Brains scans cannot read your mind

There have been several reports demonstrating the capability to read the mental state of a subject using fMRI. Here we argue that these abilities will never reach the ultimate point of a priori mind-reading capability. The development of the brain into an organ capable of consciousness requires genetic specification of neuronal function, epigenetic specification of wiring, and history-dependent modification of connection patterns and wiring: learning. This path-dependent, non-state function process ensures that the firing patterns correlated with a particular mental content will be highly variable even across similar brains. This severely limits the ability to a priori read the details of a mental state from brain information. Because of this history-dependent process, it is clear that information about activation patterns severely underdetermines the information required to read the mental state; a particular activation pattern is meaningless outside of its neural context.