NASA Plan to Read Brainwaves at Airports

cascino writes: "In one of the more bizarre (and intrusive) spinoffs of the Government's 'crackdown on terrorism,' Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify. Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs 'to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat,' according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times." This is the second story recently that gives me second thoughts about flying Northwest.

Comments

i wonder

[pohl]

How will such a system distinguish between someone with terroristic thoughts and someone who merely experiences a lot of anxiety from being in the middle of large crowds of people? Will those poor souls be delayed and harassed every time they travel? It would be a pity.

AN EEG IS NOT READING YOUR MIND!!!

[Picass0]

It's is soooo misleading the way this story is being headlined everywhere today.

An electroencephalogram (EEG) is not capable knowing what images or thoughts are in your head. An EEG can only measure electrical activity and create a graph of that activity. Think of the output of a heart monitor - a line goes up and down in time to the heart's beating. Now think of a couple dozen lines that represent the electrical spikes in major nodes of the brain.

An EEG can detect abnormal brain activity as a result of disease, head trauma, or seazure. It cannot tell me if you are an asshole.

This idea is a red herring. I think the fear it creates is more useful to law enforcement than the actual tool itself. The output of an EEG is not very useful in a court of law.

This is too difficult to do

[Avumede]

From having worked with EEG's before, both on the recording end, and the analyzing end, I can tell you it is amazingly difficult.

We were doing something that would get much better results anything they can do in airports, which is fitting an cap of about 30 electrodes on the head, and meticulously calibrating them so they are in good contact with the scalp. It requires a special gel to get good conductivity.

Even so, the data was very difficult to analyze. There is a low signal to noise ratio. In our case we didn't have a lot of outside electrical noise, but there just is a lot going on inside a persons head. And different people have different EEG's, some very strong, others weak and hard to analyze. Analysis frequently requires advanced techniques such as wave decomposition (I'm forgetting the real term for this, though).

What this is about is signal detection. My personal view is that the signal to noise ratio will be incredibly low, making this detection fairly useless. Either there will be too many false alarms, or not enough hits. So i wouldn't start worrying yet.

RF and EMF Protective Clothing

[Alien54]

Emf Protective clothing, including hats, etc can be seen here:

http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html

http://www.rfsafe.com/rfclothing.htm

http://www.nspworldwide.com/

and some industrial stuff

http://euclidgarment.com/KWGARD.html

There is plenty info out there if you search for RF protective or emf protective clothing.

I like the RF Safe Baseball Caps myself.

Re:Don't hold your breath on this one...

[irishkev]

In my opinion, for the application that they're shooting for, the EEG seems like the only chance of accomplishing the goal. And EEG is totally lacking. So what are they going to do!? Add the Colonel's Special Herbs and Spices: heart rate, eye movement, blah blah. No way. They do talk up EEG, though. For example, in the article, there's this sentence, which seems like, hey, these bozos can do something with EEG: Published scientific reports show NASA researcher Alan Pope, at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., produced a system to alert pilots or astronauts who daydream or "zone out" for as few as five seconds.

Alpha patterns, guys. Alpha waves are probably the cleanest pattern in EEG. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) Easily quantifiable. As soon as you start to relax/zone out your brain starts giving off alpha. When they would hook me up to the machine and put the goggles on, I'd hear the engineers talking about how they could see clear alpha showing up. Now, is the pilot/astronaut thinking about his wife, the vacation he's going to take, if he turned off the oven, etc.??? No combination of EEG, heart rate, eye movement, is going to help you out there. However, the machine would be able to show if the subject went from being in a "zoned out" state to doing multiplication. Think of EEG as a gross indicator of very general phenomena.

I have to admit, though, when I first got involved with this stuff, I had these visions of Brainstorm-like machines (Christopher Walken, 1983), with the capability of recording and playing back thoughts. HA! But then you look at a few channels of EEG going across a laptop screen. Those data are so many orders of magnitude removed from what we're actually perceiving that it's ridiculous that EEG is even being considered for the role in question. It's comedy. Heart rate, eye movements??? They might as well throw in the movement of the Dow 30 and the S&P 500 while they're at it. Tea leaves, entrails, take your pick. I did initially suggest the circus macaque, so I'll be sticking with that. ;)

Re:the line

[swillden]

I don't see people with firearms on boarding planes.

Of course you do. Quite a few of them, although they don't advertise it. I've done it myself. All it took was a laminated plastic ID card and some photocopied printouts (military ID and copies of my orders) and I was escorted past security and allowed on the plane while carrying a 9mm pistol with 30 rounds of ammunition.

There's actually a wide assortment of badges, IDs and paperwork that will allow you to take a firearm onto a plane. Most of them would be pretty easy to forge.

Yet another example of why all of this supposed airport security is a complete crock. Its only purpose is to convince the masses that their government is "taking action".