New Scientist reports on an impressive new "mind-reading" study here. The study gathered data from one group of subjects engaged in particular thought processes to predict which thought processes were engaged in by subjects in a different group. There were four possible thought processes, and the researchers guessed the activity correctly 34 out of 40 times among the subjects in the second group.
The articles states:
The findings suggest that patterns for thousands of mental states might serve as a reference bank against which people's thoughts could be compared, potentially revealing what someone is thinking or how they are feeling. "In some dystopian future, you might imagine reference patterns for 10,000 mental states, but that would be a woeful application of this technology," says Greicius.
The idea of the system being used by security services or the justice system to interrogate prisoners or suspects is far-fetched, Greicius says. Thousands of reference patterns would be needed, he points out, and even these might not be enough to tell if someone is lying, for example.
Instead, he hopes it could be used in Alzheimer's and schizophrenia to help identify faults in the connections needed to perform everyday tasks. He also says the system might be useful for gauging emotional reactions to film clips and adverts.
How much detail such brain scans would show remains to be seen. "There would be a pretty coarse limit on what you could distinguish," says John Duncan of the UK Medical Research Council's Cognitive and Brain Sciences Centre in Cambridge. "The distinctiveness of an activity predicts the distinctiveness of brain activity associated with it," he says.
Kay Brodersen of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, agrees. "You might be able to tell if someone is singing to themselves," he says. "But try to distinguish a Lady Gaga song from another and you would probably fail."
The quoted discussion strikes me as unnecessarily pessimistic from both a scientific and societal point of view. Why assume we won't someday have very large databases of mental activities? Why assume that we won't be able to distinguish the Lady Gaga song from another? Technologies improve and costs go down. To be sure, the act of lying is rather removed from anything studied here. But even if lying turns out to be particularly difficult to study, the research may have other applications.
Putting aside the science itself, some of the comments strike me as a bit defensive about its social implications. They seem unnecessarily pessimistic about the possibility that this kind of research could have positive effects on society and the legal system.
