The answer to that may soon be an unqualified yes. Imagine a world where everyone can see through every white lie. Where bluffing is impossible. Where the intentions of terrorists or unscrupulous car sales men can be known immediately.
60 Minutes ran a story on research being done on applying MRI imaging technology to the question of reading our thoughts. The long and short of it is, they already can on a rudimentary level. Show a person a picture of a hammer...and the computer can tell. It turns out that we all use similar parts of the brain, to think about the same objects. Reporter Leslie Stahl and 60 Minutes assc. producer Meghan Frank put the concept up to the test.
"You know, every time I walk into that scanner room and I see the person's brain appear on the screen, when I see those patterns, it is just incredible, unthinkable," neuroscientist Marcel Just told Stahl.
He calls it "thought identification."
Whatever you want to call it, what Just and his colleague Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon University have done is combine fMRI's ability to look at the brain in action with computer science's new power to sort through massive amounts of data. The goal: to see if they could identify exactly what happens in the brain when people think specific thoughts.
They did an experiment where they asked subjects to think about ten objects - five of them tools like screwdriver and hammer, and five of them dwellings, like igloo and castle. They then recorded and analyzed the activity in the subjects' brains for each.
"The computer found the place in the brain where that person was thinking 'screwdriver'?" Stahl asked.
"Screwdriver isn't one place in the brain. It's many places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like, what you use it for," Just explained.
He told Stahl each of those functions are in different places.
When we think "screwdriver" or "igloo" for example, Just says neurons start firing at varying levels of intensity in different areas throughout the brain. "And we found that we could identify which object they were thinking about from their brain activation patterns," he said.
"We're identifying the thought that's occurring. It's…incredible, just incredible," he added.
"Are you saying that if you think of a hammer, that your brain is identical to my brain when I think of a hammer?" Stahl asked.
"Not identical. We have idiosyncrasies. Maybe I've had a bad experience with a hammer and you haven't, but it's close enough to identify each other's thoughts. So, you know, that was never known before," Just explained.
60 Minutes asked if his team was up for a challenge: would they take associate producer Meghan Frank, whose brain had never been scanned before, and see if the computer could identify her thoughts? Just and Mitchell agreed to give it a try and see if they could do it in almost real time.
Just said nobody had ever done an instant analysis like this.
Inside the scanner, Meghan was shown a series of ten items and asked to think for a few seconds about each one.
"If it all comes out right, when she's thinking 'hammer,' the computer will know she's thinking 'hammer'?" Stahl asked.
"Right," Mitchell replied.
Within minutes, the computer, unaware of what pictures Meghan had been shown and working only from her brain activity patterns as read out by the scanner, was ready to tell us, in its own voice, what it believed was the first object Meghan had been thinking about.
The computer correctly analyzed the first three words - knife, hammer, and window, and aced the rest as well.
According to Just, this is just the beginning.
Another thing researchers have learned, is to tell if a person is familiar with a certain environment or set of circumstances. For instance it can tell from scanning your brain, whether or not you have seen a particular scene in your past or not.
In the meantime, Haynes is working on something he thinks may be even more effective: reading out from your brain exactly where you've been. Haynes showed Stahl an experiment he created out of a video game.
He had Stahl navigate through a series of rooms in different virtual reality houses.
"Now I would put you in a scanner and I would show you some of these scenes that you've seen and some scenes that you haven't seen," he told her.
Stahl recognized the bar. "And right at this moment, we would be able to tell from your brain activity that you've already seen this environment before," Haynes explained.
Not only is the ability to interpret thoughts by scanning the brain, but the other side of the problem, i.e. remote scanning of people's thoughts, is getting closer as well.
For now, it's impossible to force someone to have his or her brain scanned, because the subject has to lie still and cooperate, but that could change.
"There are some other technologies that are being developed that may be able to be used covertly and even remotely. So, for example, they're trying to develop now a beam of light that would be projected onto your forehead. It would go a couple of millimeters into your frontal cortex, and then receptors would get the reflection of that light. And there's some studies that suggest that we could use that as a lie detection device," Wolpe said.
He said we wouldn't know if our brains were being scanned. "If you were sitting there in the airport and being questioned, they could beam that on your forehead without your knowledge. We can't do that yet, but they're working on it."
I seem to remember that Microsoft has also been developing remote sensing software for computers and cell phones which can determine the emotional state of a user, and use that information to determine whether to offer assistance to users displaying frustration or anger. It doesn't take much imagination to make the leap from a cell phone reading emotions to a cell phone which acts as a hand held lie detector.
There is an interesting book, by the name of The Truth Machine by James Halperin which explores a world where reading the intentions of others becomes ubiquitous through out human society, world wide. The premise of the book being that this technology is an absolute requirement in a world where an individual or small group has the ability to inflict great harm. In short, in his story, the technology is used by individuals and institutions alike to determine the honesty and intentions of people, having a transformational impact on human behavior.
Good or Bad, this technology is coming like a freight train. Will it be the transformational force laid out by Halperin? Or will it lead to a security state more insidious than even Orwell or Stalin could have imagined? I guess we'll see.
