Page - 78 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

78 • Cyborg Mind implanted electrodes in the spine of an individual to create electrical pulses which initiate waves of pleasure signals whenever the person decides.143 Brain Decoding: Reading Minds Neurological science has not yet reached the stage when the mental state of a person can be read, especially when the person being examined may want to conceal his or her thoughts. But research is now taking place in which computers are beginning to decode a person’s thought patterns. Nevertheless, these are very crude experiments with only some elements, such as the images viewed by participants, being recognised by researchers. Such programmes need quite a lot of ‘training’ to recognise brain activity initiated by a range of images or film clips. In addition, a number of research teams around the world are similarly trying to analyse brain scans in order to determine what people are hearing and feeling, as well as what they remember or even the topic of their dreams.144 Such brain decoding began when neuroscientists realised that they could use a lot more of the information they were obtaining from brain scans using fMRI. To do this, scientists divided the three-dimensional brain into voxels (the equivalent of pixels with images) and examined which voxels responded, and in what manner, to a certain stimulus, such as looking at a face.145 As a result, studies indicate that the responses do not just take place in one specific area of the brain, but in a much more distributive manner. Once the com- puter has ‘learnt’ to recognise these brain responses, it can then be used to predict which pictures are associated with which brain responses. In some of the first studies, researchers were able to identify categories of objects when examining the brain scans of participants looking at objects such as scissors, bottles and shoes.146 It was then possible, in 2008, to develop a decoder that could identify which of 120 pictures a subject was viewing.147 In 2013, other researchers published an attempt at dream decoding. This enabled them to predict, with 60 per cent accuracy, what categories of objects, such as cars, text, men or women, featured in the dreams of the persons taking part in the experiment who were woken up periodically and asked if they could remember what they had dreamt about.148 Yet many challenges remain. For example, it is difficult to associate the spe- cific patterns experienced by an individual with the general results obtained from a whole group of persons.149 But such problems have not discouraged certain companies from trying to use technology, such as neuroimaging, to develop lie detector tests. These would be used to check the truth of a certain statement, the reliability of memories or even any bias in a judge or members of a jury. Such ‘brain reading’, if it proved successful, would create a number of significant ethical challenges with respect to privacy and whether a person’s This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.