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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
... 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.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
From what I understand Polygraph tests are legally prohibited from most work environments. I hope they extend those laws to brainscans, thought detectors, etc.
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.
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.
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/
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...
Actually I'm hoping that this technology gets developped even more and is proven to be infallible.
Can you imagine the stinkin' lawyers we'd get rid of? Stick the guy in the brain scanner and ask 'did you rob the store and murder the clerk - yes or no?'. Done. No more blowing a quarter million dollars of my tax money on some trial for a lowlife criminal (or wrongly convicting the innocent).
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
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.
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.
"Stick the guy in the brain scanner and ask 'did you rob the store and murder the clerk - yes or no?'. Done."
yah sounds awesome.
Stick a guy in the scanner and ask "do you agree with the government?" Yes or no, done.
I think at some point our never ending quest for understanding of the way the world works will end up trapping us into a life of never ending servitude from birth, i don't want to be a part of that world.