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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?
... 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.
On the up side that aluminium foil hat you're wearing might actually keep the government out of your brain for a change.
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...