Mind Reading? Get Real

Last month, I wrote this lengthy article in the Washington Post Magazine about a group of people who believes the government is controlling their mind. Frankly, I was more interested in understanding *why *they believed in mind control than in trying to prove -- as some would have preferred -- that these folks are all mentally ill.

One of the reasons that people believe in mind control is, well, because of so many over-hyped claims that science has already learned how to tap the deep crevices of our mind.

The latest example comes from the Max Planck Society in Germany, which recently became the latest bold entrant into the world of brain reading. Researchers there claimed they were able to spot brain patterns that indicate intent.

Naturally, this announcement resulted in a bunch of breathlessly enthusiastic articles about the advent of mind reading. The society clearly fanned this enthusiasm with their own statement about the work: "For the first time they were able to "read" participants' intentions out of their brain activity. This was made possible by a new combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and sophisticated computer algorithms (Current Biology, 20th February 2007, online: 8th February).

My take: These guys may have made some really interesting advances in neuroscience, but they probably watched the film Minority Report
one too many times and came up one ball short. If you saw the movie
(back when Tom Cruise had a movie career), you'll remember that a trio of bald soothsayers soaked in a wading pool, while Tom Cruise waived his hands around. The idea was to pinpoint future murders, thus preventing them from ever taking place. The soothsayers communicated through colored balls engraved with the murder victim's name. It's a fun film, as long as you remember the "fiction" part of science fiction.

Here's how the institute explained its technique:

*Our secret intentions remain concealed until we put them into action - so we believe. Now researchers have been able to decode these secret intentions from patterns of their brain activity.
They let subjects freely and covertly choose between two possible tasks
- to either add or subtract two numbers. They were then asked to hold in mind their intention for a while until the relevant numbers were presented on a screen. The researchers were able to recognize the subjects intentions with 70% accuracy based alone on their brain activity - even before the participants had seen the numbers and had started to perform the calculation...
*

The work... goes far beyond simply confirming previous theories. It has never before been possible to read out of brain activity how a person has decided to act in the future. The trick by which the invisible is made visible lies in a new method called
"multivariate pattern recognition". A computer is programmed to recognize characteristic activation patterns in the brain that typically occur in association with specific thoughts. Once this computer has been "trained" it can be used to predict the decisions of subjects from their brain activity alone. An important technical innovation also lies in combining information across extended regions of the brain to strongly increase sensitivity.

Why do I find this all a bit dubious? Because brain researchers, by all accounts, are many years away from understanding the very complex brain processes that are truly linked to intent, future action, and every-day thought. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, is useful for monitoring brain activity, but claims of clear links to specific intentions is somewhat dubious. As one astute Navy scientist told me last year: "People find the pictures of brain activity exciting. They think they are more exciting than they are. Because it's visual, they think it's reality. There's a tremendous amount of inference."

In fact, I wrote a bit about "mind reading" in this month's issue of Defense Technology International, in an article called "Bad Intentions." In that case, some ambitious researchers attempted to use infrared imaging to detect small heat changes in a person's face, hoping to correlate those changes with deception. Several firms were awarded Navy small business contracts for work in this area. A novel idea that, if it worked, would open the field to mass scanning devices at airport and border crossings.

The two companies I interviewed -- Technest Holdings and Barron Associates
-- were very good firms and employed smart researchers who were honest about their results. Detecting a specific intent, they acknowledged, was pretty darn difficult, and not really feasible using infrared imaging (though they still clung to hope that heat could correlate to mood changes). But mind reading? No way. You have to wonder about the military folks who thought this was a nifty idea in the first place.

Even the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a place known for harboring some of its own far-fetched ideas, was unusually pessimistic about this heat-seeking approach. The agency told me:

However, in general the use of fNIR
[functional near infrared imaging] to detect specific cognitive states such as intent to deceive does not appear practical as a wide-scale screening tool. First it would require a large experimental program to connect the fNIR output to the cognitive state over a wide range of people and it is entirely possible that such a correlation does not exist. Second, even if there were such a universal correlation, it is likely to be badly confounded by trained countermeasures. Finally, eye safety and the high levels of IR light found in even a normally lighted room make it impractical to do fNIR remotely. DARPA is not pursuing this technology for stand-off detection or contact detection of complex mental states.

Of course, DARPA's talking here just about infrared imaging, and not fMRI, which I suspect is of greater interest to the agency. But even then, the issues are somewhat similar: consistent correlations across a wide population; possible countermeasures; and the general ability to match up brain patterns with specific intent.

Final thoughts: for the time being, I'm guessing a good psychic has about the same chance at "mind reading" as scientists.

-- Sharon Weinberger

UPDATE: Noah here. Darpa may not like the infrared imagining. But the agency hasn't totally given up on the mind-reading game, however. More to come, soon.