By snoadmin
Picture yourself walking into your biology class and the professor scanning the bar code on your neck to find out if you plagiarized the paper you just wrote. Or a campus cop lights up your eyes with his handheld magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device to see if you’re lying about jaywalking.
It might seem like a stretch of the sci-fi imagination to believe that government agencies and law enforcement will eventually be able to read our minds and use our illicit thoughts to send us to prison, or worse. We’re not really too far from that futuristic possibility.
Frankly, a court in India has already decided the future is now.
Judges in India have been allowing brain scans as evidence in criminal proceedings for years. One court sentenced a woman to life in prison in June for poisoning her ex-fiance to death with arsenic, based almost solely on a newer version of a lie detector.
Science has been searching for decades for an effective way to weed out liars in our midst. Methods have included firing infrared rays into suspects’ heads, scanning potential fibbers’ eyeballs while they’re hooked up to a giant MRI and “truth” drugs. Unsavory modern techniques — not to piss off U.S. terrorist hunters in Guantanamo — include waterboarding and other forms of “acceptable” torture.
While U.S. courts have long held that lie detectors are not reliable and, therefore, inadmissible as evidence, it doesn’t mean that government agents don’t want to use them for interrogations.
The way the machine in India works, according to The New York Times, is that a suspect has electrodes hooked to his/her head to measure electrical activity. The suspect sits quietly as an interrogator reads the list of crime details.
The captured brain images are then fed through special software, which decodes the suspects’ memories and — abracadabra; you’ve nabbed yourself a crook.
This type of technology would mean we’re not too remote from the possibilities framed in the 2002 Steven Spielberg film “Minority Report,” in which people can be sentenced to isolation in giant test tubes for the “future crime” of simply thinking about axing their boss or wayward significant other.
Some scientists in the global arena are hailing the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test as a discovery as remarkable as sliced bread, the wheel and DNA, even though it hasn’t been examined outside of India’s psychological and judicial communities.
Others, like Stanford Law School bioethicist Henry T. Greely, rightfully are suspicious and cautious about such findings and consequential legal verdicts. As Greely told The N.Y. Times, “[w]e need to demand the highest standards of proof before we ruin people’s lives based on its application.”
Outside of the legal ramifications, think of the other beneficial uses this technology could produce. Students could abandon using scantrons for academic tests. They would simply show up to a pre-designated test site, get wired by a professor in a lab coat and have the test questions read to them.
A BEOS machine would spew out a ticker tape and, voilà, no delay for test results. A Cal State Long Beach student could see a pass or fail instantly, rather than waiting for grades to be posted on MyCSULB or Beachboard.
Although revelation is a mainstay of the Daily Forty-Niner, please don’t tell us your thoughts on this topic — insert “Twilight Zone” theme here — because we’ll find out soon enough, whether you want us to or not.
