| -Caveat Lector-
-----
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 5:06 PM
Subject: Police State America?? "Your brain may soon be used against
you"
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 05:25:55 -0600 (CST)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Philadelphia
Inquirer | 10/29/2002 | Your brain may soon be used against you
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/4391614.htm
Thought
Police
Posted on Tue, Oct. 29, 2002
Your
brain may soon be used against you
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff
Writer
RON CORTES / InquirerRuben Gur, a Penn scientist, says
brain scanners
could be used in criminal interrogations. He says privacy
concerns
should not overshadow potential benefits in understanding better how
the
mind works.
The last refuge of secrets and lies - the brain - may
be about to reveal
all.
Scientists are finding ways to use the brain's
activity to expose truths
a person may try to hide. The techniques could
revolutionize police
work, improve national security, and threaten personal
privacy.
"It's the scariest thing around," said physicist Robert Park,
an
outspoken critic of old-fashioned, unreli! able polygraph machines.
"The only thing worse than a lie detector that doesn't work is one
that
does."
Ruben Gur, a neuropsychologist at the University of
Pennsylvania, says
new kinds of brain scans can reveal when a person
recognizes a familiar
face, no matter how hard he or she tries to conceal
it.
The scanning machine, called a functional MRI, takes pictures
that
highlight specific parts of the brain activated during certain
tasks.
Telltale parts of your brain "light up," he said, when you are
presented
with a face you have seen before.
It is easy to imagine such
scanners being used in interrogation of
criminal suspects or terrorists about
their associates. Gur described
just such possibilities for national security
experts at a recent Penn
workshop.
"Everything we do, and everything
an enemy does, starts in the brain,"
he said at the Penn meeting, sponsored
by the newly formed Institute for
Strategic A! nalysis and Response, which
includes Penn epidemiologists,
germ-warfare specialists, political
scientists, and computer experts.
Such scanning could also be used to
pick up brain abnormalities that he
says characterize those prone to
violence.
Another Penn scientist, Daniel Langleben, has found that a
functional
MRI can act as a lie detector. A handful of other scientists
around the
country are examining ways to read thoughts by examining the
brain.
"In the long term, I think we will have technologies powerful
enough to
understand what people are thinking in ways unimaginable now,"
Langleben
said. "I think in 50 years we will have a way to essentially
read
minds."
He said he was not particularly happy about that. Neither
are others
concerned about the unprecedented threat to humanity's most
private
realm.
Gur acknowledges the concerns about brain scans
eventually revealing
private thoughts.
The balance ! between security
and privacy is something society will have
to come to grips with in many
areas, he said.
A long quest
To Gur and Langleben, visions of
Orwellian thought police do not
overshadow the potential benefits and the
ever-tantalizing scientific
prospect of understanding how the mind
works.
Gur said this work grew out of a long-standing quest to understand
the
nature of conscious thought. When he set out to study consciousness,
in
the 1970s, the concept was so hazy as to be out of the realm
of
scientific inquiry.
With the advent of imaging machines such as
MRIs, scientists found the
machines were capable of witnessing the brain in
action by tracing the
way blood flowed to specific regions during various
mental tasks. Gur
got in early, testing which of the many small structures
inside the
brain were activated when test subjects were resting, reading
words,
recognizing shapes, or trying to remember facts.
! The early
machines used radioactive tracers that would "light up"
regions where
metabolism was fastest. He went on a long diversion
exploring differences
between the way men and women used their brains.
He found, among other
things, that differences in the brain endowed
women with better memories and
better control of emotions, while men
were more likely to be
hot-headed.
In the last several years, he started focusing on the way the
brain
responds to emotion.
Through a friend at the Arden Theatre
Company, he brought together 140
Philadelphia-area actors.
Signs of
recognition
He asked them to portray a range of emotions - happiness,
sadness, fear,
anger and disgust.
He took pictures of the actors and
showed them to volunteers whose
brains were being scanned by a functional
MRI, which works by monitoring
the way molecules in the brain tissue respond
to a magnetic field.
He isolated a number of centers in the! brain that
were activated when
the volunteers looked at the emotional faces. Then he
decided to show
the volunteers faces they had seen before mixed in with new
faces, to
see if their brains registered recognition.
The familiar
faces stimulated more activity than the new ones in several
areas, including
the hippocampus, which regulates memory, and parts of
the visual cortex. He
published his findings in the May issue of the
journal
NeuroImaging.
Investigators have long employed numerous methods to
detect lies - voice
analysis, observations of body language and facial
expressions, and the
polygraph, which measures changes in skin conductance
and pulse rate.
Controversial since its invention, the polygraph fell further
out of
favor this month when the National Academy of Sciences deemed it
too
inaccurate for the government to use to screen people as
potential
security risks.
"The polygraph only catches people who ar! e
anxious about lying," often
letting through those who lie with ease, Gur
said.
Langleben said he was inspired by studying children with
attention
deficit disorder. He noticed that such children often had
trouble
telling fibs - they would just blurt out whatever came into their
minds
first, which was usually the truth. That led him to wonder whether
the
part of the brain that helps control behavior also helped people to
lie.
He found himself collaborating with Gur, who shared his
interest.
They started with a standard test - called the "guilty
knowledge test,"
used in polygraph studies. Volunteers were asked to choose a
playing
card and put it in an envelope along with a $20 bill. The subjects
were
hooked up to the scanner and asked a series of yes or no questions
about
the identity of the card. They were told they would get the $20 if
they
could fool the computer.
When the subjects lied, the scanner
showed increased! activity in several
areas, including one called the
anterior cingulate region, which Gur
said was activated by conflicting
information or errors. Also activated more in lying was a part of
the
frontal cortex normally involved in making decisions. Finally,
the
researchers also saw more activity in the part of the brain
that
controls the right hand - since volunteers had to communicate
their
answer by pushing buttons.
The scientists still cannot tell when
each individual is lying - they
only get significant results when they
average results from many
subjects. But they say they are getting closer to
the ultimate goal of
lie-detecting: being able to tell individual truths from
lies - and
truth-tellers from liars.
Contact Faye Flam at 215-854-4977
or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
.
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