Source: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2 … g-tech-way
So now they could potentially read your mind instead of doing things like water board you. I wonder if they will need a search warrant?Popular Science wrote:
At the World Science Festival this week, indications that brain scanners may soon uncover your private thoughts
By Brooke Borel Posted 06.12.2009 at 5:15 pm 0 Comments
Neuroscientists are already able to read some basic thoughts, like whether an individual test subject is looking at a picture of a cat or an image with a specific left or right orientation. They can even read pictures that you're simply imagining in your mind's eye. Even leaders in the field are shocked by how far we've come in our ability to peer into people's minds. Will brain scans of the future be able to tell if a person is lying or telling the truth? Suggest whether a consumer wants to buy a car? Reveal our secret likes and dislikes, or our hidden prejudices? While we aren't there yet, these possibilities have dramatic social, legal and ethical implications.
Last night at the World Science Festival in New York, leading neuroscientists took the stage to discuss current research into functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a type of scan that indirectly measures neural activity by measuring the change in the blood oxygen level in the brain. Neurons require oxygen in order to fire, so if a person is thinking about or looking at a specific image, by looking at the oxygen levels the scientists can see the patterns that "light up" in the brain, and link them to a specific word or image. Study results in this field are astonishing. Work out of Frank Tong's lab at Vanderbilt University, one of the event's panelists, shows that the researchers can read the orientation of an object that a person is looking out -- say a striped pattern that goes off to the left or the right -- 95 percent of the time. His group also, with 83 percent accuracy, can predict which of two patterns an individual is holding in their memory.
But deciphering the patterns that result from one word or image is fairly simple. Unraveling the entirety of our thoughts is not. John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin and another panelist, says that the researchers are not truly reading minds: "We don't understand the language of the brain, the syntax and the semantics of neural language." At this point, he says, they are just using statistical analysis to analyze brain patterns during very specific object-oriented tasks.
