when she was 16 a date I picked completely at random as I did this one February 18th 1988 1988 oh

you're laughing I'm laughing it was a Thursday I had a big conversation with a friend of mine and that's all I'm going to say Louise says she can remember every day of her life since the age of 11 try to talk us through can you do that how how it works um out of the air April 21st 1991 1991 okay April 21st so in the moment between April 21st and 1991 I have scrolled through 25 April 21sts thinking which one is it going to be which one is it going to be okay 1991 which was

a Sunday and I was in Los Angeles and I had a concert with the American Youth Symphony you went to the most important thing that happened that was the most I mean probably don't want to hear about you know sort of the day oh I got up in the morning and I got dressed you remember that yeah you remember you had for lunch um not what I had for lunch that day but I do remember what I had for dinner the night before so and effortless it just pops in right I mean for me it's

almost as automatic as if you say what is your name and where do you live but how do we know that what she says remembers really happened entered James maau a professor of neurobiology at the University of California Irvine and a renowned expert on memory Dr maau is the first to discover and study Superior autobiographical memory and he is quizzing Louise his fifth subject to find out an eye condition requires him to wear a clouded lens let's move back in time now to uh 1990 it rained on several days in January and February can you

name the dates on which it rained um believe it or not she could let's see it was slightly rainy and cloudy on January 14th 15th was very hot the weekend of the 27th 28th no rain we check the official weather records it rained very hard on Sunday February 4th and she was right Mah says this type of memory is completely new to science so he and his colleagues have had to devise their own tests like this one on public events October 19th 1987 it was a Monday uh that was the day the big stock market

crash and the cist jacin due died that day the Berlin Wall falls on what day uh November 9th 1989 which was a Thursday Christopher Reeves accident occurred on what day uh it was Saturday May 27th uh 1995 and when were the Oscars held in 1999 in 1999 Sunday March 21st yes perfect I went to a fabulous Oscar party that day because these people remember things that you and I couldn't possibly remember and they're not memorizing there's no trick they can do with their memories what you and I can do about yesterday and they can do

it every day and they can do it every day and when I ask what what goes on in what goes on in your brain what goes on in your mind they give the very unsatisfying response I just see it it's just there the first person ever identified with this ability is Jill Price who says she feels haunted by The NeverEnding stream of memories and hasn't wanted to meet any of the others 40 tomorrow with a chance of snow or rain is next was Brad Williams a radio news anchor and reporter from Lacrosse Wisconsin who isn't

bothered by his memory he says it comes in handy at work and playing trivia games I would get six seven ,000 points everybody else would get 1,000 points third was Rick Baron from Cleveland do you remember every movie you've ever seen sure and you remember when lots of television shows started anything movies 60 Minutes Tuesday September 24th 68 the first Sunday show was uh September 19th uh 71 August 1st 1974 Thursday why do you know that that's my most memorable August 1st why and Bob patrell I moved to LA that year a TV producer and

writer who serves as the collective memory and sometimes the evening entertainment for his friends 1996 April 27th which was a Saturday it was a Tuesday no April 27 96 in 93 see it was Saturday everybody else is can't remember anything I have an all and I'm wrong not wrong I must confess that when I first heard about this research what surprised me was not that this tion existed but that it was considered so rare that's because it sounded like a description of a friend of mine the actress Mary L Henner the star of the hit

TV show taxi she lives with her husband and two sons from a prior marriage in Los Angeles hey Mom what day was Valentine's Day in 79 in 1979 um it was a Wednesday and you're right how do you you know you've lived with me your entire life but you've never explained how you can do that I don't do it I just see it you and I have known each other 25 years I can rattle off almost every single time I've seen you I do you remember when we went to Oro the restaurant that was '

93 oh my gosh that was June 1st the Tuesday and what did we eat I had the salmon cuz I she even remembers what day she first wore many of the shoes in her large and well-organized closet like these shoes I wore them October the the first time I wore them October 18th 2007 these I wore on April the 21st of this year so that was a Tuesday um oh these shoes I got a long time ago it sure seemed like Superior autobiographical memory to me 1982 I got them April the 9th so that was

a Friday of 1982 we put Mary Lou in touch with Dr maau hi so nice to meet you I'm Jim to have her memory officially put to the test there was a session in his office you know when John lenon was killed yes that was December 8th 1980 and that was a Monday a round of standard memory tests go ahead and put them in the order that they were presented to you the public events quiz Delta Airline flight 191 crashes near Dallas Texas oh I know exactly when that happened because all of a sudden I

was at my uh it was August the 2nd of 1985 it was a Friday after 7 hours of grilling October 1st 8th 15th 22 M and his collaborator neuroscientist Larry kahill officially anointed Mary L Henner Superior autobiographical memory subject number six extremely impressive you really do remember your whole life it's like putting in a DVD and it cues up to a certain place I'm there again so I'm looking out from my eyes and seeing things visually as I would have that day do you remember all your old boyfriend's birthdays do not only that the date

of the first time you know I remember in order let's have another warm Miami welcome for Mary L we searched for footage of long ago events in Marylou's life to try and stump her October 26th 1976 okay October 26th 1976 1976 was a Tuesday oh I went to uh went to shoot a ring around the collar commercial in Venice Italy and you saw a second and a half mood shot of Venice and then a Gondolier singing of love I sing TR la la la for you got ring around the Kal la la and I went

my powder didn't work more than 30 years [Music] later my powder didn't work dead on boy you guys really have drawn up the drags what do you see as the potential in terms of science it could be a new chapter we think we knew a lot and all of a sudden these people come and display a kind of memory we've never seen before and we have to say woo what is that about and so we're going to take a look and see if we can figure that out and it could be could be very important

so excited to meet you guys one thing Dr maau had not yet done is bring these memory Wizards together so we did and he kicked off a questioning session unlike any other a 7.1 earthquake H the San Francisco Oakland area we were watching the game of the World Series oh my gosh are you guys feeling a little competitive with each other no well I want to make sure that I'm not the dun here when they tell you they know are they always correct I would say over 99% of the time if not 100% of the

time if they tell you something and you can check it they're right I've almost given up looking now because they're right people go okay what's the trick what's the that's what you get a lot they seem to relish the chance finally to compare notes do you guys ever get ticked at someone and it's something that you consider Monumental and for them it's Monumental and then you bring it up and they go I don't remember that how can you forget that you know what I love I love when people get so flattered like they go wow

I must have really made an impression on you does it ever freak anybody out people misunder understand it a lot of times they think it's photographic they think it's autistic you know they call your Rainman and I'll just go along with I yeah yeah definitely Friday you know St like that it was a question we had are they autistic are they anything like Savant I guess the answer is yes and no they're not people who have a extraordinary ability but can't tie their shoe and that's part of what I think makes this at least so

interesting for me is that you have this really remarkable ability in a person who other is otherwise pretty darn normal but what exactly does normal mean when you remember every day of your life when everything good and everything bad that's ever happened to you is right there instantly accessible when you look back at painful memories is it just as raw sometimes it'll be as though it happened yesterday sometimes it's as though it happened last week just the mention of a sad day like the one in 1986 when Louise learned she'd have to change schools and

she relives it emotionally I felt like my whole world was collapsing and you say that and it's like all of a sudden I feel like this really heartbroken little 13-year-old all over again you feel it I do feel it Vivid awful yeah is your heart I mean my my heart is actually pounding right now telling me she says her memory is a gift but there are definitely downsides sometimes having this sort of extreme memory can be a very isolating sort of thing there are times when I feel like I'm fluent in a language that nobody

else speaks or that I'm walking around and everybody else has Amnesia are there still Skeptics in your field who know what you're up to and just yes Science is based on skepticism and so yes there are Skeptics I suppose if I had not met these people and tested them I would be a skeptic my answer to that is come on over for a day I'll let you meet a few of them and I'd like to see how many of them walk away and say well it's not a big deal no it is a big deal

and we need to figure out what it's all about come on in and that work is already underway Dr maau is doing MRI scans of all the subjects searching for clues that might be hidden in the structure of their brains you all right there yes okay here we go preliminary results from the MRIs are in and the findings are tantalizing and unexpected we'll tell you about that and what this kind of memory has meant for their relationships when we come back beyond the fun of asking what happened on August 16th 1983 and knowing you'll actually

get an answer there is a lot at stake here the discovery of people with instant access to virtually every day of their lives could recast our whole understanding of how human memory works and what's possible and that has implications for all of us is it it possible we all have memories of every day tucked away in our brains but we just can't retrieve them could understanding these remarkable people someday help with Alzheimer's and other memory disorders scientists tell us the potential is enormous but the inquiry is just beginning the first step look at and try

to figure out what might be going on inside their brains we watched as the first MRI images of Louise Owen's brain appeared on the screen the hope is that somewhere in these pictures and measurements will lie the first clue that might explain what makes her memory so extraordinary did you find anything good we'll find out what did you think you were going to find and then what did you find well if you want the honest truth the honest truth is that I thought I bet we'll find nothing oh right I mean it's kind of like

figuring that you know if you open Einstein's brain there's going to be some huge lobe that says genius you know you don't you don't find stuff like that but Dr kale was wrong no flashing genius loes but they did find parts of the brain that were significantly larger in people with Superior autobiographical memory than in control subjects of matched age and gender this would be a person looking this way he brought along a model of a brain to show us there's two areas that are jumping out at us the first is this area over here

called the temporal lobe and this area is quite a bit bigger now that's intriguing because this is the the chunk of brain neurobiologists think has to do with storing new memories so not a surprise not a surprise there more interesting he says is a second region deep inside the brain called the cadate nucleus which scientists believe is involved in what's called habit or skill learning and also in obsessive compulsive disorder can you give us an analogy of how much larger these sections are a lot larger perhaps up to seven or eight what's called standard deviations

larger than normal to understand what that means if a man with seven or eight standard deviations taller than the height of the average man he'd be 10 feet tall so we have some potentially whopping effects Giants Giants now they need to figure out why we have the chicken egg problem do they have these larger brain regions because they have exercised it a lot or do they have good memories because because these are larger because these are larger and what about the fact that the cod8 nucleus is thought to be involved in obsessive compulsive disorder the

scientists think there may just be a hint there and exhibit a is Mary Lou Henner's closet I love organization I like my shoes a certain way right foot going this way left foot going that way so you can always see the toe and the heel on every pair and you'll see that things are very color coordinated here but in sections and I always hang like with like and I have the exact same hangers because then everything slides more easily and of them have what we think of as OCD like behaviors they love to collect things

they have to have things in just the right order what about phobias this hypochondria account it's like oh I hope I don't get this I hope I don't get that this e you have a little germa I wash hands frequently yeah so do I in fact I dropped my keys when I was in a hurry driving down here and I went all right now so I went back in and I like R I washed them off I ran yeah I do that all the time if I drop them can you conclude there's a connection or

or we're still way too early because it's showing up in one fashion or another in all of them I'd say it's our biggest clue and when you think about it they even seem to look for ways to organize their Memories the thing that is most pleasurable is categorizing any event any time I went bowling in my life any wedding lived starting as as a six-year-old sometimes what I do is I'll go back July 14th as far back back as I can remember I just go July 14th 67 that happened and then maybe I won't remember'

68 but I'll remember 69 and 70 or you remember around 68 but do you all do that Louise even compares dates I'll scroll all the way back to 1985 we like well which were better March 3's or March 4ths a year ago two years ago three years ago and go all the way back it's it's sort of like mental gymnastics there's a certain irony to the fact that it is Dr maau Who is studying this phenomenon because he is known in the field of memory for discoveries these people seem to defy his work with rats

like this one that doesn't know there's a platform hidden below the surface of this water tank prove the role of adrenaline in making strong Memories the rat swims around the edge then eventually Ventures out and by chance bumps into the platform the next day he'll find it just a little bit faster but watch this rat that learned where the platform was yesterday then received a shot of adrenaline immediately afterward notice that it starts out not on the edge oh there you go oh that's impressive adrenaline actually made this rat's brain remember better and MGA says

the same thing happens in people when we experience something emotional positive or negative our bodies release adrenaline searing those memories into our brains more strongly what can we you and I do right now to make sure we remember this conversation I could kick you yeah or I could embarrass you most of my research is with laboratory rats and suppose I said all of a sudden oh and I'm going to demonstrate to you and I drop about six rats right at your feet I'd remember believe me I'd remember you remember excuse me don't don't sit on

her lap excuse me you're not supposed to be there uh I think you'd remember that now the people that you're we're meeting now yes they wouldn't need those rats and that's what's so baffling these people do remember the ordinary non-emotional events the rest of us routinely forget lots of sports fans can remember highlights from particularly exciting games Bob patella a Pittsburgh Steelers fan remembers every game when was the last time the Redskins beat the Steelers H let's see they played him in 2004 and the Steelers won they played him in 2000 the Steelers there as

he scanned back through 19 seasons in 19 seconds oh in ' 91 in uh yeah they played in 91 November 17th 1991 Bravo we tried even further back what were the last two games in October of 1979 let's see uh the 22 they played uh Denver on Monday night and I think they won 42 to7 yep and then they they played oh then they played Dallas on uh October 28th Sunday it was on CBS so you can get that game Pittsburgh Pennsylvania we did we got that game and 31 years later he was able to

describe plays starb was scrambling and Elsie Greenwood just slammed right into him it was in the fourth quarter starback really took a shot he was hit by Greenwood he even remembered specific images from the broadcast I remember starback just sitt on the bench you could just tell he was out of it how about November 11th 1990 they didn't play that was a buy you're good that was a trick question no I I remember that day cuz I was I was I I was depressed I had broken up with this woman and I was going out

there to rent a couple videos and I was thinking about her there's a quote that I love it's by the great psychologist William James he said if we remembered everything we should on most most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing and that's what the field of memory has always considered a given that a healthy dose of forgetting is crucial to our ability to think you abstract and generalize in part because you forget uh when you have a trip to work uh and you have the same trip every day you abstract and

you generalize a typical trip to work because you don't remember every single detail of every single trip so a little forgetting is needed to help you abstract in general eniz well that's what I always thought until I met your five subjects today do you ever get the feeling that all these memories are cluttering up your mind but it's just too much up there and I need to sweep this away it's organized you know what I mean it's organized so it's called on when you need it but it's not like they're like oh they're coming in

all the time and it's not overwhelming surprising thing is that these people don't appear to have cluttered brains they can pull out the right information at the right time and that's the puzzle it's the real puzzle that's the puzzle it kind of takes everything we've all assumed scientists and Ordinary People and said come on guys rethink it yeah got to do some rethinking but that's that's fun that's that's part of the fun part of science this is where the saliva goes and they're pursuing every Avenue they can DNA testing to see if there are differences

in their genetic makeup handedness testing since all three men are lefties to see if that heals any clues which way would you cartwheel I mean could you imagine going this way or could you imagine I'm you do cartwheels the inquiry is just getting started with six willing subjects eager to see where it all will lead and who knows how many more still out there I've always loved having this memory I feel as an actress and as a writer it's been indispensable as a mother as a wife certainly why do you say that oh my gosh

no cuz you can never lose an argument no you didn't say that I said this you know you said this yeah but maybe he doesn't like like it so I know yeah well that's probably why I'm on my third yeah which raises a real question since Mary Lou is the only one of the six subjects who is married or has children you would think that in a in Romance M it can be tricky it can be tricky I think so breakups must be horrible horrible because you cannot not remember right I find it intriguing that

four out of five of you are not married and as far as as I'm aware and not in a relationship do you all think there's a problem having this memory and having a good relationship I like the think it's coincidence you're going to remember everything right you're going to win every argument although I think it's you know it's what you do with it I mean I try not to be defined by this and she says for the most part she succeeds overall is it a good thing are you glad you have this I am you

are I am I mean sure there are times when it's difficult but I feel like it makes me live my life with so much more intention and so much more joy like what do you mean more intention because I know that I'm going to remember whatever happens today it's like all right what can I do to make today significant what can I do that is going to make today stand out as you watch these remarkable people and as you think back on say my three children how little I can actually remember when they were four

five six you start to wonder why are we the default State why are we normal and they're the unusual ones why didn't we evolve such that we most of us are like them and we're the unusual ones who can hardly remember anything just makes you [Music] wonder how often have you wondered what your spouse is really thinking or your boss or the guy sitting across from you on the bus we all take as a given that will never really know for sure the content of our thoughts is our own private Secret unknowable by anyone else

until now that is neuroscience Research into how we think and what we're thinking is advancing at a stunning rate making it possible for the first time in human history to peer directly into the brain to read out the physical makeup of our thoughts some would say to read our minds this is the technology that is transforming what once was science fiction into just plain science it's a specialized use of MRI scanning called functional MRI fmri for short that makes it possible to see what's going on inside the brain while people are thinking every time I

walk in into that scanner room and I see the person's brain appear on the screen when I see those patterns it is just incredible Unthinkable mind reading I what do you call it thought identification whatever you want to call it what neuroscientist Marcel just and his colleague Tom Mitchell at Carnegie melan University have done is combine FM's ability to look at the brain in action with computer science's new power to sort through massive amounts of data the goal to see if they could identify exactly what happens in the brain when people think specific thoughts okay

are you ready to get started they did an experiment where they asked subjects to think about 10 objects five of them tools like screwdriver and Hammer and five of them dwellings like igloo and Castle then recorded and analyzed the activity in their brains for each you had them think about a screwdriver MH and the computer found the place in the brain where that person was think thinking screwdriver screwdriver isn't one place in the brain it's many places in the brain when you think of a screwdriver you think about how you hold it how you twist

it what it looks like what you use it for and each of those functions are in different places correct just says when we think screwdriver or Igloo for example neurons start firing at varying levels of intensity in different areas throughout the brain and we found that we could identify which object they were thinking about from their brain activation patterns you're reading their mind we're identifying the thought that's occurring it's incredible just incredible are you saying that if you think of a hammer that your brain is identical to my brain when I think of a hammer

not identical we have idiosyncrasies maybe I've had a bad experience with a hammer and you haven't but it's close enough to identify each other's thoughts so you know that was never known before we asked if his team was up for a challenge would they take our associate producer Megan Frank whose brain had never been scanned before and see if the computer could identify her thoughts Justin Mitchell agreed to give it a try and see if they could do it in almost real time so you've never done an instant analysis is way might say on television

nobody's done this ever ever that's her brain that's her brain inside the scanner Megan was shown a series of 10 items and asked to think for a few seconds about each one if it all comes out right when she's thinking Hammer the computer will know she's thinking Hammer right he we're all done so Megan yes how was it it wasn't bad good within minutes the computer unaware of what pictures Megan had been shown and working only from her brain activity patterns as read out by the scanner was ready to tell us in its own voice

what it believed was the first object Megan had been thinking about I think the word is knife all right one fing all right then the second I think the word is Hammer all right I think the word is window it's perfect right so far and it continued to be word after word Apartment 10 out of 10 10 out of 10 well done well done good thingk you and of course this is just the beginning exactly who knows what you're going to be able to read little scary actually well that's our research program for the next

5 years what to see what how you know we're not satisfied with hammer and neither a neuroscientist 4,000 M away in Berlin at the Bur Stein Center John Dylan Haynes is hard at work here using the scanner not just to identify objects people are thinking about but to read their intentions so we're going to start now with the actual experiment subjects were asked to make a simple decision whether to add or subtract two numbers they would be shown later on Haynes found he could read directly from the activity in this small part of the brain

that controls intentions what they had decided to do this is a kind of blown up version of the brain activity happening here and you can see that if a person is planning to add or to subtract the pattern of brain activity is different in these two cases I always tell my students that there is no science fiction anymore all the science fiction I read in high school we're doing to Paul root walpy director of the center for ethics at Emory University in Atlanta the ability to read our thoughts and intentions this way is revolutionary through

throughout history we could never actually coers someone to reveal information torture doesn't work that well persuasion doesn't work that well the right to keep one's thoughts locked up in their brain is amongst the most fundamental rights of Being Human you're saying that if someone can read my intentions we have to talk about who might in the future be able to do that absolutely whether we're going to let the state do it or whether we're going to let me do it I have two teenage daughters I come home one day and my car is dented and

both of them say they didn't do it am I going to be allowed to drag them off to the local brain Imaging lie detection company and get them put in a scanner we don't know but before we've even started the debate there were two companies already offering lie detection services using brain scans one with the catchy name no lie MRI but our experts caution that the technique is still unproven in the meantime Haynes is working on something he thinks may be even more effective reading out from your brain exactly where you've been Hayne showed me

an experiment he created out of a video game and you can actually navigate around if you want he had me navigate through a series of rooms in different virtual reality houses now I would put you in a scanner and I would show you some of these scenes that you've seen and some scenes that you haven't seen well I haven't seen anything yet oh okay and okay now I'm getting into recog yeah I recognize the bar right at this moment we would be able to tell from your brain activity that you've already seen this environment before

and so this is a potential tool foral tool absolutely in the case of break-ins you might be able to tell if someone's been in alqaeda training camp before have any uh uh national security agencies been in touch with you not in not in the US anywhere in the world uh yes in in Germany but uh so there are people who are considering these kinds of possibilities and using them in India last summer a woman was convicted of murder after an EEG of her brain allegedly revealed that she was familiar with the circumstances surrounding the poisoning

of her ex fiance can you through our legal system be forced to take one of these tests it's a great question question and the legal system hasn't decided on this yet but we do have a fifth amendment we don't have to uh incriminate ourselves well here's where it gets very interesting because the Fifth Amendment only prevents the courts from forcing us to testify against our cells but you can force me to give DNA or a hair sample or or blood even if that would incriminate me so here's the million dooll question if you can brain

image me and get information directly from my brain is that testimony or is that like DNA blood semen and other things that you could take from me court case inevitable there will be a Supreme Court case about this for now it's impossible to force someone to have his or her brain scanned because the subject has to lie still and cooperate but that could change there are some other technologies that are being developed that may be able to be used covertly and even remotely so for example they're trying to develop now a beam of light that

would be projected onto your forehead it would go a couple of millimeters into your frontal cortex and then receptors would get the reflection of that light and there's some studies that suggest that we could use that as a lie detection device and we wouldn't know we've got a red dot in our forehead no you wouldn't if you were sitting there in the airport and being questioned they could beam that on your forehead without your knowledge we can't do that yet but they're working on scary is that is imagine a world where companies could read our

minds too light beams may be a bit far off but fmri scanning is already being used to try to figure out what we want to buy and how to sell it to us it's a new field called neuromarketing one of its Pioneers is neuroscientist Gemma Calbert co-founder of a London company called neurosense do you have a lot of clients yes such as uh unila Intel mcdonal proor and gamble uh MTV or Viacom and she says it's a growing field what we've seen is a sort of snowballing effect over the last few years I think there

are about 92 neurom marketing agencies worldwide but some experts question whether it's ethical to scan the brain for commercial purposes and say neurom marketers may be promising more than they can really deliver if you image my brain and you say aha Paul craves chocolate chip cookies and I say no I don't now are you going to believe the brain over me you can only do that if you have proven that that part of the brain lighting up means in all cases that that person desires chocolate chip cookies and what a lot of people are doing

is they're just Imaging the brain then they're declaring what that means and they're never proving that it actually translates into Behavior you know it's very interesting when you show someone a brain scan people just believe it it just reeks of credibility absolutely absolutely and you telling me that's the area where people add and subtract I thought well of course he knows but I could have told you anything I know so as brain Imaging continues to advance and find its way into the courts the market and who knows what other aspects of Our Lives one message

is be cautious another is get ready back at Carnegie melon just and Mitchell have already uncovered the signatures in our brains for kindness hypocrisy and love it's breathtaking yes and kind of eerie well you know I think the reason people have that reaction is it because it reveals the essence of what it means to be a person all of those kinds of things that define us as human beings are brain patterns we don't want to know that well that it all boils down to uh I don't know molecules and things like that but we are

you know we are biological creatures you know our limbs we accept our you know muscles and Bone and our brain is a biological thinking machine do you think one day who knows how far into the future there'll be a machine that'll be able to read very complex thought like um I hate so and so or you know I love the ballet because definitely definitely and not and not in 20 years I think in three five years does three years well five who Among Us hasn't wished we could read someone else's mind know exactly what they're

thinking well that's impossible of course since our thoughts are more than anything else our own private personal unreachable or at least that's what we've always well thought advances in Neuroscience have shown that on a physical level our thoughts are actually a vast network of neurons firing all across our brains so if that brain activity could be identified and analyzed could our thoughts be decoded could our minds be read well a team of scientists at Carnegie melon University in Pittsburgh has spent more than a decade trying to do just that we started our reporting on their

work 10 years ago and what they've discovered since has drawn us back in Carnegie melon scanner room two floors underground have a seat a steady stream of research subjects come to have their brains and thoughts read in this MRI machine it's a type of scanning called functional MRI fmri all right we'll queue it up and then we'll start that looks at what's happening inside the brain as a person thinks it's like being an astronomer when the first telescope is discovered or being a biologist when the first microscope is is developed neuroscientist Marcel just says this

technology has made it possible for the first time to see the physical makeup of our thoughts okay are you ready to get started when we first visited Dr just lab 10 years ago he and his team had conducted a study they put people in the scanner and asked them to think about 10 objects five of them tools like screwdriver and Hammer and five of them dwellings like igloo and Castle while measuring activity levels throughout their brains the idea was to Crunch the data and try to identify distinctive patterns of activity for each object you had

them think about a screwdriver MH and the computer found the place in the brain where that person was thinking screwdriver screwdriver isn't one place in the brain it's many places in the brain when you think of a screwdriver you think about how you hold it how you twist it what it looks like and each of those functions are in different places correct he showed us that by dividing the brain into thousands of tiny cubes and analyzing the amount of activity in each one his team team was able to identify unique patterns for each object you're

reading their mind we're identifying the thought that's occurring it's incredible just incredible incredible but only the beginning in the decades since Professor just lab has taken this technique and applied it far beyond Hammers and Igloo to increasingly complex thoughts this is basic science knowledge for knowledge's sake not trying to cure disease but to understand the fundamental workings of our bodies and in this case of our minds one of Dr just's main questions was whether he could find patterns for abstract ideas so he did a study asking people to think about forgiveness gossip spirituality could they

be identifiable in the brain the way the screwdriver was remarkably the answer was yes this was the activation pattern when people thought about spirituality and this was gossip one of my favorite subjects and you see a slightly different pattern one difference between the two was in areas of the brain scientists had already shown become active when we think about other people circled in blue those areas lit up bright red when subjects thought about gossip not so much for spirituality in another study Dr J tested whether patterns are the same when people think in different languages

they are and he's asked acting students to conjure up emotions in the scanner to see if feelings have distinctive activation patterns too and what did you find each emotion had its own characteristic values and you could tell which one was which and it's the same in every head amazingly it was common across people common across people does that mean we could put our colleague associate producer Jamie Woods into a scanner for the first time and Dr Justine would be able to identify her emotions so she's seeing words for 9 seconds each Jaime's job was to

think of little scenarios that would conjure up the feelings on the screen after she came out welcome back thank you how was a computer program took the brain activation dated by scan anded to decode hers so what were you thinking about for dis I was thinking of someone throwing up on me at like a baseball game and so could the computer read her brain patterns and tell what she'd been feeling the program's answer is I think the emotion is disgusted the experienced emotion was actually disgusted that was correct awesome next I think the emotion is

Envy what were you thinking for Bry I was just thinking of beautiful models and the computer program got all of J's emotions right it's reading what Jamie's feeling and it's funny isn't it because it's so personal we all think of our own thoughts so individual so intimate how could anybody else's thoughts be like mine and they are it's feelings too yes feelings now obviously people think very different thoughts but it's you know like people choose to do different things with their bodies but they all walk putting one foot in front of the other nobody walks

sideways nobody walks backward systematically there's something about the biological apparatus that makes you act in a certain way with your body and we I don't think we realize the degree to which the biological apparatus that we have in our skulls governs shapes the way we think Professor just's goal is to one day create a dictionary of brain activation a key to what all different thoughts look like inside our minds but he also started wondering whether those definitions might be different in people with disorders like autism okay you're going to swing your legs up at this

end prior research had found structural differences in the brains of people with Autism so the question was whether thought patterns might differ too hi Jeff this is Rob how are you doing Dr Justin recruited 17 adults with autism and ask them as well as 17 control subjects to think about social interactions like adore hug humiliate challenging terrain for many with autism the results Were Striking the activation patterns differed enough to tell who had autism and who didn't with 97% accuracy the people with Autism thought of these social interactions apart from themselves as he showed us

in these findings for the word hug the key differences were in brain regions that activate when we think about ourselves circled in blue right there there and there those areas light up much more among the controls whereas the autism subjects showed far less activation they thought of it more like a definition of hug without self- involvement and that you saw it with word after word yes I just thought wow this is the coolest thing I've heard and I don't know how long David Brent is a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh medical center where he

runs a clinic for suicidal adolescence he happened to attend a talk Marcel just was giving about his autism findings and immediately wondered about his own patients so I went up to him afterwards and I said would you be interested in talking about maybe doing a study on suicide you hear about cases of suicide where the person had been depressed but you also hear situations where people say there was nothing wrong suicide is a great mystery because the person who knows the most about why it happened isn't there to talk with you try to reconstruct what

happened but nobody has a window into people's you know interior uh thoughts nobody that is except someone with a mind reading device device doctors just and Brent began planning a pilot study to see if the scanner might reveal what is altered in the thoughts of people contemplating suicide they reached out to Matt knock a Harvard Professor who has studied how difficult it is for doctors and emergency rooms to know which patients are safe to send home is this the first time anybody's looked inside the brain to see about Suicidal Thoughts yes this is the first

study I've ever heard of where someone's looked in the brain of someone who's suicidal who's actively thinking about death or suicide you don't see life as something that's going to be fixed the only way to get out of it is to kill yourself Dan tsy a former patient at Dr Brent's Clinic volunteered to participate in the study to help scientists better understand suicidal thinking do you think in terms of the word pain pain is when you break a limb or you have a migraine and it hurts so bad that you can't see this being depressed

and suicidal it it's much greater much greater much greater than pain to be in the study subjects had to have had Suicidal Thoughts within the prior month they and control subjects were asked to think about words like funeral and death as well as positive words including praise good and carefree in both categories the suicidal group differed from controls this is the group that's thinking about suicide as with the autism study the key differences turned out to be in those self-related areas they lit up bright red among suicidal subjects when they thought about death related words

I give you the word funeral you know what do you think about maybe your grandmother's funeral or something like that exactly a suicidal person is much more likely to say my funeral for positive words the findings were exactly the opposite when the nonsuicidal controls thought about the word Carefree they thought about something that involved themselves suicidal subjects significantly less so did you ever imagine that you could ask people to think about the word carefree and you'd be able to tell if someone was having suicidal thoughts it's no you know it's a breakthrough idea it's a

lot of fun if you're basic scientist to discover how things work but it becomes there's an extra level of gratification when you learn that it's possibly helpful and useful this work is still in its infancy doctors just Brent and knock are doing a larger NIH funded study to collect more data and while for now it's too costly and cumbersome to put people into MRI scanners to see if it's safe to release them from the hospital if they could come up with an easier way to do this absolutely just like the first GPS was you know

a big computer in a big room and now it's in all of our phones if there's a way to a few steps down the road make much more compact this approach and bring it into emergency rooms and outpatient clinics it could go a huge way towards moving forward clinical care but as this technology advances toward fulfilling its full promise it's hard not to also want about its Peril will it ever be possible to read someone's thoughts precisely the thoughts are there precisely if you could just get close enough to the electrical activity you think one

day we'll figure out how to do that yes which means that we'll never be able to have our thoughts completely secure within ourselves I think it will be technologically possible to invade people's thoughts but it's our societal obligation to make sure that never happens our lives are filled with distractions email Twitter texting we're constantly connected to technology rarely alone with just our thoughts which is probably why there's a growing movement in America to train people to get around the stresses of daily life it's a practice called mindfulness and it basically means being aware of your

thoughts physical Sensations and surroundings tonight we'll introduce you to the man who's largely responsible for mindfulness gaining traction his name is John kabat Zen and he thinks mindfulness is the answer for people who are so overwhelmed by life they feel they aren't really living at all there are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness but what it really means is uh awareness is it being present it is being present that's exactly what it is I don't feel I'm very present in each moment I feel like every moment I'm either thinking about something that's

coming down the road or something that's been in the past so ultimately all this preparing is for what for the next moment like the last moment like and then we're dead so in a certain way are we going to experience while we're still alive we're only alive now John kidin is an MIT trained scientist who's been practicing mindfulness for 47 years back in 1979 he started teaching mindfulness through meditation to people suffering from chronic pain and illness that program is now used in more than 700 hospitals worldwide so how can you be mindful in your

daily life when your alarm goes off and you jump out of bed what is the nature of the Mind in that moment are you already like oh my God your calendar pops into your mind and you're driven already or can you take a moment and just lie in bed and just feel your body breathing and remember oh yeah brand new day and I'm still alive so I get out of bed with awareness brush my teeth with awareness when you're in the shower next time check and see if you're in the shower what do you mean

check and see if you're in the shower well you may not be you may be in your first meeting at work you may have 50 people in the shower with you capid Zen says mindfulness takes practice a lot of people start with a training class to learn how to meditate he agreed to teach us at a weekend retreat on a remote Mountaintop in Northern California when we arrived we were told there'd be no television to watch no internet not even an alarm clock so I'm checking in the retreat was full of professionals neuroscientists Business Leaders

Silicon Valley Executives before we began we all had to surrender our last ties to the outside world put your devices in the basket you know I'm contributing my MacBook Air and my uh iPhone happily I wasn't exactly happy to give up my phone I usually check emails several times an hour so let's take a few minutes and just settle into a an erect and dignified posture The Retreat lasted 3 days and most of that time was spent just sitting there silently meditating with occasional guidance from CIT Zen there's no place to go there's nothing to

do we're just asking you to sit and know that you're sitting knowing that you're sitting may sound simple turns out it's not the Mind constantly wanders the mind has a life of its own it goes here and there to not get lost in thought cabat Zin recommended focusing on this sensation of breathing in and out can we actually ride with full Awareness on the waves of the breath at the belly at the nostrils and the chest and then simply rest here in Awareness resting in Awareness is one of those phrases used a lot by people

who practice mindfulness but when I tried to do it it wasn't restful and I worried I wasn't doing it right I kept thinking about work I miss my cell phone you're not alone having a little withdrawal I will say kabid Zin who's written 10 books on mindfulness and led nearly a hundred Retreats describes meditation as a mental workout the mind wanders away from the breath and then you gently and non-judgmentally just bring it back so it's okay that the Mind drifts away but you just bring it back it's the nature of the mind to drift

away the mind is like the Pacific Ocean it waves and mindfulness has been shown to drop underneath the waves if you drop underneath the agitation in the mind into your breath deep enough calmness gentle undulations after hours of meditating in 30 minute sessions it does get easier those waves of thought cat Zin described they're still there but you get less distracted by them at breakfast we spent time relearning some of the very basic things in life including how to eat food eating a meal in complete silence is a a little awkward but without conversation is

a distraction you taste more and eat less this is something called Walking meditation the goal is to learn to be aware of each and every movement and feeling I know it seems ridiculous but it does change the way you experience walking the Zen people from ancient China when you're walking just walk turns out to be the hardest thing just walk when you're eating just eat not from the TV not with the newspaper turns out that's huge Congressman Tim Ryan an Ohio Democrat says mindfulness might look a lot like nothing but he really believes it can

change America for the better he attended his first Meditation Retreat in 2008 just days after winning a grueling reelection campaign but being mindful at a retreat is one thing we wondered if back in Washington Congressman Ryan ever worries about how all this looks well you know I can see myself in high school going whoa stay away from those guys so how do you use it here in Capitol Hill I'm on the budget committee for example there's a lot of conflict and people say things that get you ramped up I find myself as my body clinches

up when somebody says something that I know is wrong or I I want to catch them in a lie or whatever that just calm down when it's your turn you make your point Heen you don't hear the words C and Congress together very often but Ryan is trying to change that he hosts weekly meditation sessions open to members and staff of both parties now Shifting the attention to take in the entire body have you gotten any Republican Congressman in to meditate with you yet no we're working on it he's written a book about mindfulness and

obtained a million dollars of federal funding to teach it to school children in his Ohio dist District feel like we're calm right now yes you are I've seen it transform classrooms I've seen it heal veterans I've seen what it does to individuals who have really high chronic levels of stress and how it has helped their body heal itself I wouldn't be willing to stick my neck out this far if I didn't think this is the thing that can really help shift the country to some people though this may sound like kind of new age gobleg

there's so many different compelling studies that is showing that this is not new age gobble deg this is potentially transformative of our health and well-being psychologically as well as physically it can be useful for anxiety depression stress reduction there have been a number of studies that show mindfulness can lead to those benefits as well as improvements in memory and attention and at the University of Massachusetts Judson Brewer a psychiatrist and neuroscientist uses mindfulness to treat addiction this is just the next generation of exercise we've got the physical you know exercise components uh down and now

it's about working out how can we actually train our minds Dr Brewer is trying to understand how mindfulness can alter the functioning of the brain he uses a cap lined with 128 electrodes we're going to start filling each of these 128 Wells with conduction gel the electrodes are able to pick up signals from the posterior singulate part of a brain Network linked to memory and emotion this is all just picking up electrical signal from the top of your head since attending the mindfulness Retreat I'd been meditating daily and was curious to see if it had

an impact on my brain we're going to have you start with thinking of something that was very anxiety-provoking for you okay when I thought about something stressful the cells in my brain's posterior singulate immediately started firing shown by the red lines that went off the chart on the computer screen just drop into meditation okay when I let go of those stressful thoughts and refocused on my breath within seconds the brain cells that had been firing quieted down shown by the blue lines on the computer that's really fascinating to see like that Dr Brewer believes everyone

can train their brains to reach that blue mindfulness Zone but he says all the technology were surrounded by makes it difficult if you look at people out on the street if you look at people at restaurants nobody's having conversations anymore they're sitting at dinner looking at their phone because their brain is so addicted to it you really think there's something in the brain that's addicted to that well it's the same reward Pathways as addiction absolutely I'm you know on mobile devices all day long and I feel like I could go through an entire day and

not be present and what's that like it's exhausting yeah so all of this is leading to a societal exhaustion the irony is is many of the people responsible for creating the gadgets that distract us are themselves practicing mindfulness more than 2,000 people from companies like Google Facebook and Instagram showed up earlier this year in San Francisco for mindfulness conference called wisdom 2.0 please welcome our guests Karen May is a Google vice president and that's Chade main ton a former engineer who's become kind of a mindfulness Guru as could only happen at a place like Google

his actual title is jolly good fellow which nobody can deny so what is a jolly good fellow do my job description is to Enlighten Minds Open Hearts and create World Peace that's your job description that's my job description I've heard that at some meetings at Google you actually start out with moments of Silence we do how long do you sit there quietly for it's literally a minute or two of noticing your breathing calming yourself down being present and then you're able to go into the meeting the business at hand with a little bit more Focus

does it make people more productive yes it does when the mind is unagitated when the mind is calm that mind is most conducive to creative problem solving to innovate correct and one of the powers of mindfulness is the ability to get to that frame of mind on demand so along with their free health clubs and other company perks Google Now offers their 52,000 employees free lessons in mindfulness in the middle of stress when everything's falling apart you can take one breath you know I can imagine some people rolling their eyes and saying oh come on

of course Google you guys have tons of money and there's massage therapists walking around and and all sorts of nice things for employees but just doesn't seem practical the advantage of this is it actually doesn't cost anything and it doesn't take much time and you believe it really works I I absolutely believe it works after nearly four Decades of teaching mindfulness John cabad Zin is happy to see it hitting the mainstream but if you're starting to think mindfulness is something you should start practicing he says you may be missing the point it's not a big

should it's not like oh I got to now one more thing that I have to put in my life now I have to be mindful you know and if it becomes that one more thing they got to do after they take the yoga class don't do it don't do it it's not a doing at all in fact it's a being and being doesn't take any time