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."

Comments

Covered in a SF book

[koreth]

This sort of thing is the premise of a book I read a few years back, The Truth Machine by James Halperin. The premise is that someone develops a brain scanner that can tell with absolute certainty whether someone is lying. Halperin paints a pretty optimistic picture of the results; I think he underestimates how profoundly uneasy this kind of thing would make people, but I think he's right on the money in predicting that if such a device existed and were available at an affordable price, there'd be no stopping the spread of it and no avoiding its profound impact on the way society works.

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.

This is rediculous

[DJStealth]

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.

Re:This is rediculous

[deblau]

I participated in neurological research for the Salk Institute at the UCSD Thornton Hospital MRI last year, and they're nowhere near anything like this.

Let me explain the experiment, for those of you who are curious about the state of the art in neuro research. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the location in the brain of areas which are active during certain tasks. The task I was given was a memory / reflex test. I was given a button, and shown a sequence of letters at varying rates. I was supposed to press the button when I saw a letter that was identical to the letter shown two letters earlier. So if I saw E-C-E-C-C, I'd press the button on the second E, and again on the second C, but not the third C. (This is a hard enough test without being a medical experiment!)

First, they wired me up for an EEG. This involved sitting still for about 45 minutes while two people stood over me, put a skullcap with wires on my head, and went over each electrical contact with some grease and a little wooden dowel to move the hair out of the way so the electrodes would have good contact with the skin. (The goop washed out in the shower, but it felt funny driving home.) Then they stuck me in the MRI, with a mirror in front of my face at a 45 degree angle so I could look past my feet without sitting up (impossible in that tiny tube). Then they performed the tests.

I was in the tube for about 90 minutes, most of it not moving any muscles except for my finger to press the button. If you move any muscles, your whole brain lights up with activity, and it throws off the readings. It was also noisy in there, because I was laying in the middle of a huge electromagnet being bombarded with radio waves. After it was over, they showed me a 3D brain scan, and I got to see a 2D plot of my brain waves by color (blue for theta waves, green for alpha, red for gamma, etc etc).

Back to the topic at hand. Unless they suddenly find a way to carry around a $1.5M electromagnet, hide it somewhere where no one can see or hear it, convince people to walk through it somehow (Futurama tubes, anyone?), figure out a way to filter out all the extra brain noise from people walking, talking, and doing all the other things we normally do, and somehow interpret the data in a time-relevant manner, there's no way anyone is going to make "brain scanning" work. OTOH, maybe there is a way after all.

Re:Got a whole lotta hype

[dogfart]

As has been the case with other crimes for many years. The act is criminal, the intent determines the severity (among other factors)

More like a Vernor Vinge novel...

[praedor]

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.

Wrong author - try David Brin

[jmjm]

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.

Re:what you are fearing...

[RKloti]

Retarded literally means "delayed" (the French word tard means late, retarder means "to delay", which you might see at an airport or a train station in France if your plane or train were delayed - very common in France, but that's besides the point) and it refers to passing development milestones at a higher age than is expected from normal children, that is, talking longer to learn motor, social and cognitive skills like speech, crawling, walking or reading. In this sense, people with AS are "retarded" in a social sense, but by definition they aren't retarded in an intellectual or a linguistic sense, otherwise they wouldn't fall under the definition of Asperger's Syndrome which requires normal language capabilities and average or above average intelligence. Some people with AS also have apraxia - a lack of motor coordination that causes them to appear [very] clumsy.

The term "retarded" is strongly stigmatised, and many people associate it with Trisonomy 21/Downs Syndrome or other forms of severe mental disabilities. People with HFA and AS are often above average intelligence and some can be a genius in a very specific area, but they lack important social skills, which can cause bizarre (to "normal" people) behaviour and usually social withdrawl and isolation. Neither condition can be treated per se, but it is possible to "learn" some of the innate social capabilities that most people have.

IANAP