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Brain Privacy
sleepyrobot writes "As neuroscience advances and brain scans become more sophisticated, the Boston Globe points out that some privacy advocates are concerned about brain privacy. Could employees be scanned for violent or depressive impulses? Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality? It sounds like a Philip K. Dick vision of the future, but some predict this will be a bigger ethical issue than genetics."
The problem I see though is people are not thinking broad enough. Technologies such as this can be used on a large scale against humanity. I believe the consequences of such abilities need to be addressed in a uniform manner, without always talking about the terrorists that will kill us all anyway. How far will society let the security over take our lives? I for one do not want to end up living in a military state where every body that does not have blonde hair, blue eyes, and a perfect attitude is destroyed. Do you?
Go calculate something
The part that makes this the most frightening is that we've seen recently how far people are willing to go if they think that security is at hand. The Patriot Act and Patriot II (return of the civil liberty abuses), both passed with widespread support, just because people were scared. With the right amount of fear, this technology will not only be allowed, but mandated in usage to screen for "potential security risks"
Maybe there IS something to those tinfoil hats after all! Hmmm...
My journal has hot
Thought Police!
Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality?
I always find it ironic that technologies created by open-mindedness have to ability to empower the narrow-minded.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
This is exactly why I keep a lock on the download port. Remember, physical security is your last line of defense...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Now my boss will know how burned-out and disgruntled I have become... I'm so screwed...
Problem now is that I can't back up my brain, reformat it with an encrypted file system, and then restore everything...
You just need a Gaydar unit, none of this crap.
REad the book out ther "profiler" I think thats the name. HEs one of the guys who works out the psychologal profile of wanted murders and serial killers. He basically claims that he can tell who a serial killer is just by the fact that they follow his profile.
Its getting to the point where any variaton from the median of society is being seen as wrong, or a disease. Speaking as an outlier, fuck you.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
And you thought my tinfoil hat was crazy!
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Could synesthesiacs be given preferential job offers as novelists and playwrights?
isn't that someone is invading your precious privacy. What you are afraid of is that someone can peer into your mind and see what a twisted demented fuck you really are inside, Michael.
People are afraid of the truth...if people couldn't hide from their own thoughts, they'd be faced to deal with the lies they live, and perhaps actually have to consider change.
to figure out what is going on in someone's head by looking at the things that the person does or say, the external manifestations of a person's thoughts. If you are concerned about your "brain privacy", just don't talk to people, post on Slashdot or a personal blog, don't write letters or emails, etc.
I'm sorry, but I hold the copyright over my brain and the information therein, and your brain scanner is an unlawful circumvention device under the DMCA.
My lawyers will be calling.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I woke up and found an "X" chalked on my forehead.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm one of the folks who feels uneasy, but on the other hand I'm not quite sure I can bring myself to believe that the potential harm of some of these developments outweighs the benefits -- if the technology can be applied in both directions, not just by the police. If I can quiz a politician on what his real motivations were for passing a law and be assured that he's not dodging the question, it might not be quite as onerous to be unable to lie about breaking it. But even with that thought in mind, I'm still uneasy.
Now they can find out for real. Scary, innit?
From the article...
"'Perhaps child molesters and other criminals in the future will wear headgear that will monitor that brain region in order to determine when their intentions will be carried out,'' Hinrichs wrote. ''Would this be a reasonable method of crime prevention or a human rights violation?''"
A Human rights violation, in the spirit of 'Saving the Children'.
Slashdot has just read my mind!!!!
There's a major difference between a drug screen and having your brain scanned as a condition of employment. A drug screen is meant to pick up illegal activity which poses a tangible safety and liability issue to a potential employer. There's nothing illegal about thinking anything (at least in the developed democracies), so I don't see brain scans becoming accepted practice during my lifetime (knock on wood).
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Worry more about health information getting leaked. Or about how a good handwriting sample (or signature!)can essentially reveal the same information.
----------
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
1: Mind control police run towards you
2: Press double-barrelled 12 gauge shotgun to forehead
3: Squeeze trigger.
4: Laugh all the way to the morgue.
Trolling is a art,
Double think.
or more specifically, i once had a priest stick his penis up my buttocks.
bullonlyus greed/fear based ?pr? FUDgeCycles(tm)
re-posted from an earlier, as yet un-re-scored post.
this
was extracted buy using an eyecon0meter(gpl) scan of this
site, before & after application of va lairIE's patentdead
corepirate ?pr? PostBlock(tm) device.
all for a little more monIE?
let the music pay?
eXPplain US away as pairannoyed if you will?
There is no reason to fear for your brain privacy, in fact there is no such thing as a brain scan! It is all lies! Even if there were those who could perform a brain scan, there aren't, but if their were, they have all commited suicide under the walls of Baghdad! We are not afraid of the brain scan, allah has condemned them, they are stupid. They are stupid..... and they are condemned. We welcome them with bullets and shoes!
-Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
It will also be doubleplusgood to be able to identify thought criminals with technology like this.
The bleeding-hearts freedom of thought advocates can spend a while in room 101 of the ministry of love as they always do.
You can't take the sky from me...
This is rediculous, I'm doing some work on neurobiology wrt attention for my CS Masters in Computer Vision. From reading some of the recent research, I don't think the field of neurobiology is anywhere close to being able to determine such concepts from an fMRI or anything similar.
Will I get sued for sexual harassment if they get a real sexy nurse to do my brain scan?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Fuck ethics, this is bigger than that. It's an entire shift in the human experience.
:)gets this type of technology but common people don't, then we have reason to panic.
If everyone has this technology, we would probably no longer care about privacy. We want privacy because some of us (rightfully!) have something to hide, such as being gay.
But if everyone can read each other's minds, the need disappears because every last one of us would be laid bare before our peers. How do you discriminate if everyone is a "pervert"?
Now, if the government (the big bad government
All the more reason to pursue this technology agressively - if it's inevitable, it's one thing that we better all have!
However, there are good counter-arguments. We all have thoughts like "Man, I'd like to beat that guy up" even though we don't mean it later on.
Would we eventually lose "free will" and become automatons that are incapable of thinking outside the societal mores?
Is lying fundamental to humanity? Or would we be better off without it?
Ow, my brain hurts.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
How does this automatically indicate unconscious racism? I'm sure there could be other possible reasons for the reaction. How about that trying to process and recognize faces of a different race is usually more difficult than faces of one's own race?
Reminds me of the braincaps. Clarke portrays them as originally hotly controversial, but then accepted into daily use.
'Perhaps child molesters and other criminals in the future will wear headgear that will monitor that brain region in order to determine when their intentions will be carried out,'' Hinrichs wrote. ''Would this be a reasonable method of crime prevention or a human rights violation?'
I'm leaning toward reasonable method of crime prevention for convicted child molesters, rapists and violent criminals who are on parole. It could turn out to be awkward as far as social rehabilitation goes, though... I mean, who would want to stand next in line to some guy with brain-scanning headgear at the bank?
You know what's really funny about this? The most feared army in Greek times, the Spartans, were all gay. Many of them fighting shoulder to shoulder with their lovers.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
They can already detect the bearded, lank haired unwashed, clothes filled with pizza crumbs and Jolt stains, Linux geeks from a mile off with fairly unsophisticated hardware already so it makes sense they go after everyone else now.
Seriously though this is becoming a disturbing trend. It used to be you were interviewed and that was the determining factor. Now its a gazillion interviews, medical tests, security interviews, psych profiles etc. This just seems like the next step when the tech becomes available, much as I despise the intrusion.
The stupid is part all this will be for some crap position. Do these companies realise that by offering me a tech arch contract they are not setting me on my way to galactic domination, its just another fucking contract to keep my bank manager happy!.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
last year's philadelphia Inquirer story talks about fMRI research as replacing the polygraph, and Cognitive Liberty has the best set of links if you want more info. Frankly, i advise you to check it out, because this is not new, and This will be checking you out soon.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
That was one of the most poorly researched articles I've read about brain imaging. When will magazines and newspapers stop hyping up a technology that will never deliever the big brother scenarios they try to drum up ratings with....... For starters, MRI doesn't measure brain activity!
MRI imaging can only measure blood flow in a certain area, not the actual eletrical impulses of your brain. The way it works is by using huge magnetic pulses it forces all that wonderful iron-rich blood in your head to align in a certain orientation. After that, it essentially lets the "flash-magnetized" blood sink back out of alignment. Where your brain is working it's hardest (continually using "fresh" blood), it takes the longest for the blood to fall out of alignment relative to the rest of your sleepy noggin because of the increased iron content.
That is only the first step to getting those pretty magazine studies which most of the time are mere pseudo-science.
MRI has HORRIBLE temporal resolution. Anyone who has ever sat for an eternity in one of these machines knows this....It's the exact reverse problem of an EKG or similar system. An EKG is excellent at recording when electrical activity in the brain occurs, except for the fact that you have little or no idea where in the brain it is occuring. With MRI you get to find out exactly where in the brain this blood-consuming activity is occuring, but it takes considerably longer than instantaneous... COnsidering that most brain processes occur in under 250ms, this is like shooting in the dark. Only by repetative exposure to a given stimulus can you even hope to gain usable results...
Nor do the inaccuracies end there. After you've collected all of this wonderful MRI data from multiple test subjects (Doing a single on would be completely usualess as individual brain topology can vary) you need to compute thresholds, percent differences, and generally massage the data however you would like! The kicker is that most of these "scientific studies" never share the number crunching with any other group of scientists for independant verification..They just smile, show the pictures, and recieve the avalanche of funding.
Now I don't mean to suggest that MRI as a technology is without merit, but when you look at its limitations it can only produce useful data on a limited number of things. (Like FFA research, etc.) It certainly can't read the contents of your thoughts.
Now, even 50 years down the road if Mr. Executive placed an ultra-fine grid of sensors inside your skull, chances are you would still be safe for a long, long time. Staring at localized electrical impulses and trying to discover the functional equivalence of neural networks in a system as complex as the human brain is going to take a while.
-bcollier06
Finally us geeks will be able to figure out what women find so unattractive about us!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
He said.........Dick
hehehehe
I'm starting to see why everyone with a non-conformist viewpoint checks the AC box. Ninja hippie moderators walk among us.
That makes sense. I expect that your brain is much more likely than your DNA to determine your behavior. However, DNA can be fully sequenced right now. I would bet we're a long way off from being able to fully map a human brain.
Also, I think that much of the expectation of the privacy of one's thoughts is founded on the fact that today nobody else can be sure what those thoughts are. The examples in the article are fairly crude tools related to activity in a certain area of the brain. Care certainly will need to be taken with any potential use of these tools. Taking it to the extreme of real-time mind-reading will be a different thing entirely.
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
The ability to 'read' cognitive states will not only happen - as it already has in some medical applications - but will be used by government and private industry alike. This is guaranteed to happen as long as large institutional entities need personal information - gained from monitoring - to hedge against various risks to their respective enterprises.
Ray Kurzweil and others (Vernor Vinge among them) talk about a technological 'singularity' that is fast (exponentially) approaching. It's a place where technologies like the one discussed in the article begin to progress so fast that there is no way to keep full track of, or control them.
Cognitive scanning is simply another one of those technologies.
Imagine that you're living 20 years in the future when genetic testing and cognitive scans help an insurance company - or the government (if we ever get universal health care) - predict your propensity for violent behavior. Can you imagine tests and monitoring like this *not* being performed at the individual level - especially if they're truly predictive, and can result in intervention, thus 'saving' you and the 'insuring' agency from relative pain? I can 'imagine' that they won't, but they will; the system will demand it.
We are moving at breakneck speed toward a fundamental change in what we perceive to be human. This will begin to happen - as it already has - in ways that seem to violate everything most humans in free societies hold dear - privacy, individual rights and liberties, etc.
The only way to prevent this sort of thing from being truly disruptive is to build some kind of 'meta-monitoring' into medical, and other surveillance technologies that give individuals the right to 'review and change/question' the data that has been collected on them - including all cognitive monitoring.
Again, the problem is that these technologies are progressing at faster and faster rates. I doubt that most individuals (including legislators) have even the faintest idea about how to move on these issues because everyone is still perceiving change in many of these areas as moving at a linear rate, instead of the exponential rate represented by the steadily upward-sloping curve of technology development.
The question looms. Will we be able to get a grip on this stuff before it is so well insinuated into culture that future humans take it for granted, with all that implies? The times, they are a'changin'
I believe this sort of technology is/was being used in a legal case in Florida (trying to find reference but no luck so far).
I have already posted my reservations about using the technology as a lie-detector, but that won't necessarily stop people from doing it if they think it can "prevent terrorism".
Which means we're all stuffed, because there is no such thing as reliable brain-reading.
Mod early, mod often.
The entire ideal that allows us to live and grow, is the knowledge that no matter what we may think, it is our actions that define who we are. Take that away, and you might as well take away our individuality and return to the hive. Also, I know people that buy and sell medical information for next to nothing to sell to spammers. Do you want all your personal preferences available to anyone? I don't trust people with the info they have on me NOW, how can I trust people with the potential to have any information they so choose (SSN, PINs, Phone #'s, ect.)
A question like:
A Customer is demanding they get their money back for a product we don't carry or that will not scan. You
A) Da da da da
B) Da da do da
or
C) Da da de da
This was clearly a personality test as some of the questions had no "wrong answers" with some choices seeming better. But better to who?
I was told at the beginning of the survey, the answers had NO bearing on my employment chances. If it didn't, why administrate it?
And while this may get this post moderated "funny" I also have this point to make:
Companies like CompUSA make you go through a ridiculous "smile for the customer course". I beleive it's intent was two fold. One, to test to see if an applicant would be driven into a psychotic state. Two, to alert management to "moldable corporate clones".
The training at CompUSA was over two weeks and touched on subjects like greeting customers and asking specific questions. I consider a lot of the training like this; if you don't know how to sell, or you were not born with the ability to sell (some aren't) then CompUSA is not the job for you. I do agree with training. But to tell people they need to sell at CompUSA by Mary Lou Retton (I kid you not) that you are part of the "Winning Team" with a twinkling smile is absurd and belittling. I really do consider this type of training a "personality test" with a twist.
I am sure that some jobs use training and other subliminal ways to test personality. While not a job, isn't this what Sororities and Fraternities do as initiatiations?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
It's a good attitude to say "Fuckoff" to all those who want to scan your brain/test your blood/test your urine/etc. In fact that's pretty much how I feel. Unfortunately, there are more sheep than not in society and as long as the majority of people do not refuse the tests, those who do refuse will be branded dangerous and denied jobs/insurance/rights. If everyone stood up for basic human rights and dignity, I wouldn't be so afraid of the future. Unfortunately, the trend looks to be exactly the opposite.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Do employers screen for cancer before taking a job. We do have the technology to do that.
Common just because they have the ability to do something like this doesn't mean they will do it.
This is just hype. Privacy concerns over genetic predelictions only hold back the adoption of newer technologies that could actually improve our relationships with the world and others.
For instance, imagine being able to go on a dating board and place an accurate, quantative score on your tendencies towards violence. Others would be able to sort the bad boys out of the rest that much easier, probably encouraging better dates and lasting involement - after all, you would be picking people you are genetically geared towards.
Imagine spam geared specifically towards your depression score. The pharmaceutical industry would love it - lists of people who need Zoloft. Or, if you are negative in this category, you would be getting mass mailings about ways of curbing that mania.
I see only good things coming out of a world where we are all numbered according to our genes.
"One study of white students found that although they expressed no conscious racism, the seat of fear in their brains still fired up more when they looked at unfamiliar black faces than at unfamiliar white faces"
How is this predicting "unconscious racism"? Good old fashioned psychology would predict that it's caused by negative stereotype activation, but differential activation in the amygdala doesn't necessarily mean differential behavior towards people of "color". I am certain that there would be more blood-oxygen level dependent activity in my amygdala, particularly when walking in a bad neighbourhood, but so what? It probably also happens when I'm nervous meeting someone, when I see a cop, when I'm watching a scary movie; they have to prove that that it leads to differential behavior.
Many of our political leader in this nation (and indeed around the world) have no brain to scan, so they wont suffer any privacy breach themselves.
The way that new laws get passed is that special interest groups enter the wanted laws into a machine (political and mechanical) that controls the candidate.
Does anyone know the affects of these tests on the brain?
AFAIK, you cannot test something without affecting that something (I can't remember the name of the "rule" right now). For example, when reading voltage there is a finite amount of current taken away from the system.
Another example: X-ray use has been quite beneficial in medicine (CT scans, etc), but the tests require the use of high energy waves to measure attenuation. These waves have been shown to affect tissue tested (DNA damage).
Testing upon material within the body is actually quite invasive. I'm not thrilled with urine tests, but at least it's done externally and the affected test material doesn't physically stay with you.
But given the job search approach: What happens to the brain under the strain of multiple interviews?
This is not my sig.
We are the techno-elite, right?
Technology may be our plaything, but the technologies we do not own will own us.
There is always a window of opportunity for the early adopters to acquire mastery over those who would use a technology to oppress. Plus, brain hacking might just be the ultimate in geek fun.
While not everyone can afford to use their own MRI to do neuro-feedback hacking, there are tools that can be had right now that will let you do some serious tweaking of your own skull pudding. One such device is made by IBVA Technologies
IBVA has been at the forefront for the past few decades in building devices that allows one to view in real-time their own brain activity on Macs and PCs. They soon will be releasing a Linux version of their software.
Hopefully, we'll stay ahead of the curve on this folks, because the dark side of this tech is pretty fucking dark.
The most conservative view of the brain's power say that it's a computer program. The most elaborate theories also envision that there are other structures like souls that can't be 'caught on tape'. Strangely, I'd be the hardcore conservatives wanting to use this technology are statistically more likely to be those who say we have unmeasurable souls. Just a guess. But if it's so, I wonder how they rationalize that.
But let's take the conservative view--that the brain is just a computer program that is trillions or quadrillions of times more complex than your average programming project for work. Now we're talking about hooking us up to a machine that has no idea what a single line of source looks like, no idea what data has been preloaded, and is just going to watch the approximate equivalent of the blinking lights on the console and tell me if my program is not only functioning correctly now, but whether it's predicted to function correctly in the future?
Geez, forget core dumps, stack debuggers, tracing tools, and all that. I just want one of these cool push-button debugging tools for writing programs!! People pay enormous amounts for teams of people to pour over source code for days or weeks or more on projects so trivial as today's... and it's apparently all wasted. We could have solved the whole Y2K problem by just letting this machine watch the blinky lights on the front of some COBOL boxes and tell us that the planes wouldn't crash and the elevators wouldn't stop. Why didn't we rush them into production if they were this close to ready?
Or is it possible that the effectiveness is slightly oversold?
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
It's the smell.
Measuring brain activity using blood flow with lousy temporal resolution != reading your mind :)
-bcollier06
You may think this is illegal but its not! It is illegal for a doctor or physcologist to disclose information but not for an insurance company who pays them! Its also near impossible to prove since these insurance companies deny everything because it could cost them there big money maker clients. This has been on the news a decade ago and was a big deal. People forgot quickly afterwards.
But I think it also opens the door to descimination lawsuits. A brainscan would be a great defense. Why would you use it other then to desciminate agaisn't homo's, people with learning dissabilities, people with possible depression impusles, etc. A call to your insurance company is different because you can not prove your employer did this.
A drug test is different because that is not discrimination. An employer has the right to make sure its employees do not have dependancy issues.
But if I see a doctor or physcologist I only pay in cash. I do not want to lose my job over this. MY father is a former executive for a famous clothing company I will not disclose. Basically they check to see if employee's attent AA meetings and they pressure them to quit if they find out. HR calls the insurance companies to find out about this. THis is a sad reality today.
http://saveie6.com/
Unless they've got something to hide? This is a very positive technology that will help detect psychopaths, people inherently unfitted to their jobs, deviants, and other misfits.
Widespread deployment will allow the proper treatment and direction of people as _individuals_ instead of assuming that some sort of "one size fits all" Bill of Rights can be applied in a blanket way.
This article and the comments on it are examples of hysteria and romantic pessimism.
When I first scanned the blurb, I read it as concern about Brian Piracy, and that some terrible new form of IP law was about to be born.
Imagine my relief...
My wife is a behavioural neuroscientist and let me say that Neuroscience hasn't advanced that much. They only have rather vague ideas about which brain regions are involved in, not responsible for, certain general classes of behaviour. Don't mix up correlation with causation. Brain sciences are pretty much still in the "look for correlation" phase, and are FAR, FAR, away from any predictive value, expect certain specialized clinical areas. The brain is so complex that we may be incapable of understanding it. It's like peeling an onion.
is that somebody going for a master's degree in CS is still unable to spell a word as simple as "ridiculous." Hint: Right now I am ridiculing you .. I am not "rediculing" you. I cannot even begin to fathom how such a braindead incorrect spelling wormed its way into widespread usage.
The thing is, if people use brain scans all the time they will find out things about people that were kept secret. Maybe every other prospective employee intends to resume smoking weed regularly once they pass the drug test, maybe %50 will fail the 'have you ever stolen from a place you work?' question when asked because they once stole a pack of gum or a 1 cent tootsie roll from the store they worked at as a teenager. This might actually have the effect of making people accept common, non-serious 'bad' behavior because they will see how every decent person they've ever met is imperfect.
Eat at Joe's.
But the second they start trying to beam Pepsi ads or goatse pictures into my head, I'll write my congressperson for sure!
I was searching around Kaaza for some pr0n and I came across a download of my brain! Albeit it was a few months old and didn't include any of the more recent American Idol memories, but I still feel cheated that someone stole my thoughts and posted them on the web for anyone to download.
It also wasn't too comforting to see that it was only a 2 meg download.
Live web cams
About 5% of the population is allergic to the contrast, so there is a decent chance you will DIE slowly as your diaphram spasms when its injected.
... thats a joke, it does happen alot though )
Long term effects of spinning your molecules with 3 tesla magnets are not known. You will not be scanned if your pregnant.
If you have EVER used a drill or grinding tool on metal, you probably have small bits of metal in your eye, which will blind you when they start spinning.
People at hospitals keep pushing oxygen canisters into MRI rooms, which then leap at the machine inexplicably and hit the patient in the head, usually killing them. Its a big mystery (
If you want to screw up an mri exam, just move your head a little during the scan.
Typical mri scan's are about an hour and cost around $4500. Functional studies are longer and cost more.
Most of the quotes on there from scientists are *very* cagey. Sure, you can interpret them in the spirit of the article (OMG, Big Brother lives!), but if you go back and read the scientists' quotes (Michael Gazzaniga's in particular) and look objectively at what they are actually saying, it's all very "well, we'll wait and see".
Mod early, mod often.
I wouldn't call 430-someodd Congressional Representatives and 100 Senators "widespread support".
;-)
Technology is going to render representative democracy an archaic relic. I only hope it happens in my lifetime.
Although I do shudder when I thing of the kinds of craziness engendered by a futuristic slashvote.org. Ugh. Think of the millions of First Vote posts we'll have to suffer through?
are belong to us... Yeah, I know, it is not funny.
Now we can start to crack down on all the evil pirates who hum songs in their head without paying for them!
sounds like a load of cr*p. one of the first experiments proffered about self-ascribed non-racist who show higher levels of "fear" in the "fear" geography of the the brain when shown pictures of black people...
when was the last time anyone in this forum was afraid of a picture of faces. maybe the reflex was more along the lines of ugly or not ugly given that people have and affinity more for their own kind (or given societal brain washing as to what if attractive).
i really feel sorry for Michael Jackson; poor s.o.b.
In both cases there will be untold millions for large corporations to save by abusing this technology. If we do not fight for our rights to be ourselves, companies will require periodic brain-scans as easily as periodic drug checks. They won't have to pay attention to individuality or the cause of one person's odd brain-patterns, they will justify it with statistics. "People with your brain-type are 80% more likely to become unhappy at this job, therefore we will not risk hiring you." They won't care that 5% of the people with your brain-type do especially well at that job, because they will work the percentages and it won't pay to take the risk.
The pay off of having faith in people doesn't show up on the bottom line, and the burden of having faith in people is one that the "gifted" or "blessed" often don't want to shoulder. If we want these scientific advances to be stairs for the ascension of mankind into the kind of species we can truly admire, then we must bridge this social gap. We must say as a society that we are willing to pay the price in dollars and cents, in mistakes and losses, to retain our diversity and that of our neighbors, even when we don't understand or approve of them.
Numerous studies have shown, the category of people who smoke has more accidents to it's credit than that of people who don't. As it stands, today it is legal to charge someone more for insurance if they smoke, than if they don't. Smokers have become the outsiders. This injustice remains. It is based on a statistic no more or less true than:
-
People who smoke pot have a greater chance of becoming addicted to pot.
-
"People who steal in their youth are more likely to steal as adults."
-
The first black person on your board of directors will have a harder time "getting along."
As technology advances more "truths" like these will exist, and the scientific evidence to back them up will become undeniable. The socially myopic corporations of the world will want to modify the way they treat the people who fall into the categories above in a profitable fashion and they will fight for their perceived right to do so.Can't really argue that one.
Also very true, and plainly so when you consider it's corollary.
This, in my limited exposure to such things is also likely to be true, and were the mechanism to exist to quantify such things (one day it will) I'll wager that statistics would bear this out.
The question of how to move forward is not one of fighting discoveries, or denying the obvious.
It is one of willfully choosing to make illegal and immoral by our societies standards, any use of indirectly related statistical phenomena to alter or inhibit any citizen's opportunities in any endeavor the public is permitted to regulate.
Most of us would raise hell if our auto insurance company demanded the right to to base our insurance rates on the following questions:
Have you ever stolen anything in your life?
Have you ever smoked canabis?
Are you of African American descent?
And we can be proud of that fact.
How many of us left the question box "Do you smoke?" unanswered and got on the insurance agent for being at the root of a Gattacan state?
Is it because of how incredibly annoying it is to step outside a crowded shopping area yearning to breath fresh air only to find our lungs filled by a cloud of noxious fumes? Is it the meal ruined by the elderly folk, who sat at the edge of the smoking section in a restaurant in our youths and managed to billow forth more atmospheric poisons than a '66 Chevelle? What ever our reason for just checking the box handing over the form, does it really justify making them pay more for mandatory auto insurance? Is any reason you could give any less a prejudice than would be implied by seeing the three questions in my list above listed on a job application?
Gattaca ends or begins with us.
It would be great to screen the boyfriends my daughter brings home. I could set curfew based upon the 'horney level' of the boyfriend.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about! ;-)
Even if we could detect these characteristics, to select against them would be against our best interests. If mental/emotional screening had been available and used over the past two centuries, we would have lost almost every great modern mathematician, scientist, artist, musician, and writer to paranoiac ignorance. We'd be living in a world full of dull, unimaginative, passionless sops, perpetually perky, and never dissatisfied. No CDs, no computers, no Beatles, no Godel, no microwave ovens, no Slashdot...
Go ahead, make brain scans accepted practice. Pick the minds of potential employees and let's see what you wind up with as a workforce, if you ever do find anyone who is both qualified and mentally "clean".
Me? I'm going to sit in my room and daydream all day long about having rough, stinky intercourse with a donkey while snacking on human brains and plotting to drop a busload of nuns onto a busload of children. Of course, I'd never do such things. I'd probably get kicked by the donkey.
>The Patriot Act and Patriot II (return of the civil liberty abuses)
Its not just about secuity per se. Employee screening got ridiculously out of hand during the beginging of the "war on some drugs." An applicant in the US today is expected to go through a background check, written psychological tests, and a urine/hair sample. We lost our privacy rights long ago and this could be the next step. On what legal ground could anyone fight this when they're already giving their piss away?
Sure, there are some decent pro-testing arguments, like for machine operators, drivers, etc, but drug testing is usually a cheap and effective way to avoid paying for competency testing and to clean out "undesirables." Be it the "freethinker," the member of some minority, etc. Interesting how white collar drugs are so difficult to detect.
Are the anti-brain scan, anti-genetic scan people going to get in bed with the anti-drug test people? I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, but Joe and Jane Sixpack need get over their political hobgoblins and realize that this is all part of the same package. Want drug testing? Then you'll get brain testing. Its almost that simple.
Worse, what do we do with this new class of undesirables? You need to work to get health insurance in the US.
"Sorry Ted, you're a borderline schizo according to our tests, you better see a doctor. You may be functional now. but something, sometime could happen and now that we know we can't hire you. Its HR policy, my hands are tied, buddy."
"I cant afford a p-doctor without some health insurance and job and even then its pushing it."
"Sorry, thats your problem."
*slam*
Funny how homelessness, unemployment, lack of health care is all our problems. Eventually everyone is going to run up against these walls. I really don't want to get delivered the "sorry my hands are tied, buddy" line because of degradation of basic civil rights in the US.
I'm not a privacy lunatic, I would be all for this screening in children to help discover faults and provide *free* therapy, etc to help them have good lives, but waiting until you're in the job market to be scrwed over is beyond ridiculous.
Now we know how the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like.
The future ain't what it used to be - Yogi Berra
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
"Could employees be scanned for violent or depressive impulses? Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality?"
Could politicians be scanned for stupidity?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Of course, at the moment, society seems dumb enough that they don't see why things like the patriot act are a bad thing. They'll learn. Usually the hard way.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Once a lie-detecting brain scanner is reasonably available, there'll be some public challenges to sleazy politicians to answer (under the scanner, with cameras rolling) questions like "did your vote on bill X have more to do with that fat campaign donation than with the good of the country?"
The media will hype this up so far, it'll make the Clinton sex scandals look like a 5-over-limit speeding ticket.
Conclusion - self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure than brain scanners are *extremely* illegal.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
What if the brain scan finds a black hole. Does this mean the conception was from a big bang or just the back seat of a 57 Chevy while on acid?
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
No, no, you're all confused. The Crimson Assurance short was before "Meaning of Life", not "Life of Brian".
...and a light side. Any technology can be used for evil or for good. As long as evil lives in men's hearts, we will have people who abuse technology.
So don't choose the dark side. Once you choose it, forever will it dominate your destiny. (Until your son saves you.)
-Thomas
Oh no! It's ...forming...
self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure than brain scanners are *extremely* illegal
Only when used on politicians. Um, national security, that's it. It's okay on ordinary citizens, though.
One study of white students found that although they expressed no conscious racism, the seat of fear in their brains still fired up more when they looked at unfamiliar black faces than at unfamiliar white faces.
Is this racism or did they merely prove that the sample selection of whites were literally more familiar to the participants? Would black participants' "seat of fear" fire in response to less familiar white or asian faces.
I think this current technology gives us no more than a bunch of subjective squiggles that is left to subjective interpretation. These brain scanners are going to be more scary and arbitrary than lie detectors. Let's hope they carry the same weight in court.
Strangely enough, something like this has already been done. The military investigated a series of devices that measure sexual attraction, in order to screen out homosexuals. The idea was that they could put new male recruits in front of mostly-undressed pictures of athletic young men, then measure the level of sexual excitation, and screen out the homosexuals.
By the way, one of the devices used to measure sexual excitation was called a "Penile Photoplathismograph". It measures blood flow to the sexual organ, and most youngish men can't help but get a little bit of an erection when exposed to a picture of a naked attractive potential sex object.
ANYWAY, the idea was abandoned, for two reasons. First, some of the extremely homophobic people could not pass the test themselves. This grants some credence to the notion that angrily homophobic people are sometimes having some kind of internal conflict. Second, people who are "bisexual" to some extent greatly outnumber people who are outright gay. Although men who are exclusively homosexual make up 1-2% of the population, people who will evince at least some attraction to members of the same sex make up 5-6% of the population. Kicking out 6% of the military would be a problem.
...All your brain are belong to us.
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
What happens when this "peek" ability is expanded to "poke" capabilities?
It sure would be a neat hack... aiming my neural transmitter at Martin in the front row of class and then....zzzzzzzzzap. Instant zombie, or assasin, or drooling vegetable.
We could all take turns being John Malchovic
I want to be the puppet master and go home with all the nightclub cuties. Yay
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
I need either new glasses or a better monitor. At first glance I thought the title of the article was, "Brain Piracy!" LOL, or maybe it's because there is always a story on /. about MPAA/RIAA trying to stop "piracy."
Absolutely. I thought the same thing.
Current tests are so crude, there are multiple potential interpretations for same firing pattern.
They're the ones that offer lower rates to businesses that drug test.
"Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality?"
No, because that violates the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" regulation. Half of that policy is "Don't Ask."
Of course, screening someone's brain with that kind of precision will probably tell you that homosexuality has little impact in one's ability to serve in the military.
Maybe I'm being wildly optimistic but I'm guessing that if there was no way to hide deceptiveness from one another, maybe a whole lot of problems would go away.
Brain scans for all could be the greatest democratiser there ever was.
And it's copyrighted, will RIAA sue me for having an "illegal mnemonically-pirated" copy?
What I do on my off hours is not any of their business.. Until they can tell the difference between home use and use at work, drug tests should be outlawed as invasion..
The brain scan, a similar attitude. It's none of their business, unless the thoughts interfere with productivity ( or safety ) while *AT* work.. They would also have to limit any 'scanning' to things ONLY relative to the job. What I think about a character on TV at night, or that i hate rap doesn't qualify for scanning, for example.
I hope you are right about 'not in our lifetime'. But that was once said about intrusive background checks too.. Now look at things, you will soon be getting a backgrond check just to get a airplane ticket.. or to flip burgers..
A disclaimer: I detest drug usage.. but its a persons individual right, on their own time, in their own home.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's been done. The RCMP for one, in the 50's or 60's (I can't remember exactly), were using a device called "the fruit machine", which showed men pictures of naked men and women and measured their physiological responses. Those who became too "excited" as the naked men were shown would be suspected of gayness.
I doubt it was very accurate. A very homophobic heterosexual might get more "worked up" at the sight of naked men than women. I don't think they were using a penile cuff either...
Freedom: "I won't!"
Brainscanning and other monitoring abilities would give a company/gov't (the same thing these days, particularly in the USofCorp America) power similar to that of the "Emergent" in A Deepness in the Sky
by Vernor Vinge.Picking up impulses whether acted on or not, knowing who is hot for who whether it is "secret" or not, knowing who is PO'd/disgruntled and thus a "security risk" and in need of firing or pre-emptive jailing (or indefinite detainment by the gov't under out current Shrub).
The possibilities for superb abuse are wondrous. Can't wait for widespread law-enforcement use, gov't use, and corporate use. Those tin foil hats would start to come in handy about then but they would be a dead giveaway that you have something to hide and thus need to be detained, fired, etc.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I'm glad there exist people in society that do the hardwork 39-41 hours a week, think the clean thoughts, use the "righteous" anti-stress meds (beer and cigs.), and go to church, but no body I know qualifies.
They may be in the majority, but I'd rather pick my nose than have a conversation with such people, and if you knew how long my fingernails are you'd know how painful I think it is.
We wouldn't just loose the creative sparks that make the world cool, we loose all the obsessed people who put up with the misery and pain of striving to be something great for the tiny chance they will become such.
Even if we had the genetic gifts, how many of us would have the dedication to shoot enough basketballs to develop the skills to play for the NBA? Only an insane person would take the kind of pain long distance runners tell me about to place 165th in a marathon with 4000 other runners. Variations of insanity drive all but the most mundane of tasks in our society. I'd put up with the Antarctic climate to avoid living in a place like that.
I'm afraid I simply pictured the bus load of nuns in quantity, (rather than in the bus itself), being dumped onto a similar volume of children, like from the scoop of a great bulldozer. Which brought to mind the image of the nuns afterward telling the children that all the pain and bruises were the kids own faults, because of their SINS.
Getting your head scanned for emotions or sexual orientation is one thing, how about someone acquiring information about your bank account, credit card, behavioral traits, business ideas, social security number and well, anything you can think of, no pun intended. You open a door to a plethora of people acquiring false identities, corporate espionage, personal espionage, oppression, basically brain hacking. Try and firewall that one!
Halperin shows the implications - business negotiations take minutes for multimillion dollar deals (just ask the guy on the box what his real squeal point is on the deal and whether that really is a deal breaker or not), the justice system is streamlined down to almost nothing (trials don't take very long, obviously), etc.
Blurb from the book website: http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/promo/truthmachi ne/
MHO. YMMV. Any resemblance between this post and real persons, or reality in general, was accidental.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
SO do a whole mess of people who havent started killing and eating their neighbors. Should we just start locking people up who MIGHT commit a crime? That was this guys point in the book, he claims he can tell before they do anything that they are dangerous.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
hell, with me pitching, you'd never get on first bud :-)
youdda struck out 'ginst mah breaking ball...
now, i'm a big ole rightie, so my move to first probably wouldnt have gotten ya.... and its been 6 years since i played ncaa ball... but, i still think i could throw one by ya.
... hi bingo
I knew those voices in my head weren't mine...
Your brain is built using pieces of DNA that have been patented by many different companies. EVery time you think you're violated 27 patents. You evil person you...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Sure the tought police sound scarry, however, thought can be directed. There is no reason to consider how you would mutilate your coworkers or how much you are attracted to the same sex technician giving you the test. Just practice a little discipline.
So, what do we have to fear. How about when they can insert ideas like how to mutilate your coworkers or how much you are attracted to the same sex technician giving you the test into your head.
Oh yeah, Pepsi the Choice of a New Generation.
Of course I have something to hide: my core personality. What occurs in my brain and does not spill into meatspace is no one's business but my own. You have a right to examine my actions as they can affect you, but no human deserves to experience the true me -- you're all not worthy.
I am a psychotic misanthrope and I hate all humanity, but until I harm others, you have no right to meddle in my affairs. I am profoundly unsuited to my job, as it involves people. So fucking what -- I do my job well. Yes, I am a deviant and misfit. My deviancy affects no one, with the exception that I don't positively contribute to society as much as I can. Once again, humanity is not worth my best effort.
I hope to Cthulhu you are trolling. If you actually belive this is positive thing, you are naive to the point of incompatence and require a caretaker.
The problems that we are always going to face in the US, in Europe and in other liberal capitalist societies are fundamental. Nothing can be done about it. The only chance is slow and gradual transition to the society where people are brought up to care about common good and to respect others. Basically a communist society in its ideal form.
In a communist society no one would worry about using MRI to sell more Coca-Cola. People would think rationally about this and see that:
1) Companies are not motivated to maximize profits, they are motivated to maximaze common good.
2) Corporate employees do not care about quarterly earnings, but care about people's health, ecology and other similar factors.
3) No one would use advertising to sell more Coca-Cola because every person already has access to various drinks in the public catering in stores or at home and is free to select the one that he wants.
4) If there was actually a reason to use MRI to find out why people drink what they drink, everyone would be sure that the researchers will behave responsible and in everyone's best interests, because that's the way everyone behaves.
P.S. Please don't flame about the failure of communism. You know better than I do that some forces are not interested in trying it. One failure of the specific implementation that was launched in the wrong place and in the wrong time according to the theory, that had to deal with the economy destroyed by world war, with almost 0% literacy, with poor industrial development and with a paranoid dictator who killed everyone who could stop him before they got a chance to do it, does not mean the failure of the idea. And practically all other attempts were to build state socialism, state capitalism or just plain dictatorship.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Oh, it said privacy, not piracy. My bad.
A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name. -- Evan Esar
Plink, plink.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I've read (nearly) all of PKD's books, and I don't recall seeing any mention of anything like brain screening. I love PKD, but really, he gets too much credit. The best literary reference I can think of is David Brin's excellent "Sundiver," in which one of the characters lives the life of a second-class citizen after having failed a battery of tests designed to screen for violent or perverted impulses. David Brin's latest book, "Kiln People," is also quite good, and utterly unlike anything I've read. Check it out.
When the technology is cheaply available to alter one's skin color will you dismiss any prejudice against African Americans with:
Then just stop being Black.
I was sincerely hoping that my examples were diverse enough to illustrate that the root cause they had in common wasn't a pro/con opinion on any particular subject but that:
Accepting discriminatory practice when it seems like science, or saves us money, or only directly affects a class of people to which we don't belong, is always a bad choice. Always.
And more importantly, that if we can make it a habit that people in our society are alert for, recognize, and resoundingly reject such practice, we could live in a world without fear from new technology.
P.S. I've never smoked anything but salmon.
self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure that brain scanners are *extremely* illegal
This is a fine point, and I don't dispute it.
However, politicians have other defenses as well. One such defense is changing the form of the question. Remember they are always at risk of having anything they say proven wrong, so they try not to say anything with interesting truth value at all.
One common politician trick is to make sure all questions about what they support are single-place predicates ("Do you favor lower taxes?") and not two-place predicates ("Do you think it's more important to have lower taxes or better schools?"). By doing this, they can be in favor of everything good but omit the critical bit--how much they're in favor of each thing, and therefore what their actual priorities are. I'm sure this is not the only trick they use.
(Incidentally, I've noticed a surprising similarity between the problem of detecting whether a politician is someone you should trust and the Turing Test. Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe the essential question is the same--"is this person for real?")
Furthermore, I've been fascinated for a long time by an analysis of the late HP Grice called The Rules of Conversational Implicature, which basically assert that the relevance of speech is often not carried in its propositional, or per se, truth value, but rather in what is written between the lines. (Grice offers techniques for making this more concrete than you might expect.) I've often thought it would be interesting to see some implementation of Grice's rules applied to the various legal arenas involving speech acts (slander, fraud, perjury, etc.) I don't think it's practical (yet), but if it could be, it would yield fascinatingly different results than what we get now. Poking about in Google reveals at least one good writeup of Grice's position, though there must surely be others.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
It's not like homosexual people got a certain bit set to "1" in the brain or like serial-killers has a corrupt MBR... =/
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Corporations are specificlly to have "isolated" leadership, Limited financial liability for the owners, and limited legal liability for the employees/directors. Those same things all apply to being a government! The owners give up their individual property rights to the corperation, we need to stop letting corps hid behind investors coat-tails.
Changing the status would fix a great many things. Eula's and TOS would have to be fair per constitutional grounds. Drug tests, lie detectors, and the like would finally be disallowed for good. The biggest problem of all is that the govt is hiding behind corps just as badly! Congresscritters use corps "property rights" to inflict all sorts of unconstitutional infringement on us by requiring the corps to do this for contracts.
It's all neat and pretty for those at the top -- just like it was for King George in 1776!
Its simple to screen your brain from hidden brain scanners with an aluminum foil hat.
Sindri Traustason.
[...] Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality?
Meaning that homosexuals would be rejected or that they would have priority? In ancient Greece, some divisions of the army were composed primarily of homosexuals. The reasoning was that the bond between them would make them fight harder when they saw the others in danger. So this is an issue that swings both ways (pun intended, har-har).
In most countries a soldier's sexual orientation / preference is not an issue (one way or the other), though.
I think that screening based on predisposition to kill (if it turns out to be something you can identify genetically) would be a lot more likely.
RMN
~~~
How would this screening help my business plan?
Do I look for people who think:-"Mmm love to drink cum..."
Could I use it on potential customers finding those who think about sex?
Can I train my brain to think?
Exclamation mark trumps period every time.
What a brain scan shows is the relative activity of different regions. Presuming that it actually works out that some particular range of balances of activity is optimal for productive workforce participation, there's nothing to worry about. We'll simply employ stimulator and suppressor devices to keep your brain in balance. We have no desire to leave you out of the workforce. And dammit, you will be a happy worker.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I have a perfect example of this. The Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional to drug test railroad employees but not federal judges. How convenient.
We can hope that neuroethics is as successful as medical ethics and bioethics. More people can get jobs for having opinions in exchange for elucidation of emerging quandries ande guidance for the future. Just look at the triumphs. For instance, er... uh... More people have jobs for having opinions.
The Trusted Thinking Architecture Alliance is coming!
All your thoughts are belong to us!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
- We can have privacy and etc. but people will be killed by terrorists and others.
- or
- We can trust a central system to protect us -- aka, human rights and life.
The United States was not founded on principles of privacy but on principles of life. That we are to be protected from others (protected from ourselves even?). Move somewhere else if you want to have your privacy protected.This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Put simply, we are decades from actually "reading thoughts", if we *ever* get that far. I've seen some of the current research. We're barely to the point of reading binary impulses (e.g. "open the door, moron computer" as projected from a handicapped person.) You'll all be dead before Big Brother can measure your tendency to think that Al Queda dudes aren't all that bad, after all.
Of course, the "Ballmer is a lying sack of shit" thought has been thoroughly characterized, and if you are thinking that, the NSA already has an interrogation cell prepared for you.
FWIW, diagnosing someone with ADD has been somewhat of a subjective process. There are a few places working on tests using fMRI to find which areas of the brain light up (or fail to light up) in testing for ADD, so that hopefully in the future it won't be so subjective.
The Boston Globe article actually underplayed the current technological capabilities.
Can anonymous first posters be banned from (b)log websites?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I'm no Bladerunner expert, although Harrison Ford is an intense stud, but isn't there a scene in the begining of the movie very similar to this?
cool quote from the movie:
We're not computers, J.F. We're physical.
We just want to borrow your brain.
We have to get it out first.
It has to be prepared
...treated...
.............diced!
It can be replaced if you think it's important. A shell script would suffice. A simple one would do.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
i don't have a warehouse...but if i did thats exactly who i would want driving a forklift. so long as they were sober.
you are not going to get screwed over if you provide them with steady income to pay for the drugs that they seek. hell look at all the companies that do this for prozac, tobacco, alchohol, serozon*, and good quality pasta.
now you may say 'but these people are loosers, and would steal from you': sure. i'm notsure if there are laws against theft where you live, butthere is here. if they steal, they will be liable as far as the law can throw them[which is here pretty goddamned far if they are illegal drug-users : and i'd make them aware of this]
but what if they show up to work stoned/fried/fucked up? and you've never shown up to work without sleep before? or after a long hardcore bout of sexual activity[it does have an effect] where do we draw the line? if i were in charge of any group[and i have been, and will continue to be] i wouldn't care *why* x person was burned out... unless it wasnt' theit fault[ie mother in the hospital, so they are tired, etc]. if they are messed up, its' their responsibility to sobert up before they make it to work.
and of all the drug addicts i've worked with, the pot-smokers are the worst. they thumb their nose at authority a lot more often than others. so hey mabye i am wrong...[as rapid firing leads to lost potential training, etc]...but i don't think this is necessary...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
(1) What if I don't get a job because I am screened and found to be a suicidal maniac?(2) What if I don't get the job because I am likely to rape? ANSWER: good. maybe they will offer counseling and treatment for you problems. And do you really think you deserve the job if you have all of those mental problems? I don't think someone with mental problems could easily get a job as it is today.
dunno. just seems relevant.
....is a bad thing because...?
SCANNER TECH:(Scanning the Politician- Puzzled Expression) " Erm, I think it is...but it seems to be broken..."
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
understanding of the brain is a significant project. there will be problems, and the problems will be solved. and in the fullness of time, growth from understanding will occur. but if i were a lawyer, this is the last thing i'd want to have happen to me... ;)
You know, somehow I knew someone was going say that... I should be more careful with my examples next time.
>That's not the case with MRI.
That's all fine and good, but the approach I was pursuing was that testing anything affects the stuff being tested. If you have a blood test then you need to remove blood from the subject, not only altering the blood to become useless but also affecting the quantity of it available within the subject. Urine tests take waste that's going to come out, test or no test. However, in this case, my concern is that material tested WITHIN the body alters that material and STAYS in the body.
The X-ray thing was just a close example that most people are aware of. I know that MRI doesn't affect the body like X-rays, so what are the consequences?
I'll rephrase my question: Given that any test will alter its subject (maybe insignificantly), what are the affects of the tests used here (MRI)?
This is not my sig.
Sorry, but that sounds a little paranoid to me. Every place I've worked, I have not been the only person there with a mood disorder (in my case, recurrent depression, mostly in remission thanx to expensive meds). If they're trying to filter us out, they're doing a lousy job of it.
And every place I've worked, I've had to hand over the insurance enrollment form to an HR person--they've never offered me the option to mail it to the insurance company, and I've generally figured it would seem suspicious if I insisted, so I held my nose and gave them the form. I have a medical history a mile long consisting of depression (2-3x/yr visits to my psychiatrist plus meds costing at least $200/month) and an assortment of manageable chronic disorders (low thyroid, hypertension, acid reflux). I'll even put the little stuff on the form, the urinary tract infections and minor back pain, just to be complete and reasonably honest. I either have to attach an extra page or write reeeeeally small. There's always a column for noting the date you recovered from the ailment. Recovered? Ha. I'm doing just fine, thanx, but who "recovers" from hypothyroidism? I take a handful of pills with breakfast. Then I go to work and do good work; and that seems to be what they care about.
Nonsense. All you've accomplished is turning politics over to people who are good at lying to themselves. Which may have already happened!
At the time I was reading alot of Erick Fromm. What struck me was that the honesty test needed to be administered dishonestly to work!
Somehow this strikes me as the flaw with all systems that try to make value judgements. Regardless of the technique used the subject needs to believe something fundimental before results can be evaluated.
The human brain is an incredible piece of engineering and can show chemical and physical changes caused by emotional states. Therefore any results that might come from scanning techniques could be slanted by the subjects current mental state.
I do not see any benefit from this technology except perhaps for use in conjunction with drug treatments, for mental illness. Certainly as a scan for lie detection or the predeliction for aberrant behavour it will be proven useless.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!