Saturday, December 13, 2008

FutureWatch - Eavesdropping's Future, Mindreading

Researchers at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, say they've developed new analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person's brain and display them on a computer screen, according to Pink Tentacle, an English-language blog that covers news from Japan. Pink Tentacle picked up the info from Japan's Chunichi Shimbun daily newspaper...

Although the technology is still in the early phases of development, it paves the way for applications that until now have only been the stuff of science fiction, such as reading minds for interrogation purposes, eavesdropping on dreams as people snooze... And researchers at the University of Sheffield in England believe that fMRI is more useful than polygraphs, which have been shown to have false positives and negatives, in determining whether someone is lying. (more)