Narrator: This is Science Today. Computers can be used for almost everything these days. Now, they can even measure brain cognition. Dr. Louis Gottschalk, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, developed a computer program to help detect hostility, anxiety - even brain disorders. All a person has to do is talk into the computer for about five minutes.

Gottschalk: We've done studies of people coming to a psychiatric outpatient clinic and got speech samples and other measures and the five minute speech samples, it gives scores on some fifteen different psychological states and they tend to agree pretty well with what the clinician finds out.

Narrator: The computer program is based on the Gottschalk-Gleser scale, an international diagnostic tool used to measure cognitive impairment.

Gottschalk: It's capable of summarizing mathematically each score. So people send us material. Sometimes on a patient. There's some doctors that get this, get a five-minute speech sample and send me and use it as they might a psychological test.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.