<http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7304>
The article describes new inroads into electronically sensing what human brains are perceiving. There's quite a lot of sensationalistic language to it, and not much substance IMO, but there are a couple of interesting passages to me:
"The pair showed patterns of parallel lines in 1 of 8 orientations to four volunteers. By focussing on brain regions involved in visual perception they were able to recognise which orientation the subjects were observing.
"Each line orientation corresponded to a different pattern of brain activity, although the patterns were different in each person."
...and:
"More subtle forms of mind-reading such as working out intentions or beliefs are much more speculative, she argues. Even if such subtle information could be gleaned from brain scans both studies suggest the patterns are unique to individuals."
This intrigues me because of something in my WIP, _The Seven-Year Mirror_ -- one of the subplots involves using schizophrenics as information couriers. The reason is pretty simple. In the 2K+ -year-distant future there's a sophisticated machine called "Rosetta" that can read thoughts. What it does is flash a long series of (essentially) test patterns at a subject, including sensations, aromas and flavors, and the subject's responses are charted and mapped to a general consciousness model. When enough data points are in place, that subject's conscious mind becomes more or less transparent to Rosetta, and whenever s/he has a conscious thought it appears in a visualization device.
The idea is that schizophrenics, whose brain chemistry and structure are at variant from the norm, can't be read in Rosetta, which makes them essentially totally secure couriers of information. (The details of embedding the information and wiping it are also covered in the story.)
What's funny about this is that I came at it from a totally different angle than the biological; I was looking at it as a simple cryptographic problem, just noodling a couple years back with a few random concepts. If we all have more or less the same *basic* idea of what a cat is, and furthermore how it's different from a dog, then it seems to me the only *real* organic difference in how those thoughts are held has to do with individual neural layout, since of course brain structures are not identical.
However, they might well be very *isomorphic*, which got me wondering whether it wasn't possible to, in essence, compare enough scrambled signals against a baseline, thereby getting an idea of what ... well, what a given idea was someone was holding. Which meant, to me, that with enough data points and a large enough neural mapping database, pretty much anyone's thought patterns could be mapped, though not with 100% accuracy or clarity. At least not yet.
So what would be the way to prevent that mapping from working? It seemed obvious to me: A one-time pad. One-time pads are used to scramble a coded message and are then discarded (hence their name); with a genuine one-time pad encryption, a message is irretrievably obfuscated. The only way to decrypt it is with a key, and if that key is lost, so it the message, forever. This is because with a real one-time pad any single character in the message could be replaced by any other character. A note the length of this one would probably never be deciphered, even if the universe lasts another fifty or so billion years and there was an infinite number of compute cycles to commit to its cracking.
So the more I thought about that, the more it seemed that only people with actual organic abnormalities might be possessed of a different enough neural map that a Rosetta device couldn't "read" them. They'd have to be conscious, capable of more or less high function, but also organically variant. That pointed to schizophrenia.
The tragedy of it, of course, is that in such a future it's in government and corporate interests *not* to treat or cure schizophrenia. I love it when dilemmas like that get dropped in my lap; they really punch up a story.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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