Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system that can forecast the activity patterns a brain will create for a specific word.

Subjects were given 58 concrete nouns and asked to think about the meaning and properties of the words. Brain scans taken when the users were thinking about the different words were then captured using magnetic resonance imaging.

The researchers identified a number of the basic building blocks that the brain uses to represent meaning. These building blocks could be used to predict patterns for words.