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Originally posted by Vector A I am not quite sure what to make of this. Were the researchers doing something like this?: (1) Scan each person's brain as they look at certain things, creating a "roster" of scans for that individual. Then try to match up one of the initial scans with a later scan of that same individual and use that to "guess" what that particular person is seeing. Or more like this?: (2) Scan all the people's brains as they look at certain things. Use the collection of scans to make generalizations about which parts of the brain are activated by which objects. Then use those generalizations to guess what any individual is seeing (i.e. you need not know the person's identity to guess accurately). The second seems more impressive, and more ominous, to me, while the first seems like more ordinary, incremental improvement of brain scanning techniques.

(2) is more likely. it would only work for a very specific group of individuals though. the parts of the brain that are activated by perceiving objects change depending on the status of that object. here's an example: i can't remember her named and am arsed to look it up, but there is a chess grandmaster living in the czech republic who participating in a series of brain scans to see how it is that she was so good at the game. the section of her brain that normally identifies faces in other individuals now activates when she is looking at a chessboard, so that a given configuration is registered like a "face".

it would be really likely that this kind of thing only works if your sample of subjects are people similar to each other in most respects, including emotional response, level of education, political views, etc. if you start including a wide variety of individuals, the results are going to get fucked. however, what would be really fucked/ominous is if this was (1) true across the board for almost all individual, so maybe 80% of brain function always correlates; or (2) they could predict a quotient of neuroplasticity, including which other parts of the brain could be activated instead.

either way, fucked. but also largely pointless. what are they gonna do if they scan for "resentment" and "murderous impulses" and come up positive? jail you? fuck that. gonna be jailing the entire population.

what if they scan for "love" and come up positive? they gonna be a match-making service?