Brain Scanner Customizes Web Surfing for You

Peck and his team asked study participants to wear headbands fitted with two functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) probes that measured activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain that plays a critical role in the emotion and reasoning behind decision-making. Each person was given a list of films culled from IMDB's lineup of the 250 best movies and the 100 worst movies and asked to pick the top and bottom three movies. The participants were then shown slides of each selection, while the fNIRS probes measured the person's neural patterns that correlated with preference and opposition. "We try to get an idea of what the patterns in the brain look like for things they like or don't like," said Peck. Preference patterns were then fed into a brain-computer recommendation system -- a series of filters and machine-learning algorithms -- that interpreted those patterns to make recommendations as subjects watched a fresh series of movie slides.