Computer scientist Tom Mitchell, and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University are working on a research project that demonstrates how specific thoughts activate our brains. "We believe we have identified a number of the basic building blocks that the brain uses to represent meaning," said Mitchell. "Coupled with computational methods that capture the meaning of a word by how it is used in text files, these building blocks can be assembled to predict neural activation patterns for any concrete noun. And we have found that these predictions are quite accurate for words where fMRI data is available to test them." These findings coupled with brain scans may help advance work done for people with autism and other neurological disorders.