Michael Gove should be one of the heroes of this government. His determination to fix Britain’s broken education system is beyond admirable, and the scale of his plans is beyond ambitious. Much of Gove’s work is long overdue, and should be welcomed with open arms. Some of it, however, needs to be urgently rethought.

Gove has, despite incredible bad luck (see Building Schools for the Future fiasco), done a rather good job. He managed to safeguard the education budget in a last minute rescue attempt, and reallocate funding where it is most needed via the pupil premium. In the education white paper he included plans to allow teachers to, for the first time in years, teach. The National Curriculum will shrink from a dictatorial control freak into a sensibly sized set of learning goals — laying out what pupils should learn, not how teachers should teach it. He included plans to put individual schools and teachers at the heart of disciplinary policy, and give them the discretion necessary to do what’s best for their community of pupils as a whole.

He also scrapped EMA. Though we can all cite the rich friend who get EMA through some obscure loophole and spent it on Smirnoff Ice at bad underage clubs, EMA serves an important purpose. The decision of whether to do A-levels, and which ones to do, determines a child’s future. Pupils whose parents cannot afford to give them an allowance, or who need to financially contribute to the running of their home, face an incredibly tough decision. In some cases this will lead to them dropping out of education altogether, or taking easier subjects to give them time to work longer hours at their job.

EMA is not a perfect system. Paying it direct to students has proven a clear mistake, and payments instead should be sent direct to parents. This doesn’t mean that the all important helping hand it gives to poorer students isn’t worthwhile though. The opportunity cost of Sixth Form is, for many people, remarkably high. Bringing it down will help students from less fortunate backgrounds get more university places, at better universities. If we care about social mobility this is one thing that should not be scrapped.

Gove also scrapped school sport. Here it is hard to see why so much has to be sacrificed for so little gain. The £162 million saved is only just more than the £120 million we spend on debt interest each day, yet the consequence is to hit both health and education. Tales of Cabinet showdowns have detailed ministerial concerns over the health of schoolchildren, and how scrapping the budget for exercise while obesity is rising might not be the best of ideas.

There’s another important problem though. Most of our schoolchildren, despite Jamie Oliver’s best efforts, still survive on an unhealthy high sugar diet. Pupils who snack for breakfast and spend their lunch break munching on sugar are inevitably hyperactive and disruptive in the classroom. The longer they sit still in behind a desk and then at home in front of the television, the worse their behaviour will be. School sport is a great way of breaking the cycle. No pupil who’s just played a proper football match has the energy to disrupt a classroom. Better than unleash the hyperactivity during maths, pupils should be getting rid of it on the sports field.

…Then I wouldn’t believe you. It doesn’t matter whether you use a top hat and a wand, or a multi-million pound fMRI scanner: reading thoughts is still far beyond the reach of modern neuroscience, let alone anybody else. Recent years have seen huge advances in brain scanning technology and it is true that scientists can now effectively look inside the active brain and detect activity. But the technology has important limits.

This doesn’t stop ‘brain reading’ from hitting the popular press. The inexorable cycle of newspaper headlines has some recurring themes: politicians do bad stuff; photogenic students get good grades; animals, especially during the summer, get born and lost and found and learn to talk or dance or knit…and, with surprising regularity, “Scientists can read your mind” (or words to that effect). This is not true. At best, it is a gross exaggeration – and, of course, many of these articles will qualify their assertions and eventually even admit that the scientists in question can’t actually read your thoughts, which is what most of us understand ‘mind reading’ to be.

The technique at the bottom of the majority of mind reading stories is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which uses a huge magnetic field to quantify blood flow changes in the human brain, and infer brain activity in small pockets of space called ‘voxels’. This imaging technique itself has come under a lot of fire in recent years; there are some doubts about whether those shifts in blood flow necessarily reflect bristling brain activity. Furthermore, two 2009 meta-studies of fMRI papers flagged major concerns about selection bias and ‘voodoo correlations’ based on the way the active voxels are selected and analysed. Finally, a rather Pythonesque study even used poorly-analysed fMRI data to demonstrate brain activity in a dead salmon. Irreverent detractors aside however, it is clear that fMRI can be used to useful effect by scientists who are aware of its limitations; indeed, the (since retitled) ‘voodoo correlations’ paper came from within the lab of Nancy Kanwisher, a world leader in functional imaging who takes a notably ‘bottom-up’, assumption-free approach.

fMRI is good at comparing very specific things. If you happily put yourself into a scanner and were told to either imagine running a marathon or to picture the boy or girl whom you first kissed, the scanner could help scientists guess which one you actually did – if they already had results from other people thinking the same things. The scan would not be able to discover that you were actually thinking about lunch.

What about a simple question like, ‘Is this person lying?’ This is perhaps more likely, because it could be argued that lying and telling the truth do indeed engage different emotional or decision-making processes that might be physically distinguishable in the brain. However, there are very few scientific papers that actually examine deceptive behaviour using fMRI, and most of them have been inconclusive (such as this PNAS paper from September).

It’s remarkable, then, that at least two companies currently peddle fMRI-based lie detection services. In 2009, a Californian father accused of child abuse hired ‘No Lie MRI’ to demonstrate his innocence. The story was broken on March 14th by Emily Murphy in a Stanford blog post and Wired Science wrote it up two days later. Within a fortnight, the application to admit the MRI scan as defence evidence was withdrawn after the child’s lawyers received advice from Stanford’s Center for Law & the Biosciences, where Murphy works. In May this year, evidence from another company made it as far as a New York courtroom but was thankfully rejected.

We must be wary of these developments, but at the same time we should not allow them to detract from the other brilliant things that brain scanning can accomplish. The technology for brain-computer interfaces is progressing rapidly, from tweeting with your brain or silently bossing a robot about to monkeys learning to eat with robotic limbs. In each case, however, the fancy gadgets take quite some mastering, and they are unable to ‘read out’ their instructions directly from a naïve user. Similarly, the amazing experiments that have allowed near-vegetative patients to communicate (see the NY Times report here) rely on a brain-scanning strategy that is calibrated beforehand on healthy individuals.

Used carefully, both in terms of its technicalities and its ethical implications, brain imaging is powerful science – but it can’t read you like a book. And as for magicians and TV tricksters, there is only one that you can trust. Chris Cox, “the mindreader who can’t read minds”, uses body language and other predictable behavioural clues to predict how his volunteers will act in simple games, while openly admitting that any patter about actual mind-reading is “bullshit”. His, then, is the only mindreading show that even a neuroscientist can enjoy. Next time you see a mind-reader who is rather less up-front, or read another lazy headline about ‘mindreading’ scientists, remember Chris and think “He can’t do it – and neither can they!”