come up with a set of narrative features, we get told they aren’t the right set of narrative features,” said Gallant. Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, praised the work. Unlike many studies that looked at brain activity when an isolated word or sentence was spoken, Gallant’s team had shed light on how the brain worked in a real- world scenario, he said. The next step, he added, was to create a more comprehensive and precise semantic brain atlas. Ultimately, Hasson believes it will be possible to reconstruct the words a person is thinking from their brain activity. The ethical implications are enormous. One more benign use would see brain activity used to assess whether political messages have been effectively communicated to the public. “There are so many implications and we are barely touching the surface,” he said. Lorraine Tyler, a cognitive neuroscientist and head of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University, said the research was a “tour de force in its scope and methods”. But, the brain atlas in its current form does not capture fine differences in word meanings. “While this research is path-breaking in its scope, there is still a lot to learn about how semantics is represented in the brain.”