Yes, my husband and I watched this and he was FAR more impressed than I was. As someone towards the end of the clip mentioned, it is much too soon to know exactly how well this new technology will become the new lie detector. We'll see where this goes. As we know, the lay public completely embraces anything with even a smidgen of science behind it. Sigh. More psychobabble getting promoted en masse.
Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 [email protected] ---- Original message ---- >Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:18:20 -0500 >From: [email protected] >Subject: [tips] Mind-reading with fMRI >To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> > >Perhaps it's time we got back to psychology. > >I was watching the (USA) TV newsmagazine programme _60 Minutes_ tonight, >and they featured a rather breathless account of research using fMRI to >(in their words), "read minds". > >They (and the experts they consulted) assured us that this was not >science fiction. I think it is. > >One of their experts was Marcel Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of >Psychology at Carnegie Mellon (nice that this American school has a chair >named for an eminent Canadian psychologist, my old prof at McGill). > >Dr. Just provided a demonstration of this so-called mind-reading, using a >_60 Minutes_ producer as test subject. As I understood what was done, >they stuck her in an fMRI, and told her to concentrate on ten words >(knife, hammer, etc), one at a time. They fed the fMRI output into a >computer. > >The computer was then given a choice between the target word the subject >had concentrated on and another word. In all ten cases, it chose the >target word. This seems impressive except that it would have been easy >to fudge a demo such as this, as the experimenter knew the correct choice >in each case. I'm waiting until they show this under the condition that >only the subject knows which word of a pair she was concentrating on. > >Just has a website at http://tinyurl.com/9pmyj4 but while he lists >publications relating to the use of fMRI to study cognition, there's >nothing there that suggests that anything like this demo has made it into >print. > >The _60 Minutes_ segment is available at >http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4697682n > >Stephen >------------------------------------------------------------ ----- >Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. >Professor of Psychology, Emeritus >Bishop's University e-mail: [email protected] >2600 College St. >Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 >Canada > >Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of >psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ >------------------------------------------------------------ ----------- > >--- >To make changes to your subscription contact: > >Bill Southerly ([email protected]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
