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Scientists Predicting Intentions
An anonymous reader writes to tell us German scientists claim to have the means of predicting decisions of high level mental activity. "In the past, experts had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements in advance. But researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity _ in this case, adding versus subtracting."
My first reaction is suspicion.... suspicion of a whole lot of possibilities regardless of whether or not this work has any validity. For instance, I've talked with more than one DOD general who was interested in military applications of electroencephalograms for "mind reading" and such. Certainly there are some applications for lie detection such as the P300, but one has to be very careful about the structure of the interview so as to not attempt to extract non-meaningful information from an evoked potential. My concern is that a whole bunch of additional DARPA type money will suddenly be thrown at the problem and claims will be made that will further impinge upon individual rights and freedoms waaaaaay before even the science is understood (not that understanding science is an excuse to stomp on civil liberties).
My more immediate concern is of the claims that are being made. The fundamental problem of course is developing a global signature for mind reading that is clean enough to derive robust statistics, keeping in mind that individuals brains are far from uniform in their anatomy, physiology or wiring. Work I performed more than a decade ago revealed similar cortical mapping patterns on subjects who performed tasks and then imagined performing those tasks. Certainly it is possible to determine volitional movements based upon our knowledge of neuroanatomy and statistical averages of wiring, but predicting "intentions" is a whole other ball game. The article is light on details and I've tried a search on more in-depth content, but if they are labeling "intentions" as complex behaviors, my eyebrows will be raised. For instance, determining which of two buttons to press invokes a whole series of kinesthetic volitional programming that should be able to be determined by mapping pre-motor cortex. However, if "intentions" are whether or not to engage in complex behaviors are what they are talking about, there is much more complex circuitry to consider including the possibility of imagery or imagining an action versus actually volitionally engaging in that activity.
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What is likely, is they can't tell whether you will buy a PS3 or an XBox 360, but rather you are going to press the "left button" vs the "right button" when shown a simple image like a green/red square.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity _ in this case, adding versus subtracting."
A big portion of the work of prosecution in this country is spent proving intent. For example, the funny-looking guy that hangs out at the playground. Is he a creep, or is he just a birdwatcher? Obviously, a scanning device would figure that out pretty quick.
(... And I guarantee you that's the same kind of argument they'll make when pushing this thing, too. Because it's all about protecting the children. even at the expense of your fourth amendment rights.)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
You mean like what Tom Cruise did 5 years ago?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
...intend on welcoming our mind-reading overlords (as they well know).
Just because I like variety in my life, I use an external randomizer (flip a coin, roll a die) to decide lots of things...do I go down 10th Street or 9th Street?
I'm now seeing that this was a very wise decision....
I do a lot of sub-optimal things, but at least I'm not predicatable
This sounds very similar to "psychohistory" as discussed in Asimov's Foundation series. Now if only we could predict what random nation Bush is going to invade next... Suggested tag : psychohistory
Truly you have a dizzying intellect.
Adding and subtracting is "high-level" intellectual activity, now?
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
anyone?
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
As it was posted last week?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
That's exactly what I thought you would think.
...so don't make the obligatory Minority Report reference.
... can they also predict dupes?
Donate free food here
But... can they tell when I'm just going to give up and use a hand calculator or 'bc'?
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
You can prove intent, but intent is not enough to get a conviction: you need the act to have been committed or attempted too.
In a perfect world, sure. In the real world, intent is all you need. Ever heard of conspiracy?. An overt "precursor" act (i.e. meeting with a hit-man, in the case of conspiracy to commit murder) is required to prove conspiracy, but that precursor act is basically just proof of intent, like this mind-reading device.
There is no crime of having intent to rob, but there is one of robbery (theft) or of entering a house with intent to rob (burglary). If people start being prosecuted for mere intentions, then you need to fix the law, not worry about mind-reading devices (which after all are just the messenger).
You're incorrect in your assumptions, but I do agree, the law *is* broken.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Just because I think something doesn't mean I will do it.
I found no links or reference to this pseudo science.
This seems an "exciting" topic with little or no real substance, please provide the substantiation.
or has global warming brought warm temperatures & the August silly season early?
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
"If you knew which thought signatures to look for, you could theoretically predict in more detail what people were going to do in the future," said Haynes.
Which isn't a million miles from... "we observed that just before our participant scratched their nose they raised thier hand". Using this observation we were able to predict when participants were about to scratch thier nose. And did so with an accuracy rate of 70%."
Don't get me wrong - I think this research is very interesting - but a little over egged at this moment in time.
Advances like these are the reason we need more privacy safeguards now, before they slowly boil our frog into stew (I know the frog jumps, but that TV gecko might not). Both tech, like universal P2P encryption of email, phone and Web, and legal, like a Privacy Amendment.
Humans have inalienable privacy rights, which we create governments and tools to protect. We invented clothing, and then later the 4th Amendment. But back then our skulls could protect us. Now that such security through obscurity won't work for much longer, we need thicker tech and government.
Of course nothing will completely protect privacy: knowledge is power, and power can know better. But better tech and government will slow it down. And keep us human longer.
--
make install -not war
Suppose someone darts out into the road in front of your SUV. You react too slowly and kill him.
If this was a freak occurrence and investigators determine that you could have reacted in time, then you probably won't see any jail time.
But if you stalked that person and knew that he likes to cut across traffic at 12:07 every day to get a hot dog from a certain vendor and spent weeks perfecting your approach to coincide with his dash, then intentionally ran over him, you'll probably end up doing 25 to life.
Will they predict addition or substraction? :)
We can consider your examples in this light. Whatever punishment you dangle in front of me, I'm not going to get better reflexes. So you don't punish the first person. But punishing people who carry out actions like stalking, practicing an approach and then running people over might put people off those actions. No need to talk about intentions.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The CNS events in question may predict later behavior, or assist in doing so. What they will not do is deliver "intention" as the thing being measured. They are not that, and they are not even the same sort of thing as that.
We need to run that thing on George Bush. On the other hand, I guess this device only measures "high level" brain activity, and George has none, evidently.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
is adding versus subtracting a high-level mental activity?
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
I think it's not just intentions that can be detected with this technology but also whether a person is lying. Quite possibly, the intention to tell the truth or lie in response to a question can also be detected. Scary? Yes, but this may be inevitable.
"Punishment is supposed to (1) deter criminals and (2) keep them from committing crimes."
Who exactly told you this? I always thought it was to punish a given individual for a specific act.
As usual, the linked artice is sparse on actual details. Here's a link to the actual article in Current Biology:
s tract?uid=PIIS0960982206026583&highlight=haynes
http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/ab
The full text requires a subscription, but I've pasted the abstract below:
Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain
When humans are engaged in goal-related processing, activity in prefrontal cortex is increased [1, 2]. However, it has remained unclear whether this prefrontal activity encodes a subject's current intention [3]. Instead, increased levels of activity could reflect preparation of motor responses [4, 5], holding in mind a set of potential choices [6], tracking the memory of previous responses [7], or general processes related to establishing a new task set. Here we study subjects who freely decided which of two tasks to perform and covertly held onto an intention during a variable delay. Only after this delay did they perform the chosen task and indicate which task they had prepared. We demonstrate that during the delay, it is possible to decode from activity in medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex which of two tasks the subjects were covertly intending to perform. This suggests that covert goals can be represented by distributed patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby providing a potential neural substrate for prospective memory [8, 9, 10]. During task execution, most information could be decoded from a more posterior region of prefrontal cortex, suggesting that different brain regions encode goals during task preparation and task execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust from the medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with a specific role of this region when subjects reflect on their own mental states.
Also, the final paragraph from the conclusion, which discusses where they'd like to go with this in the future:
Taken together, our results extend previous studies on the processing of goals in prefrontal cortex in several important ways. They reveal for the first time that spatial response patterns in medial and lateral prefrontal cortex encode a subject's covert intentions in a highly specific fashion. They also demonstrate a functional separation in medial prefrontal cortex, where more anterior regions encode the intention prior to its execution and more posterior regions encode the intention during task execution. These findings have important implications not only for the neural models of executive control, but also for technical and clinical applications, such as the further development of brain-computer interfaces, that might now be able to decode intentions that go beyond simple movements and extend to high-level cognitive processes.
I made this argument a while ago to my philosophy professor against free will, he thought it was a load of bull. I wonder how he'll respond?
Coming to you live from another dimension.
Lynch these scientists, please!
sex is better than war!
is that nobody would even try to make a tinfoil hat joke by the 88th comment on this story on slashdot!
... use water to short out his cloaking device.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This has been reported before on SlashDot. I work in the field, I've read the article, and I'll say again: the claims are not that strong. There are bits in the brain that are more active when someone has taken the decision to add numbers that are going to appear in a few seconds and there are bits that are more active when when that same person has taken the decision to subtract. There are also bits that show a different activation pattern for adding and subtracting while performing the actual operation. They did get a correct prediction measure by training on a subset of the data and measuring actual performance on the part left out. That it wasn't done in real-time is not that important. And the success rate was 71%, whereas simple guessing would give you 50%.
So, can we read intentions? In practice: no. fMRI is way too slow and a lot of material is needed before a "prediction" can be made. And MRI scanners are not really portable. In theory: neither, since the success rate is rather low and the choice is binary (which real-life intentions are certainly not), artificial (make a "random" decision and maintain it for a couple of seconds) and forced (normal decisions arise spontaneously from events around you). Other experiments with "brain reading" show much more interesting results, but could not predict either. They might simply have measured people holding on to their intention, response to conditioning or even trying to be as random as possible.
If the contents of your brain are finite, and the universe is finite (mind bogglingly large, but still finite), then given a powerful enough computer with enough data, it can all be computed and predicted.
For now they only have the power to predict motions in the short-term. Soon they will be able to predict aggressive or anti-social behavior based on past behaviors. Then they'll be able to monitor a whole person's life and be able to tell with great accuracy what a decision will be based on the person's past experiences and biology. Etc, etc.
It's not paranoia, it's simple mathematical logic. I don't care if they monitor me and let me know what I'm thinking.
This is not the signature you are looking for...
I used to have a programmable calculator that emitted enough RF for me to "play" it on a radio. The pitch changed with which functions were being performed, so I could tell what it was thinking, too. (If I were skilled, I'm sure I could have made it play music.) And this was decades ago.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Seriously, if this machine could perfectly predict *intentions* - using it on me would only reveal that I *intented* to take over the world - right after I quit smoking, cleaned my apartment, mastered everything about computers, became a rock star - and just quickly glanced over the internet while I drank my coffee.
Does that mean I'm really a threat to global stability?
Not unless I'm the first person to see the "Click HERE to Take Over The World!" ad. And even then... I never click on those ads, man.