Chantel Prat is cited in this Scientific American article about mind reading and mind control technologies
Mind Reading and Mind Control Technologies Are Coming
We need to figure out the ethical implications before they arrive
By R. Douglas Fields on March 10, 2020
The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways. Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing this threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us.
MIND READING
The ability to interrogate and manipulate electrical activity in the human brain promises to do for the brain what biochemistry did for the body. When you go to the doctor, a chemical analysis of your blood is used to detect your body’s health and potential disease. Forewarned that your cholesterol level is high, and you are at risk of having a stroke, you can take action to avoid suffering one. Likewise, in experimental research destined to soon enter medical practice, just a few minutes of monitoring electrical activity in your brain using EEG and other methods can reveal not only neurological illness but also mental conditions like ADHD and schizophrenia. What’s more, five minutes of monitoring electrical activity flowing through your brain, while you do nothing but let your mind wander, can reveal how your individual brain is wired.
Tapping into your wandering mind can measure your IQ, identify your cognitive strengths and weaknesses, perceive your personality and determine your aptitude for learning specific types of information. Electrical activity in a preschooler’s brain be used to can predict, for example, how well that child will be able to read when they go to school. As I recount in my new book, Electric Brain (BenBella, 2020), after having brainwaves in my idling mind recorded using EEG for only five minutes, neuropsychologist Chantel Prat at the University of Washington, in Seattle, pronounced that learning a foreign language would be difficult for me because of weak beta waves in a particular part of my cerebral cortex processing language. (Don’t ask me to speak German or Spanish, languages that I studied but never mastered.) How will this ability to know a person’s mind change education and career choices?
Neuroscientist Marcel Just and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University are using fMRI brain imaging to decipher what a person is thinking. By using machine learning to analyze complex patterns of activity in a person’s brain when they think of a specific number or object, read a sentence, experience a particular emotion or learn a new type of information, the researchers can read minds and know the person’s specific thoughts and emotions. “Nothing is more private than a thought,” Just says, but that privacy is no longer sacrosanct.
Read the entire article here.