Getting closer to understanding how the brain works: nature/news/brain-decoding-reading-minds-1.13989 Scientists are inching closer to the ability to scan brains for thoughts, dreams and memories through a series of processes known as “brain decoding.” Much of the research came out of advances from simpler work with MRI scans: Decoding techniques interrogate more of the information [than MRIs] in the brain scan. Rather than asking which brain regions respond most strongly to faces, they use both strong and weak responses to identify more subtle patterns of activity. Early studies of this sort proved, for example, that objects are encoded not just by one small very active area, but by a much more distributed array. These recordings are fed into a ‘pattern classifier’, a computer algorithm that learns the patterns associated with each picture or concept. Once the program has seen enough samples, it can start to deduce what the person is looking at or thinking about. This goes beyond mapping blobs in the brain. Further attention to these patterns can take researchers from asking simple ‘where in the brain’ questions to testing hypotheses about the nature of psychological processes — asking questions about the strength and distribution of memories, for example, that have been wrangled over for years. Debate is already underway over how we might harness these techniques for market research – or the legal system, as demonstrated by the crime scene test in the above video: No Lie MRI in San Diego, California … is using techniques related to decoding to claim that it can use a brain scan to distinguish a lie from a truth. Law scholar Hank Greely at Stanford University in California, has written in the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (Oxford University Press, 2011) that the legal system could benefit from better ways of detecting lies, checking the reliability of memories, or even revealing the biases of jurors and judges. Some ethicists have argued that privacy laws should protect a person’s inner thoughts and desires as private, but Julian Savulescu, a neuroethicist at the University of Oxford, UK, sees no problem in principle with deploying decoding technologies. “People have a fear of it, but if it’s used in the right way it’s enormously liberating.” Brain data, he says, are no different from other types of evidence. “I don’t see why we should privilege people’s thoughts over their words,” he says.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 02:18:19 +0000
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