_______Mind reading 'a step closer to reality'_______

London: It's a development worth reading about -- it could soon be possible to tell whether someone was telling the truth or lie by observing their thought patterns.

Yes, mind reading is a step closer to reality, thanks to scientists who claim to have deciphered memories in brains of volunteers, using a brain scanner, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported.

However, according to the British scientists, the technology is thought to be at least 10 years away.

In their study, involving four people, the scientists were able to tell where an individual had been "standing" inside a virtual reality room from records of their brain activity.

Using a computer keypad, the four male volunteers navigated virtual reality rooms, choosing to "stand" in one of four locations marked by a rug. Their heads had been placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, allowing their brain activity to be monitored.

Focusing on the hippocampus, the small area of brain vital to navigation, memory recall and imagining future events the scientists measured blood flow related to neural activity.

A sophisticated computer programme was then used to work out the locations the subjects had visited in virtual space based on their brain activity. Patterns were detected which reflected the participants' memories of where they had been, the scientists found.

Professor Eleanor Maguire, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, said: "Just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality environment.

"In other words we could 'read' their spatial memories. With this kind of research, we are approaching the realm of mind reading.

"By looking at activity over tens of thousands of neurons, we can see there must be a functional structure -- a pattern -- to how these memories are encoded. Otherwise, our experiment simply would not have been possible to do."