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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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