Scary or sensational? A machine that can look into the mind

[Hugabear]

Source: The Guardian

Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.

The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.

The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person's dreams or memory.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time."

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/06/medicalresearch

---

Won't be long before people are being arrested for their thoughts.

[sofa king]

1. Here's an image of the President's thoughts:

[Teaser]

2. uploading the contents of a mind a step away

immortality here I come.

[Ordr]

10. uploading

Absolutely.
I can't wait :).
Ray Kurzweil continues to be proven right.

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. Let's take inventory:

They try to tell us how to think, they listen in to our conversations to hear what we are thinking, and now they'll be able to see what we are thinking.

Scary? Not at all.

[Sadie4629]

4. Yes, but

won't it help with convictions in hate crime cases?

[Hugabear]

12. Sorry, but that's one thing that I'm willing to do without

Sure, it could be used for hate crimes. But at what cost? Do you really want the government to have the ability to probe your mind and read your thoughts?

How many of us would be sitting in some secret prison somewhere because of something we've thought about * over the past several years?

[The Backlash Cometh]

13. Okay, here is where I depart with the liberals.

It so happens that I do believe that capital punishment is an excellent deterrent to crime, and especially murder. I think it deters millions of people from resorting to crime. So, assuming there are juices marinating in your head that this machine can pick up, and red juices are bad juices -- mean thoughts -- Well, there's probably blue juices, to offset the red juices which the scan may not yet know how to interpret.

People probably have all kinds of mean thoughts in their heads, everyday. This is afterall, a very mean world. But, they somehow make the right choices in the end. What if the crock-scan picks up all that bottled-up anger that we all live with, and not the blue angel that comes to save us in the end to keep us from doing the wrong thing? What if those red juices are especially high in people who are constantly at the receiving end of our abusive society? All the machine will see is the anger, and never the fact that the person has learned to live with abuse, as best they can. But if you have someone, let's say a white autocratic male, who gets to interpret the scan and he's dealing with a minority member, how do you think he's going to interpret that scan? "Oh, say," he'll say. "Gee, if a white person had this much red juice in his brain, he's gotta be guilty of something so I'll apply the same rule to this minority guy who gets his ass kicked in by discrimination every frickin day of his life."

You see? Our world is not equal. We all have adapted differently, as best as we can, based on our experiences -- experiences that some people don't want to acknowledge exists.

[Drifter]

5. Don't let the women get their hands on this ...

because if they do ... Men ... we are screwed !

:sarcasm:

Cheers
Drifter

[Thor_MN]

6. Reconstruct a picture of what a person thought they saw...

Having a person visualize what they saw is not like a video tape recording. There is too much information to process, so the human brain is good at discarding "unnecessary" information. Magicians actively use this process to get us to see what they want us to see while we ignore them picking up that extra card.

If this MRI technique can be refined, the best it will ever be able to produce is what the person thought they saw, not what they actually saw.

[Teaser]

15. good enough for my purposes

.

[Nihil]

16. Whilst what you say is true to an extent ...

... (i.e., in that the brain "image" is partially decoded anyway),
the technique in the OP isn't to retrieve images (= memories) but to
access them (= at the time that the person is looking at them).

Now as to *why* someone would want to do this instead of simply putting
a small camera in place instead ...?
:shrug:

[happygoluckytoyou]

7. DUBYAS BRAIN, AN OPEN COLORING BOOK....

i know what is going through DUBYA's SHINING mind every time he looks constapated (most of the time)....

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DUBYA A DULL BOY

[TheCowsCameHome]

8. They declared it was broken after testing Bush's head

Then they realized it wasn't the machine's fault.

[mainegreen]

9. Sensational.

Might have medical/diagnostic purposes for brain dysfunction.
Utterly useless in a 'big brother' sort of way.

[Hugabear]

14. Read the entire article

The article points out that currently, such uses are still in the realm of science fiction. However, they do admit that within 40-50 years, this technology could very well lead to invasive "brain-reading" functions.

After all, our brain works on a series of electrical impulses, brain waves, etc.

[0007]

11. The human brain can be found in the head of their joy stick.

[kayell]

17. Aaaaaiiiiieeee! It's the Aurora Chair!

uh, yeah, I am kind of a geek.