The Brain Scan that Can Read People’s Intentions
February 9th, 2007Clearly, the greatest Magic 8 Ball of all! HA!
Via: Guardian:
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.
The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.
The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.
“Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,” said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.
The research builds on a series of recent studies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked to lying, violent behaviour and racial prejudice.
The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuroscience is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues surrounding future uses for the technology. If brain-reading can be refined, it could quickly be adopted to assist interrogations of criminals and terrorists, and even usher in a “Minority Report” era (as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg science fiction film of that name), where judgments are handed down before the law is broken on the strength of an incriminating brain scan.
“These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we’re not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared,” Professor Haynes told the Guardian.
The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Prof Haynes. “We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren’t going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence.”
Related: Companies Offer ‘Mind Reading’ Technology to Government
Related: Ultimate Airport Security: Mind Reading Device?
Every new week, a fresh Orwellian horror is unveiled. This is hardcore, in-your-face jackbootery beyond Hitlerian proportions.
Is there anywhere in the world where people won’t be tagged and chipped any time soon? What about South America? I need remoteness, dry climate (because of my respiratory disease), and decent land on which to grow organic food and husband cattle, chickens, etc.
how does a scanner see…clearly or darkly…
I have no intentions, I desire nothing,we must break free from this worker consumer world, with desires and stuff, read some Zen, dictature cannot exist then
“Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryoken sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.”
http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/zenindex.html
Ah, it is no doubt heartening to many (braindead sheeple) to see that Thought Police and Mindcrime will soon become a reality. I feel safer already.
patiently inching our way towards the thought police…
Suddenly, the proverbial tinfoil hat begins to look like bleeding-edge technology…
Occlumency anyone? See: Harry Potter
Ha. It’s funny that you decided to highlight the “Minority Report” bit, since that was the part of the article that made me most angry. I mean, seriously, people at The Guardian, if you’re going to insert a popular culture reference to try and make your article seem more exciting to readers with absolutely no imagination of their own, at least get your facts straight. Was there really no-one in the newsroom who’d even seen the movie? Or read the story? Just for the record, brain-scan technology may well usher in a Minority Report-esque era of pre-emptive punishment – just as soon as we also develop bald pre-cognitive mutants with the power to tell the future. Idiots…
Imagine if we could build this technology right into Verichip V7.0?!
Watch this terrifying video of charming PR folks talking about how wonderful it would be to get ‘chipped’ to get a job or buy anything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpj4HRmJFiU
Introducing the new entrail-reading oracle…same as the old entrail-reading oracle…except the cloak of science guarantees his divinations will be held sacrosanct, thus making the imprisonment and/or execution of any Non-Compliant virtually guaranteed.