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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.
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.
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.