Your thoughts are no longer private: scientists can already tell what you’ve seen just by scanning your brain

I’ve never denied being a nerd. Just now, I was scanning down the Nature weekly, and saw this paper, by Kay et al. It’s just been published, and it describes how they’re using functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) - fMRI - to ‘read’ your brain as you see an image - and to decifer from your brain activity, what it was you just saw (by seeing how your brain categorises it)!

Here’s the (gobsmacking) last line from the intro:

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.

Think through what that means. Your thoughts can be scanned. Further down this line of research, we will eventually get to a point where police could get accurate IdentiKit pictures of your assailant, by scanning you; great! But the government could scan your brain to see what you really think about certain religious or political symbols. Are you racist? A commie? A fascist? Do you not like your leader? The government could find out by scanning you. Advertisers (and politicians) could find out the exact effect a message has on a person - using this, they could find out the very best, most powerful wording, the best way to influence you. Techniques for spin, advertising, and their ugliest sister, brainwashing, will come on leaps and bounds. A little worrying… but scientifically amazing.

del.icio.us Tags: neuroscience,science,brain

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I just stumbled across a research paper published by a Google employee and a Microsoft employee entitled “A Case for Usage Tracking to Relate Digital Objects“. I have no idea who Elin Rønby Pedersen is but she’s published both on this and on Google’s much vaunted foray into organising your health data. The paper highlights an interesting idea, potentially just as important to Future Google as Pagerank has been to Google so far. It’s not groundbreaking - you see it on, for example, Amazon. But it’s worth thinking about, applied to the whole web. The idea is that related objects - and I use the term extremely loosely here - can be identified because you looked at them during a session of Internet browsing; you started with one, and your later browsing takes you to related objects - blog posts or news articles on the same or related subject; similar videos; etc. Your brain does the hard work of deciding what objects you’re looking for; average that with other similar datasets and Google has a pretty damn good idea of what objects on the web are related, no matter what format the object has (could be visual, textual, a flash...

Genes to Memes to Temes (techno-memes)

This is a long post but if you can find the time, please read it to the bottom. It’s quite a good one. This is a nervous, poorly presented talk outlining a hugely important theory about where the future of humanity is headed: Blackmore’s argument goes as follows: Darwinism is Universal: any process that has copying (heredity), variation (mutation) and selectionary pressure will evolve. This describes information (instructions for how to do something in life) perfectly. She describes three levels of information. The first should be familiar to everyone. The second will be familiar to most of you, but isn’t in the wider world just yet. And the third is introduced by Blackmore in this talk, but ties in with Ivan Illich’s “Tools for conviviality” concept and several other (anti-)technocracy arguments. Here’s my summary (my own view in summed up in just 4 lines at the end) The central premise is this: information builds structures around it that help it get passed on through generations (copying events) - it doesn’t care how it’s passed on, it will just keep changing itself (the instructions for how to build structures that protect and copy it), like a virus, until it finds a...

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.