Sunday, March 14, 2010

Moving Closer To A Brave New World


With each new step of technology, we move towards a world that we can't even imagine today. The latest - using MRI's to read minds:

A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person's mind, researchers said Thursday.

British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone.

"We've been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory -- to look at actual memory traces," said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire. . . .

Do read the entire article.

4 comments:

suek said...

Hmmm. Wonder if MRIs would qualify as enhanced interrogation techniques...

cdor said...

If you've ever been in one of those tunnels for more than 30 minutes, I guarandarnteeya, MRI's would qualify.

suek said...

I'll take your word for it!

Long term, I hope!

OBloodyHell said...

This strikes me as one of those things where the reporting is claiming things are a lot further along than they actually are.

They've been claiming a lot for general facial recognition for about 5-10 years, for example, yet I have yet to see any impressive applications being exhibited anywhere that function for general recognition purposes.

This sounds like they've gotten an MRI to make a connectible association with a previously noted memory recall, which allows them to pick it up a second time in subsequent occurrences. That's hardly mind-reading, since, if so, you'd have to make that first association, which isn't going to happen in adversarial situations, nor is it practical for the general usage of figuring out what someone is thinking about.

In other words, while this may be the first step in that direction, it's a loooooooong ways from becoming a reality.