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Nature Biotechnology 25, 377–379 (1 April 2007) | doi:10.1038/nbt0407-377

Making money and opening minds

Monya Baker

Earlier this year, neuroscientists at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin announced that they could use brain scans to predict a subject's decisions. Though the particular application—foretelling whether someone would add or subtract a given set of numbers—has little commercial appeal, the rapid rise of brain monitoring techniques along with the computing capacity to handle large datasets is already changing medicine.