They Can Read Our Minds (Suzanne Forster)

Seriously, they can. Did anyone see the rerun of the Sixty Minutes segment on brain scanning last Sunday night? One of the men interviewed said there was no such thing as science fiction anymore. Everything that was considered science fiction when he was a kid had since come true.

I don’t remember imagining medical equipment that could read minds when I was kid. But I did write a novel several years ago that dealt with predicting dangerous behavior through the analysis of brain scans. Apparently I wasn’t too far off from what is now possible. New technology uses MRI scans of the brain to detect what you’re thinking, based on how the brain reacts when you look at an image.

The test subject was a Sixty Minutes staff member who’d never had a brain scan. She was shown images and asked to think about them while the scanning took place. The computer program correctly named all ten items based on the woman’s brain activity and without knowing what images the woman was looking at. They didn’t mention all ten images, but there was a knife, a window, a hammer and an apartment in the mix.

I remember thinking that the apartment must have taken some fairly complex neural activity compared to a knife or a hammer, but the computer picked all ten up in a matter of minutes, including the apartment.

Apparently in Germany, scientists are even learning to read our intentions. Your brain can also be made to tattle and tell investigators where you’ve been. You can imagine the implications of this in criminal trials, where brain activity could reveal whether or not you’re familiar with a crime scene.

It was also predicted that in three to five years, they’ll be able to read more complex thoughts. They didn’t specify what those thoughts might be, but they already know the signature brain activity patterns for certain emotions and behaviors, like kindness, love and hypocrisy.

And if all that doesn’t make you uneasy, how about this? In June 2008, a woman in India was convicted of murdering her former fiance, based in part on her reaction to a verbal re-creation of the crime while electrodes were attached to her head. Apparently an EEG of her brain showed that she was familiar with circumstances involving the murder and ultimately she was convicted. The judge ruled that only the killer could have had such “experiential knowledge.” Yikes. What about romantic suspense writers who create crime scenes so intricate their brains probably think they’ve been there? What about people who just imagine or dream in great detail???

This sort of testing is still highly controversial, but there’s little doubt that it will be used at some point in future trials, though it’s not clear whether the information from the brain will be used as testimony or as evidence, the way blood or DNA is. Just imagine being charged with a crime and having your brain waves testify for you. Or applying for a job and being hooked up to an EEG during the interview!

Perhaps the segment’s most chilling revelation was the possibility of reading minds from a distance, using light beams targeted at the head. This really sounds like science fiction, right? Well, you can relax. It’s not possible yet, but at the rate things are progressing in the brain sciences, it may not take long.

Maybe it’s my teenage issues with authority figures, my overworked writer’s imagination or too many movies like Minority Report, where they arrested people based on criminal inclinations, but I’d like to know exactly what they plan to do with the ability to read our intentions before they can actually do it. The whole idea of reading minds is incredibly cool but it’s also a matter of medical ethics, and given the potential for not just technical error but invasion of privacy, it’s important to stop and consider the consequences. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

What do the rest of you think? Maybe I’m over-reacting. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do the scientific research or develop the capability. I’d just like some reassurance that the contents of our minds will still belong to us. The most basic human rights we have—our thoughts—need to be protected.

Here’s a clip from the Sixty Minutes show, which first aired in December 2008:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/30/60-minutes-mind-reading-f_n_154370.html

And here is one of the many articles on the subject, with warnings about personal privacy invasion issues:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3343929/Mind-reading-by-MRI-scan-raises-mental-privacy-issue.html

Suz