Top 8 Most Controversial Stories About Medical Innovations

I spend my days monitoring progress, analysing new trends, and learning about spectacular new initiatives. Needless to say: not just me, but the whole team of The Medical Futurist is fascinated by what we learn. And then sometimes there is a story that just melts the fuses at one or more team members – and our readers. 

Below I picked 8 of our favourite controversial stories from – almost exclusively – this year. It’s important to note that controversial doesn’t equal bad/useless. Sometimes it’s just not widely accepted (yet) and so exotic that they can surely provide a unique talking point at any boring Christmas dinner.

Here come our 8 picks, in no particular order.

Decoding Thoughts From fMRI Readings

This is simply mind-blowing. So much so that any cognitive neuroscientist would have laughed you out of the room if you had asked 20 years ago, advising you to read less sci-fi. 

The research team from the University of Texas, Austin first trained an algorithm with the help of 3 study subjects, who each listened to 16 hours of various audio recordings during fMRI scan sessions. Based on the imaging “observations” and the audio pattern of the training sessions, the algorithm then made predictions on the content of other stories – read to the subjects, storylines of silent films played to the subjects, or stories imagined by the subjects – based on their fMRI readings alone.