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Brain Scanner Can Tell What You're Looking At
palegray.net writes "Wired News brings us an article about brain scanning systems that can accurately tell what you're looking at by analyzing your brain's electrical activity. Using a database constructed of readings taken on test subjects who were shown thousands of photographs, the system works in real time to decipher what you're seeing. Naturally, there are some ethical concerns over some potential applications for this technology. Definitely a new twist on "input devices.""
I hope my girlfriend never know about this.
what type of porn am I looking at now?
I'm really starting to love that augmented reality that we are headed towards. Surveillance won't be too much of a problem I fear, there will always be paranoid nerds like myself that will work damned hard to keep the "authorities" from watching while still enjoying all the benefits of the technology.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
It's amazing how far we've come to understand how our zombie food really works. Think about it, we can chemically alter it with a degree of precision, we can take minutely detailed images of it to determine any number of things, we can influence and stimulate it to any number of ends. Now we're on the verge of seeing each others dreams. I wonder what Tom Cruise has to say about this...
Seriously, is it supposed to look like that?
... and it normally ends in pain for me and my wandering eye.
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
With such powerful technologies, and with such rapid development there's going to be an everpressing need for privacy laws that protect our thoughts, literally.
NEXT!
-So, Mr. Interrogator, what am I thinking of *now*?
-Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
From the article Those technologies remain decades away, but researchers say it's not too soon to think about them, especially if research progresses at the pace set by this study.
Well, I beg to differ. By the time the "decades" have passed, we'll actually have some information to consider, not just a load of pie-in-the-sky whimsy from people who have no facts to base it on.
Let's worry about today's ethical issues and leave things like this for when they look like becoming a practical reality.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This is interesting because it is a form of pattern matching. Anyone who has studied the actual way the brain processes information from the senses knows that the brain receives a pattern--regardless of which sense it comes from--and interprets that pattern in such a way that it can make the interpretation. A great example of this is a device that has been built for the blind. The device consists of a grid of pressure-causing pins that are laid on the tongue of a blind person. If an image of some object is represented in the grid, the wearer's tongue can transmit this image to the brain and, with practice, a blind person's brain can learn to interpret that image and act on the basis of the information. I cannot stress the magnitude of this type of thing: the brain does nothing but pattern interpretation. It matters not where the pattern comes from, only the interpretation that is applied matter.
Naturally, there are some ethical concerns over some potential applications for this technology
Whose code of ethics are they following here? The legal profession's? The medical profession's? The psychiatric profession's? The military's? All these organizations have different codes of ethics. Who's concerned that this may be against their code of ethics?
There are certainly moral concerns.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'd be very interested in seeing the quality improvements in games that can use this technology to improve only certain points in a display based on where you are actually looking.
Now what would be terribly interesting is coupling this sort of thing with a car and a transparent LCD windshield. It would be able to enhance various aspects of your car's display and perhaps make some things more apparent from your peripheral vision.
Or for combat pilots, using this sort of technology to target a craft based on where your eyes are focused.
I could think about this all day...
Finally. A way to get content driven advertising all the time, everywhere I go. I don't have to sit around online to get pelted with banner ads, anymore.
Although it true that our ability to image the brain is now allowing us to detect "thought" in the brain, it really needs to be pointed out that this is very in the lab sort of stuff. It doesn't just involve sticking you in a tube and viola a little readout comes out telling you what you were thinking. It requires finicky, multi-million dollar, difficult to interpret equipment. First have to baseline a persons normal brain function then after detailed analysis by crazy smart cognitive neuroscientists we can sort of glean very simple conclusions. Are you adding or subtracting from a number (not found out in real time btw)? Looking up or down? Which, incidentally, I can also determine by looking at your eyes. Basically the stuff here and in other imaging studies is cognitive childsplay in comparison to the "reading of someones thoughts" people seem think is around the corner. We are so far off from that state of technology that ethics really aren't an issue, yet. It is kind of interesting to me that ethical concerns are beginning to become a concern in research of cognitive neuroscience, but needless worry is premature. This is like people starting to fear the atomic bomb right after discovering uranium.
The government will certainly misuse this technology too, no matter the legal protections. We have something called the Constitution that supposedly protects us against the government spying on us, but we're all seeing how much good that does.
So it's not out of luddism that I hope they belay this advance; rather, I want to wait until we've rebalanced our government and society to ensure our freedom and rights will not be abused.
In the meantime, why not cure cancer? That's an unambiguous good. Go work on that!
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
George Orwell - The Thought Police.
How far is it from detecting what you are looking at to detecting general ideas like "Violent Thoughts", "Adult thoughts", "Rebelious Thoughts" - if they use different parts of the brain....
Seriously. If I got a $50 fine every time I thought about killing someone, It'd get damn'd expensive.
It could get recursive, what if I wanted to kill the guy for fining me $50.....
Let's not ever consider being fined for "Adult thoughts"
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
"In the courtroom, mental readouts could have the same problems as eyewitness testimony"
Would that prevent their use in courtrooms? I don't think so.
I know of someone who was charged with a child pornography offence, who was targeted for being prominent in the paedophile activist community.
I strongly suspect that he was set up, however this will be irrelevant in the courtroom, as people know that he's attracted to children. In other words, he "must be guilty", simply because of what he is known to think.
This attitude is not only a problem for people who are attracted to children. If people associate certain thoughts and behaviours, a strong suggestion that the defendant has the thought will lead most people to presume guilt, even when the defendant is innocent.
If the researchers actually manage to build a mind-reading device, it will be used in court and it will lead to the conviction of innocent people.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Gah. Can we file this under really bad summary - this is basically an expansion of work that has been underway for a few years now (just read a paper on a similar concept from 05). What we're really seeing is a pattern-matching algorithm - train it using fMRI data from visual cortices and, with a limited subset, it's pretty accurate. Honestly, as a vision researcher, the more interesting bit isn't the so-called "mind reading" bit, although it is a good trick - it's the fact that it works across subjects with a respectable amount of accuracy (which indicates that activation in V1/V2/V3 is not overly dissimiliar between subjects). Cool work though...
A study was done recently that was using eye position recognition, and participants were shown photos of all kinds of people. The computer was able to note where (on the image) the person's eyes were fixed, and for how long.
They found (among other things) that women tend to fix upon the face and eyes of the person in the image. And they found that guys frequently stared at the crotch area, such as that of a baseball player (hey, dudes, it's a CUP, don't get so insecure). There were other findings, but these are the more memorable ones.
Article here.I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
In the future will we get billed by the RIAA for singing a song in your head without the proper 'internal cranium broadcast license' ?
If only the system, or another, could stimulate areas of the brain to induce the perception of an image. Feed in the mathematical model of a dog, and the person sees, or thinks they see, a dog. In essence, allow the blind to see. Combined with a camera and image recognition algorithms, and that blind person could see their surroundings in real time. And the model doesn't have to be accurate, so long as it is consistent. I'll bet the brain would do plenty of interpreting - if the impulses for a dog were there, and the subject was told "this is a dog", they would associate that imagery with "dog".
Of course, technology like that opens up the way for abuse -- if the subject is induced to see a face or talking head which they believe is their deity, while being simultaneously subjected to sound-inducing microwaves (or this ootoob video), that person thinks they see and hear God, as it were. And the voice says "I want you to build me, an ark" or "I want you to kill so-and-so" or "Your boyfriend needs a lot more sex"....
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I don't know about you, but I would never fit in a viola.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
The only thing new about this technology is that it's noninvasive. Neuropsychologists have known for years that the occipital lobe contains a 2D map of what you're looking at. This was studied many years ago by injecting radioactive tracers into animals and taking xrays while they were looking at image patterns. The patterns could be seen mapped out on the surface of the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. The only difference now is that they're able to do it without injecting tracers or exposing you to xrays.
As for the "ethical concerns", give me a break. The only thing this technology can do is tell what you're looking at in realtime. Your employers and the government can do this a lot more easily by simply looking at your face and figuring out where your eyes are pointing. They can't use this technology to tell what you've looked at in the past, it probably can't even tell them what elements of your visual field you're actually paying attention to, and they certainly can't use it to read your memory or current thoughts. It's not technology that's ever likely to be at all useful outside a lab, it's simply being used to help us better understand how the brain works. Maybe one day there'll be a machine that can pull private information out of your brain, but this isn't it. Put the tinfoil hats away, people.
Like the proven infallible technology in Minority Report? Can't wait.
And yet they invented it anyway. I guess you could use it to study how the brain processes images, but for the life of me I can't think of a truly beneficial, non-evil application.
Uh, how about research into artificial sight for the blind, or restoring visual comprehension to persons with brain damage? A tool is a tool, an object that is neither good or evil. It's how people use it that's the problem.