Big Brother Brain Scanners To Detect Pre-Crime

G'day all,

Just came across the folowing article from Alex Jone's Website which I thought you may find both infomative and alarming aswell. It is a scary thought that our governments dont trust their own citizens so much that they wish to control and monitor all aspects of their life and now all aspect of their possible future too.

www.infowars.net...

The technology is no longer science fiction. A team of neuroscientists has developed technology that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.

During tests, researchers were able to successfully predict the intentions of multiple subjects with 70% accuracy by scanning their brains using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance.

The study revealed signatures of activity in a small part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that changed when a person took a choice to do something before carrying out the action.

The researchers are already devising ways of deducing what patterns are associated with different thoughts.

According to the Guardian report, Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, said: "We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions.

"We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence." Professor Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany told the Guardian.

Last month we also reported on documents leaked from the Home Office in London revealing that the government is looking into using X-ray technology cameras by concealing them in lamp posts to "trap terror suspects".

This all getting out of hand, we are all frogs in the pot of water and the tempriture is going up slowly, and we are not realising that we heading towards boiling point!

fMRI will replace the unreliable autonomic system-based lie detectors very soon.

Although the study showed that fMRI can differentiate between a person's intention to add or subtract numbers, it is a bit more of a stretch to apply such technology to actually forecasting long-term complex behaviour. Even now, 70% accuracy would not be useful for real-world applications. The way fMRI works, by mapping a participants BOLD response onto a reference brain-map is not ideal for such important uses.

If it can be applied at 95+% accuracy rates, it will be very useful for criminal cases in the near future. If it helps save innocent people from spending years in prison (or the death penalty in some places), it will be a good technology.

These studies have nothing to do with government conspiracies to control the populace, it's just science in progress. The mPFC is a current area of study in social and affective neuroscience and is implicated in social cognition. Interesting to see it showing up in a less social process.

cheers for the heads-up.

ABE: Here's a another view of where these findings could lead...

www.livescience.com...



[edit on 9-2-2007 by melatonin]

and for those who might think that wearing tinfoils can prevent the govt from doing what they want with you, think again:

The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ''radio location'' (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations.

It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

MIT Link

[edit on 10-2-2007 by toreishi]

Dear Lord!
If they scan me on the wrong day it could be bad, but what about if they scan my wife during a certain few days of the month when she seems to hate the whole world? Couldnt they turn up a false positive?

I tell you one thing for sure, and maybe this is the rum talkin', but if they ever use one of these things on me and accuse me of 'thought crimes', I will probably fly into a rage and smash their silly machine.
Atleast then they would have to buy another machine before they can use it on my children!

heheh, can't see a MRI scanner being applied as easily as radio-location, they cost around $2 million and use ideally a 3Tesla liquid helium-cooled superconducting electromagnet.

Here's the original study abstract from 'Current Biology' if anyone is interested:

Report
Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain

John-Dylan Haynes1, 2, 3, 4, 5, , , Katsuyuki Sakai6, Geraint Rees4, 5, Sam Gilbert4, Chris Frith5 and Richard E. Passingham5, 7

1Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
2Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, 10115 Berlin, Germany
3Charité – Universitätsmedizin, 10115 Berlin, Germany
4Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, WC1N 3AR London, United Kingdom
5Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, WC1N 3BG London, United Kingdom
6Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
7Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, OX1 3UD Oxford, United Kingdom

Received 11 September 2006; revised 24 November 2006; accepted 27 November 2006. Published online: February 8, 2007. Available online 8 February 2007.

Summary
When humans are engaged in goal-related processing, activity in prefrontal cortex is increased [1 and 2]. However, it has remained unclear whether this prefrontal activity encodes a subject's current intention [3]. Instead, increased levels of activity could reflect preparation of motor responses [4 and 5], holding in mind a set of potential choices [6], tracking the memory of previous responses [7], or general processes related to establishing a new task set. Here we study subjects who freely decided which of two tasks to perform and covertly held onto an intention during a variable delay. Only after this delay did they perform the chosen task and indicate which task they had prepared. We demonstrate that during the delay, it is possible to decode from activity in medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex which of two tasks the subjects were covertly intending to perform. This suggests that covert goals can be represented by distributed patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby providing a potential neural substrate for prospective memory 8, 9 and 10. During task execution, most information could be decoded from a more posterior region of prefrontal cortex, suggesting that different brain regions encode goals during task preparation and task execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust from the medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with a specific role of this region when subjects reflect on their own mental states.

This was a very revealing story, similar to how Anna Nicole Smith's blatant OD was immediately spun into an international conspiracy. It was less than a week ago that the actual source story for this came out -- a discovery by John-Dylan Haynes, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

Original link:
www.physorg.com...

It took less than 24 hours for that to become "Big Brother's New Nightmare Device for Thought Control in a Police State". I'm not denying that potential is there, but making that distant possibility into the core of the story is dishonest and just petty alarmism.

Even if -- and again, it's a probable if -- the technology is fashioned into a brain reading Pre-Crime device, that's still many years away. Even with Moore's Law taken into account, it's gonna be years of R&D followed by an equal period of design work, investment and marketing.

As usual, our biggest source of fear is ourselves.

[edit on 10-2-2007 by Thirtyseven]

technology is old, already being used. i know of someone in 1992 this was used on, and he is well known that this was used on him(before anyone says its not true). i am talking about uk here.

from that i can say, the accuracy is rubbish. at the end of the day humans have these technologies and if the humans using these things are stupid, the technology is useless.

and no there is no protection, they have had this technology back in 1992, imagine what they have today.

a good film to watch on this is control factor, though the only thing wrong with that film is there is no such thing as protection against these technologies(i.e in the film they use a copper mesh wire, this is just hollywood). there is no protection. just watch the film and see what they had back in the times of the la riots, this is what is projected in the film.

[edit on 2/10/2007 by andy1033]

The company "No Lie MRI" of Tarzana, California uses fMRI to provide a commercially available lie detector... hardly stealing thoughts but certainly linked

The microphone equipped security camera suddenly blares, "HALT! Citizen #123 initial brain scans detect a hightened state of aggression. Futher analysis of your implant indicates you are in violation of Civil Code #6789. You have just committed a Thought-Crime! Do not move! Noncompliance will result in an automated response. A task-force is enroute to escort you to the Ministry of Love & Truth for processing. Have a nice day..."

Sorry to expose you to that - I have a vivid mind.

Take a deep breath and relax. Listen to some calming music...It works.


[edit on 2/15/07 by Calm Anomaly]

This is pretty creepy if you ask me.

Ill bet within 20 years we have some sort of Minority Report pre-crime division within the big brother establishment that has been erected.

They have said that the technology is currently about 70%reliable, and too bulky, but with the thought around this already blossoming, it is almost inevitable that smaller, more precise equipment is right around the corner.

The people need to create a law which would stop this kind of technology from ever being used. It’s clearly oppressive. The scientists who are delving into this kind of research and their backers are the ones that should be locked up.



[edit on 20-2-2007 by kode]

[edit on 20-2-2007 by kode]

I'm not actually going to be the first person to mention Minority Report am I?

There are some serious ethical issues with crime prediction. What if telling the person that is about to commit murder that he will do it will in fact stop him from doing so or ever even desiring to do so?

have have a LOT to learn about the human mind still.

EDIT: Bah I got beat to the Minority Report reference 2 posts earlier

[edit on 22-2-2007 by Vanhandle]