Scientific Mind Reading

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Scientific Mind Reading

Postby Guest » February 9th, 2007, 11:39 am

What kind of world would it be where mind-reading was commonplace?
Is the menacing prospect of unbridled mental eavesdropping about to come true?
Would we in desperation develop anti-scanning helmets to block invasive bugging?

Mentalists might be interested in the following neurophysiological experiments reported in the British press:

The brain scan that can read people's intentions

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 9, 2007

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 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.

During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen.
Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy.
The study revealed signatures of activity in a marble-sized part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that changed when a person intended to add the numbers or subtract them.
Because brains differ so much, the scientists need a good idea of what a person's brain activity looks like when they are thinking something to be able to spot it in a scan, but researchers are already devising ways of deducing what patterns are associated with different thoughts.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University: "A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty."

Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, said: "We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions."


Re: Scientific Mind Reading

Postby Guest » February 9th, 2007, 2:40 pm

I've heard rumors of at least two full-time working mentalists who've spent piles of money to develop an MRI that will fit in their MRI being necessary for fMRI, the technique described above.

So far, the research on making the gigantic, multi-ton magnetic devices portable have not been the idea of mounting them on the back of chairs in a performance area is not "around the corner." :D

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