In this issue of Neuron, Haxby and colleagues describe a new method for aligning functional brain activity patterns across participants.Their study demonstrates thatobjects aresimilarlyrepresented across different brains, allowing for reliable classification of one person's brain activity based on another's.
Frank Tong · 2011
‘‘How do I know if you see red the same way that I see red? What if you saw all red things the way I see green, but just call those items red?’’ Even children in primary school seem to appreciate this rather weighty philosophical question, first posed by John Locke (1689). From this simple thought experiment, one could argue that it is impossible to know if the fundamental experiences of one person are truly shared by another. In essence, how can we ever know if our brains or minds are aligned with those around us? Remarkably, advances in human neuroimaging and multivariate pattern analysis could be bringing us a step closer toward addressing questions of this nature.