The year 2200. The streets are quieter than ever. Even though no one is talking to anyone, people smile at each other or seem to be (quietly)  fighting. No question about it: they are communicating without words. The art of reading minds has finally reached the streets. After years of researching and developing the possibilities of mind-reading, from now on everybody can lay hands on mind-reading techniques. It’s no more uncommon than a iPod or BlackBerry is today.

In popular media new ground-breaking findings in brain research pop up every now and then, with bold statements like “some of us have fat brains that make us crave for too much food” (www.thesun.co.uk) or “our consciousness houses on a highway underneath our skull” (www.volkskrant.nl). When you read these articles, brain research seems so very simple: you put participants in an fMRI, show them a stimulus, measure their brain activity, analyse which brain areas get activated and draw a conclusion. A piece of cake.

What makes a movie belong to a certain genre? How do we categorise movies in genres? What brain areas are activated when watching an action sequence? What does the plateau of about 65% mean in MVPA analysis? What is the significance of MVPA and what is its future? These are just a few of the many questions raised during the Brain Lab 2012 experience.

       The human mind is of course a complex thing, and so when I thought of the brain, I thought of a messy web of connections, something like the tangle of wires behind my Dad’s TV set, times a million.

Why do we dislike being tickled, but laugh anyway? Why does the tickle monster ignore our heart filled pleas to stop? Here’s a cognitive-evolutionary explanation on the tickling paradox.