Employers, the military and intelligence services may soon be using computerised mind-reading techniques and there is a need for a public debate about "mental privacy," a leading neuroscientist said yesterday. Scientists have taken MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to detect lying, racism, and even identify which image a person is looking at, suggesting one could visualise scenes from a person's dreams or memory. At the Cheltenham Science Festival, backed by The Daily Telegraph, Prof Geraint Rees of University College London said that, although hospital patients and experimental volunteers are protected, there is a need for debate about, for example, whether employers could use mind reading methods to decode brain activity to screen job applicants. Another possibility raised by studies of how the brain encodes memories and other information is that these methods could be used by intelligence agencies: a suspect's brain could be interrogated against their will. "There are obvious military activities and the CIA and so on are known to be interested too." And it could be possible to reveal unconscious prejudices: a person who claims not to be a racist could be revealed to be one, if their amygdalae, almond shaped structures linked with disgust, go into action when shown a picture of a black person, raising the nightmarish possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes". Although "conceptually possible," Prof Rees says say this is currently firmly in the realm of science fiction because these mind reading methods, which typically detect tiny changes in blood flow in the brain, currently have to be adapted to each individual during hours of training while in the scanner.

advertisement "You need an all purpose lie detector that would work with many people," he says. "That is quite challenge, given people's brains are different shapes and sizes, and lies come in many variations too, from my CV to how I got here.

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I will never support the policing of thoughts.

That will not work with many of the most dangerous, sociopaths, the ones most prone to kill or harm others.
They are more likely to register pleasure, like showing a hunter a picture of a deer with a big rack of horns.

Some of the applications used by technology are getting more and more disturbing.

I don't support this because then we can't even have privacy in our minds anymore...That would seriously suck.

I would love to get that "mind reader". I'm having a hard time to figure out what a woman want

Amen brother!

I agree with Affliction on this. The policing of it would deny us any right to privacy and impose on our personal life.

simple answer...

moooooooooooooooooooooooonnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey........

Not much interesting going on in my brain anyway. I guess scientists want to study boredom more closely.

Bla Bla Bla... It's all just crap. No MRI or any other machine for that matter can see what a person is really thinking or feeling because thought exists on a quantum level that is unmeasurable by any technology known or unknown. All this is is an attempt to make you think that scientists are making great strides in being able to know what you are doing, have done or are going to do in order to apply enough propaganda into the people so that you will vote against it in the future. By voting against something so incredibly (or apparently) scary to think about, we give power to those companies and organizations as to scrape every penny from you in order to support the cause against it (a cause that secretly uses 99 percent of your money for other projects that they don't tell you about or they just don't use the money toward anything at all and just pocket it). After all, when you give money to a cause or organization against a cause, where does that money go? Advertisements? The same thing that caused you all to get riled up and give them money in the first place. You are only fighting fire with gasoline.

Don't buy into it because in the long run, you are only giving all your money to the exact same people that started the issue in the first place. Do your homework. It's just history repeating itself. People hate being told what they can or cannot do. The best way to get a person to buy more alcohol is to tell them there is a limit on it. Even with the smoking issue... more cigarettes have been sold in the last three years than in any combined ten year period of our past. Why? Because of all the 'ban smoking' and other propaganda that you are all sucking up to. Smokers hate the people against smoking but that's ok because the people against smoking are just fueling the tobacco industry's sales.

Now we can read your minds! Woooo, I'm so scared. After all, I have nothing to hide anyway so just ask me what I'm thinking. I drink, I smoke, I occasionally steal, I've done drugs before.... hell, if those scientists really want to (even if they had the capability to do so) the only thing they will ever visually see from my brain scans that they have never ever seen before and most likely never will again is female genitalia.

Let's say it is all true (for the sake of argument because there are enough of you out there who would love to masturbate on reality). Let's say they did develop a way to read people's minds. I'm all for it on one condition... the inventors of that technology must scan their own thoughts and dreams from every inch of their brain cells and make them freely available to the public on the internet (or you can order the full DVD set). After all.... If you can dish it out then should be able to take it as well.

John
Ex-Military Intelligence (Desert Storm)

Yet another government tactic to take more of our civil liberty's away whats next we won't be able to dream.

Does anyone remember that old movie, "Dreamscape"? I think they (the government? scientists?) could hook a machine up to the mind and watch a person's dream as it occurred. This reminded me of that.

Okay and from stage left, enter the anti-christ... and scene!

I knew someone would want to involve legal issues with this sort of thing.

What if it's done without anyone's knowledge and another question that comes to mind is what else can kids hear beside that phone ring adults can't hear?

Could kid's minds be somewhat manipulated by these selective sounds in order to achieve goals set by secretive clubs or whatever they maybe? Imagine being able to control the mass using these technologies? Can we say for certain? After all if anyone could master mind reading and manipulating by using sounds that only kids can hear how would we know?

I think it's worth thinking about.