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Brain scanning has advanced to the point where not only can it identify where certain thoughts take place within the brain, it can now identify the very content of those thoughts.

German researchers led by Dr. John-Dylan Haynes have found that MRI machines can be used to learn a subject’s intentions before they become actions, which may interesting repercussions in crime prevention, law enforcement, criminal interrogation, and will also pose interesting issues regarding civil rights.

The researchers at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience said they have learned to identify people’s intentions about future higher-level actions, such as subtracting or adding, within the brain before they occur.

In the German laboratory, volunteers are placed in MRI machines and asked to decide something, such as which of two buttons to press, or whether to add or subtract two numbers.

Meanwhile, scientists in another room are looking at what’s going on in the brain and using the MRI information to figure out what the volunteer intends to do before it is done.

Potential

MRI machines have long been used to identify brain activity of many different types. United States scientists have recently developed a brain scan designed to detect lying.

But many experts consider the new research groundbreaking. “The fact that we can determine what intention a person is holding in their mind pushes the level of our understanding of subjective thought to a whole new level of our understanding of subjective thought to a whole new level,” said professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Dr. Paul Wolpe.

“Haynes’ experiment strikes at the heart of how good we will get at predicting behaviors,” said associate professor of psychology at Washington University, Dr. Todd Braver.

“The barriers we assumed existed in reading our minds keep getting breached.”

Scientists are making enough progress in the area to give ethicists something to be nervous about. But these developments have practical, benign applications as well, Haynes notes. He cites that the technology could be used to help paralyzed people change TV channels operate robotic devices, or surf the Internet.

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