In the show House there was a very intresting machine that can't possibly be real

 In the episode "black hole" there was a machine that transferred your thoughts in to clear images ona screen and I'm curious if it's real because it's amazing and seems a little too cool to be true

The machine in that episode was based on the premise that, after having a person view a lengthy series of images over the course of several hours, and mapping the parts of the brain associated with seeing those images, you could read the activity of the brain to display an image of whatever that person is imagining.

In the episode, they referred to the technology as "extremely preliminary/experimental/something to that effect", and said that the technology to reliable read a person's thoughts was fifty years away.

I don't know enough about this specific type of theoretical technology to say much about it at all. I would surmise that, when we have an adequate understanding of the brain, we *will* be able to "record" such a movie, although whether it will work like the machine in that episode of House or not, I can't say.

We are able to hook someone up to a machine and get them to think "green" and (separately) "red" to train the machine to recognize the brain patterns associated with those two thought pattern. After training, the machine is *usually* able to tell if the person is thinking one or the other. If it trains on a bunch of people, it is then *often* able to tell when a person it hasn't been hooked up to before is thinking "red" or "green". That is about as good as we can do, now. Hardly ready to read thoughts, and probably will never be able to do well without already having got to know the person it is reading intimately.

Yup, that's the result of creative script writing and the prop department.