Scientists have edged closer to mind-reading by using brain scanners to measure changes in blood flow that signal a person's intent to do something.
Every day numerous actions are planned, such as returning a book to a friend, shopping or making an appointment.
But how and where the brain stores these intentions has been revealed thanks to a study that unveils the intentions in the brain.
The work is remarkable because it has never before been possible to deduce from brain activity how a person has decided to act in the future.
The feat is reported today in the journal Current Biology by Prof John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, working in co-operation with Prof Richard Passingham from University of Oxford, Prof Geraint Rees, Sam Gilbert, and Prof Chris Frith of University College London and Prof Katsayuki Sakai from Tokyo.
The scientists let subjects choose freely and covertly between two tasks, either to add or subtract two numbers. The subjects were then asked to hold in mind their intention for a few seconds until the relevant numbers were presented on a screen.
Using a brain scan method called functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers were able to recognise the subjects' intentions with 70 per cent accuracy based on their brain activity alone, even before the participants had seen the numbers and had started to perform the calculation.
OK, we’ll stick our necks out and indulge in a little blind, uninformed second-guessing here:
A) Given a choice between adding and subtracting two unknown numbers, isn’t it a fair bet that most folks–maybe as many as 70%–would choose to add? Might not most folks be just a tiny bit more stressed or pumped by the prospect of subtraction?
B) Note that by the third paragraph, intentions appear to have become animate objects independent of us that are “stored” somewhere. What happens if they are unfulfilled or we change our minds? Do they rot?
C) How is this mind-reading when the choice was ordained and it was a condition of the experiment that nobody change their minds?
In other words, does this experiment indicate anything more than that different mental processes may have different physical manifestations in the brain, and what exactly is so novel or surprising about that?
Before we leave you cleverer chaps to ponder all this and help us out, we simply have to note that this report earns our award for most creative trumping of ethical concerns by the promise of future medical benefits. In the face of sombre fears about how all this may herald a dark age marked by the total destruction of personal privacy and rampant Big Brother totalitarianism, we are asked to balance such mundane matters against this important upside:
The understanding could find use in mind-reading methods under development to enable tetraplegics to move prosthetic limbs and operate computers.
10 comments:
The very last paragraph in the linked article asks, "What's Next?"
I think I can predict the answer to that question with 99.97% accuracy. Get as big a grant as possible from the dim bulbs in Ottawa/Washington/London, so we can continue to live the good life at taxpayer expense.
Peter, again your comments were highly mirth-provoking. I may reorder my reading preferences and start off on the high seas.
That the future holds the near-total destruction of personal privacy is pretty much a given.
But that need not lead to "dark ages" or rampant Big Brother totalitarianism.
As ever, that's up to us.
The past, up until maybe 200 years ago, was a time of very little personal privacy for almost everyone.
Whether in tribes or small villages where everyone lived for their entire lives, everyone eventually knew almost everything worth knowing about everyone else.
Even the nobles gave up their secrets to the servants.
I'm in a mood, so I'll address your questions.
A) I don't think that's significant. What's key is that the reading is reduced to detecting one of two predefined and premeasured states.
B) Of course intentions are in some sense distinct from us and stored somewhere. They are little different than memories, just future oriented instead of past oriented. If one takes a functionalist view of the brain and sentience (as these researchers do), then every bit of information one knows in any way is "stored somewhere", i.e. has a physical manifestation. From a materialist point of view, where else can it be?
C) It's mind reading in the same sense Saddam Hussein's last election was voting. What is novel is not that "different mental processes may have different physical manifestations in the brain", but that these physical manifestations can be detected and distinguished. And hey -- if you accept physical manifestation for mental processes, what's the problem with (B)?
[I]sn't the whole message here that our intentions are corporeal things that exist independently of us and over which we may have limited control or awareness of?
No, it's that our intentions are carried out in a chemical and bio-mechanical fashion, in a process that we have no conscious awareness of, but the direction of which is normally totally under our control.
It's as if we learned to operate alien fly-by-wire craft that we'd found. We can control them, but we don't know how they're doing what we're directing them to do.
But by studying the central processor, we've noticed that every time the craft is directed to speed up or slow down, a discrete and indentifiable signal is generated, so that simply by observing for those signals, we can now tell whether the craft operator is wanting to speed up or slow down, without directly observing the operator.
But the signal is not independent of the intention, and by "where the brain stores these intentions", they mean "what area of the brain is activated until you complete the task".
-- I accept there are physical manifestations when someone scares the life out of me, but I wouldn't say I am "storing" my fright somewhere --
There is no difference between a "physical manifestation" and "storing" the fright. These are synonymous terms in this context.
In materialists terms, the fact that you are frightened is information that exists and this is definitionally the same as the information being stored somewhere, somehow.
I am not sure what you mean by "separate from us". As Oro points about, data in computer memory is separate from the CPU in a technical sense, but from the outside it's all "in the box".
SH/Oro:
It wasn't so long ago that we used to analogize the human body to the automobile. Food was "fuel" and we recommeneded annual visits to the doctor as "tune-ups". Now we seem to be awash in computer and software analogies. Why do we do this?
I guess it must be because we are hardwired that way.
Uh, because we're analogizing the human mind and not the body in this case?
In any event, metaphors are part the language and therefore as long as we use natural language, we will use the metaphors of that language. As the language changes, the metaphors used change. But you really don't want to get me started on that, as a big part of my doctoral thesis was on the subject and you'd be clawing your eyes out long before I finished.
SH:
Umm, I don't suppose you ever bothered to write a two-page executive summary, did you?
You'll have to go easy, SH: Peter is still firmly behind the theory that the brain is an organ for cooling the blood.
Ha. The thing was 600 pages. But executive summary, hmmm.
"Design support systems must be based in an understanding of how people do design, which is at its root a linguistic activity. This is especially true in groups. Only by acquiring a deep knowledge of language and its use can we build systems that can truly support collaborative design activity".
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