India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from a controversial brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

Brain scientists are on a roll. Concern about rising levels of mental distress have resulted in unprecedented levels of funding in the US and Europe. And a range of new technologies, from genetics to brain imaging, are offering extraordinary insights into the molecular and cellular processes underlying how we see, how we remember, why we become emotional.

Interest in using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain-scanning technology as a lie-detector by government agencies and criminal defense lawyers is increasing although there are still many scientific and ethical questions left to be resolved.

It is possible to read someone's mind by remotely measuring their brain activity using functional MRI scanning, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves.

Brain scans show that the brains of people who are lying look very different from those of people who are telling the truth according to new research.

The science of lie detection has a chequered past. But it is becoming more reliable

Increasingly, lie-detector tests use voice stress analysis, a technology that has been around for decades but that has gained in popularity as the software at its heart continues to be refined.

A lie detector small enough to fit in the eyeglasses of law enforcement officers can tell whether a passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to questions in real time.

As neuroscientists hone new technologies for probing our brains, predicting our behavior and perhaps even altering our thoughts, ethicists wrestle with some troubling questions.

In labs across the nation, researchers are using technologies originally developed to examine diseases, brain activity, obesity and even learning disorders to try to solve some of the mysteries of human conduct. The provocative idea behind some of the research is to go beyond measuring the anxiety of a liar ? as polygraphs try to do ? and to catch the lies as they form in the human brain.