The "Thought Police" may come soon....

www.wired.com...


Although initially it may be used for passwords and the like, the government wont be too far behind on this bandwagon.

YOUR THOUGHTS ARE YOUR PASSWORDS

What if you could one day unlock your door or access your bank account by simply "thinking" your password? Too far out? Perhaps not.

Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, are exploring the possibility of a biometric security device that will use a person's thoughts to authenticate her or his identity.

Their idea of utilizing brain-wave signatures as "pass-thoughts" is based on the premise that brain waves are unique to each individual.

Very interesting. Looks like Orwell's 1984 is materializing sooner than we all expected.

What do you think about this? I think its scarey as all get out.

I would be interested to see the computer 'interface' used to translate those electrical signals from thoughts to actual words that could be either written or spoken by a computer program.

I seriously doubt that there would be anything remotely close to a 'thought police'
in any century soon.

It looks like this system described works on the premiss that each person has an underlying SPECIFIC EEG Much like fingerprints are used to open locks.

"""Though the basic EEG pattern remains a standard one from person to person, each individual has his own unique EEG pattern. The same individual given two separate EEG tests weeks or months apart will generate the same alpha wave pattern, assuming the conditions of the tests are the same. Identical twins will both have the same pattern. One twin will virtually match the second twin to the extent that the two tracings appear to be from the same individual on two separate occasions."""

From:

www.bookrags.com...

I'm thinking about what I think about this.... anybody picking up on that???

Yes, and shame on you! This is worthy of posting because technologically we are making huge advances and it wont be much longer before they're trying out the "Thought machine" at airports.

amazing...

i guess we will have to see this in action before we can assume the "thought police" may come to power...

The technology exists, so it wont be long.

I also foresee a monitor in each home giving us orders.


Watching our every move- Wouldn t this be something

[edit on 29-4-2006 by dgtempe]

From the source (last paragraph)

Iead Rezek, of the Pattern Analysis Research Group at the University of Oxford, says the proposal has "flair," but is impractical: Too many things are going on in the brain at the cellular level that all look the same from a scalp distance. "Signals from an uncountable number of nerve cells are smeared and lumped together by the time we are recording the brain-wave patterns," says Rezek. "Authentication is akin to recognizing speakers from muffled voices because, for example, the speakers are some distance away."

Interesting story, but I highly doubt this will ever be put into use. Just in case I have my tinfoil hat on stand by, it's full proof

Sporty

hmmmm sounds interesting.

Very Orwellian and big-brotherish

Kind of reminds me of the plane from the movie Firefox.