Since reading James Halprin's The Truth Machine in late 1998 I have been looking for technology like this to come on the scene. The argument laid out in Halprin's book, that mankind's future in a world where technology increasingly leverages the power of the few or the one to cause damage or death to an ever larger number of people, is going to be dependent upon the development of technologies which can to all intent and purposes read peoples minds to determine whether the person has intentions to cause harm to others.
Naturereports that the Department of Homeland Security has been conducting tests of Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) over the past few months in northeastern states. The technology is designed to identify individuals who intend to commit a terrorist act using public transportation.
Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person's gaze, to judge a subject's state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.
The technology is hardly fool proof. DHS claims a 70% success rate in it's tests, which of course means that 30% of the simulated perpetrators got through the system. The concept has received a great deal of criticism, with critics pointing out that there are a number of aspects of traveling on public transportation which can cause a persons heart rate to rise or have other physiological responses. Nature reports the response of one critic:
Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, a think-tank based in Washington DC that promotes the use of science in policy-making, is pessimistic about the FAST tests. He thinks that they will produce a large proportion of false positives, frequently tagging innocent people as potential terrorists and making the system unworkable in a busy airport. "I believe that the premise of this approach — that there is an identifiable physiological signature uniquely associated with malicious intent — is mistaken. To my knowledge, it has not been demonstrated," he says. "Without it, the whole thing seems like a charade."
I think we will see technologies with this goal continue to be developed and to quickly get better over time. Technologies like this represent a double edged sword to our traditional understanding of liberty, and brings up basic issues like the question of individual privacy vs public safety which will be difficult to resolve. What does privacy mean when, in the near future, the government has the right to read your mind whenever you get on an airplane?
Check out The Truth Machine. It is an interesting read.
One of the rss feeds I make sure I glance at daily, is the news feed from inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil's website KurzweilAI.net. That website does a good job of pulling together tech and science news related to the exponential acceleration of technology the human race is experiencing. He featured two news articles on advancements in mind reading which caught my attention in today's rss feed. I've touched on mind reading and advancements in brain scanning and modeling algorithms which are increasingly effective at reading the mind's memory content and predicting future intentions in an earlier post on The Common Green American. Today's two stories show the rapid advancement's which have taken place in the relatively few months that have passed since then.
okia claims the ThinkContacts app it’s developing for Nokia N900’s Maemo platform allows a “motor disabled person to make a phone call to a desired contact by himself/herself,” using brainwaves.
According to Nokia, a headset reads the user’s brainwaves, which are digitized and sent via Bluetooth to the phone, where the data is translated into the user’s “level of meditation” and “attention” for navigating between contacts and selecting one to call.
One of the main threads of the near future that I'm looking for will be the overnight adoption of various communication and information technologies which make use of brain scan technology as the interface. This looks like it's very close to being a precursor to just that sort of technology. Expect to see it coming soon to a teenager near you.
The second story of interest from the field of neuromarketing is a bit more insidious. The NewScientist magazine recruited the help of neuromarketing company, Neurofocus to access the subconscious mind in determining the most effective cover for this months edition.
The science behind this effort is based upon brain-imaging techniques like fMRI, which measures blood flow to determine activity in different regions of the brain and EEG which looks at different brain patterns. One of the determinations they made using this data, is something I learned in my years in autosales..., people are less rational and more emotional in their decision making than traditional economics has suggested.
In a typical test, NeuroFocus wires subjects up to a high-density array of electrodes, which gives coverage of their whole cerebral cortex. They also apply facial sensors to filter out electrical signals generated by muscle movements such as swallowing and blinking. Subjects are then exposed to the test material - TV adverts, movie trailers and so on - and their brain responses recorded. The main things NeuroFocus looks for in the EEG trace is attention, memory activation and emotional engagement. They also use eye-tracking to follow precisely where the subject is looking.
In addition, NeuroFocus looks for specific EEG patterns which the company believes betray whether or not a person will buy a product. In its early days, the company studied thousands of TV commercials looking for characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with successful and unsuccessful ads. It is these they are after. "It's not deterministic, but it gives a relative probability, given two adverts, which is more likely to change behaviour," says Michael Smith of NeuroFocus.
Finally, NeuroFocus does what it calls "deep response testing". This exploits a well-known EEG signal called P300, a spike of brain activity that occurs about 300 milliseconds after you see something new or personally meaningful. "That brain wave is interesting because it's bigger if the stimulus is very salient to you," says Smith. NeuroFocus uses this to find out if test materials have primed people's brains to certain concepts. If the P300 response to a word like "buy" is stronger just after seeing an advert, the researchers conclude that the advert is more likely to elicit a purchase.
Among the things that neuromarketers have learned over recent years is how the brains emotion-related limbic system impacts and overrides rational decision making as it relates to brand loyalty, and that we form long term emotional relationships with brands. This has led to all the feel good marketing meant to sustain those long term emotional ties of recent years.
Another key discovery of neuroeconomics is that certain products trigger activity in brain systems that usually fire in anticipation of rewarding stimuli such as food, sex and addictive drugs. A team at the University of Ulm in Germany found, for example, that pictures of sports cars produced much stronger activity in these reward centres than pictures of other cars, in research funded by DaimlerChrysler (Neuroreport, vol 13, p 2499).
Wanted: reward
Neuroeconomists now think of the amount of activity in these regions as a sort of universal currency of desirability, allowing the brain to weigh up different rewards. "There's a lot of evidence that signals in these regions represent some kind of value," says Berns, "and that makes a lot of sense. We're always trying to make decisions between doing things that have value but are completely different, like going to the movies, going out for dinner or spending time with loved ones."
Findings such as these have encouraged market researchers to believe that they can access the hidden desires and preferences locked away inside consumers' heads. The past few years has seen a steady stream of businesses turning to companies such as NeuroFocus. Want to know if a new car design is pushing the right buttons? See if it revs the reward centres in the brain. Is this advert going to make people love our product? Measure the emotional response it generates.
While the articles conclusions focus on the suggestion that the information derived from today's brain imaging and scanning is of limited use in creating marketing which "forces" people to buy, it think it ignores the reality that brain imaging technology is getting cheaper and better with every machine generation, (which right now is somewhere around 18-24 months) and that as this tech becomes ubiquitous, we may see a day when a company is discreetly scanning prospective customers to help it close a sale.
