Trust is a very simple word for a very challenging human dynamic. It can build at each successive encounter, and be irreversibly damaged by a single transgression. While the creation of a trusting situation requires two people to realize, trust exists separately inside each party, a subjective evaluation if ever there was one, always influenced more by perceived actions than words.

Little wonder, trust has been extremely difficult - if not impossible - for scientists to study. Until now. A great leap forward in technology has finally opened the door.

Neuroscientists from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and their colleagues at Cal Tech in Pasadena have teamed up to build what might be called the world's first online brain game. Subjects at each location climb into what's called a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system, and then proceed to interact with each other via a computer game. You can read about the exact details on the Internet, but let's just say it's a scheme in which money is involved, and over time, the players determine just how much they can trust each other.

The major technology breakthrough was actually syncing up the choices each player made with the information they were receiving with the activity the scientists could see going on in both of their brains. And let's not forget that one player was in Texas while the other was in California. No wonder it took them three years. But eventually, how trust unfolds in the brain began to reveal itself. And just as we all know anecdotally, the indicators of trust started happening earlier and earlier with every interaction, as mutual trust grew.

These are certainly heady days for neuroscience, and everyone has their own fantastic ideas about where this new hyper-scanning technology might take us. First up are conditions like autism, where relating to other people is a constant challenge. If you can't successfully interact with another person, how do you have trust in your life? Despite the early candidates tossed out to the press, the truth is … this scientific field is wide open.

If we simply limited ourselves to issues of trust, the questions seem endless: What exactly happens during betrayal? Can a broken trust between two people be permanently impaired, or can it actually be re-built? And can we visually see it all in their brains? Can a person be genetically untrusting, no matter who the other person is? Or genetically untrustworthy? And what can't we measure with this new technology, just to check both our assumptions and our conclusions?

Right now, the science is all questions and the excited possibility of actually getting some answers.

The technology is wildly costly at this point and suitable only for science. But driving tech costs down is what we're so good at, so nagging at the back of my mind is the idea this technology might also come back to bite us.

With just this test alone, might potential employers require a brain scan to make sure you can work well on a team? Could one player be a set-up, to see how you act when someone gets greedy? Or is overly generous? Will we have any rights to the test results? Or the privacy afterwards? And once hired, might such tests be required and find their way into our job evaluations?

I have the uneasy feeling we'll be watching exacting this in the final moments of every episode of "The Apprentice." Or find that they're the first stop when couples decide to go in for counseling.

Whatever actually happens, know this: The technology-accessible mind is about to take center stage.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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