Mind Reading MRI Technology

This week on “60 Minutes,” they showed this segment on new brain scan technology, called Functional MRI.  By watching which parts of the brain are active, they are developing new methods of actually reading someone’s mind.

This sort of technology has been in use for a while now, such as knowing which areas of the brain contain speech, memory, etc.  However, this new method can actually start to understand your intentions and emotions.

Some parts of this video amaze me and other parts scare me.  Such as being able to beam a light onto your forehead and read your mind without you even knowing.  Someone questioning you will know if you’re telling the truth, or a store could use that technology to know what you want to buy and how to sell it to you.  What if we could even scan our friends and family to know if they were being honest with us?  Would we even  be able to live our lives normally anymore?

They also say how they can use this to investigate crimes, which could be an incredible way of proving innocence or guilt, but there are still so many ethical questions we need to ask before we could use something like this.

Apparently this technology could be reading our minds within the next few years, so it will be interesting to see what changes this brings about in society.  Big Brother isn’t just using cameras anymore.