Mind Readers: By Phillip Ross Phillip Ross, contributing editor of Scientific American magazine, writes an article of a potential way to scan a brain and interpret thoughts as well as separate the truth from falsity. He starts off the article, imagining a world where one could see through to the truth. “Human society would be orderly, boring and as alien as an anthill,” he notes. If only there was a machine to read others’ minds… There is such a machine, but to some extent, can only measure anxiety, taken to mean as a lie. This machine, the polygraph, also known as the “lie detector”, only can hint whether a subject is lying. Critics say that the polygraph is flawed because of false positives (an honest answer is mistaken for a lie) and false negatives (a lie is overlooked as a truth). Furthermore, the polygraph is not permitted to use as evidence in the legal system; the National Research Council even called the device “blunt”. There must be a better way to achieve successful end results in looking at others’ thought processes. Ross names famous philosophers and scientists investigating the same problem. Greek philosopher Diogenes went about his life carrying a lamp to look for an honest man in what he thought was a corrupt society. Ross argues that instead of looking for clues of deception on the outside of one’s body (like sweating or breathing irregularly, as found in the polygraph), it is better to look inside one’s brain. There you can not only tell a truth from a lie, but look at how one solves a simple math problem step by step. A scientist who investigates this further is J. Peter Rosenfeld who observed an interesting feature in the EEG (electroencephalograph; chart of brain’s electrical signals) in which lying also elicited the P300 wave (component provoked in the process of decision making). Another scientist, Daedalus, observed that a brain scanner would be a perfect lie detector, in which telling the truth would activate one site in the brain while telling a lie would activate two sites. This leads to Professor Daniel Langleben of University of Pennsylvania using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to inspect subjects’ brains during a line of questioning. In some of the questions, the subjects were told to lie, in the rest, they were to tell the truth. The images from each category were averaged and compared with the rest of the subjects’. Just like Jones’ observation, the results were that truths and lies were activated in a number of sites in the brain, however lying triggered more sites. Langleben concluded that the default position is truth, and lying is a process performed on truth. For example, truth is a routine response. Some of the particular sites that were stimulated by deception were the anterior cingulate cortex and part of the left prefrontal cortex. These parts of the brain are associated with suppression of response, for instance, when the brain decides to go with one of the two conflicting responses and must constrain the other one. The Cognitive Load Theory is a theory that starts from the idea that our working memory is limited with respect to the amount of information it can hold, and the number of operations it can perform on that information. According to this theory, a learner should be encouraged to use his or her limited working memory efficiently, especially when learning a difficult task. Ross exemplifies actor Sean Connery during the filming of a movie. When asked his name by another actor, he immediately thinks “Sean Connery”, however, with some effort, he instead says, “Bond. James Bond”. At this point, two other fMRI groups have found similar research on this theory of “cognitive load”. Nonetheless, it is still yet to be determined whether such tests will be used in catching a particular hostile witness in a lie. Langleben admits that fMRI scans for determining such factors are not even in the proof-of-concept stage. He planned on modifying this experiment the following year after the aforementioned experiment took place, only this time, using a larger sample of subjects and simulating situations closer to real life deception. An example of such simulation would be a simple game of poker. Ross defends that brain imaging is better than a polygraph because it has nothing to do with general anxiety, while polygraphs have everything to do with it (e.g., polygraphs are used to instill fear) and brain imagine follows a sensation that is much closer to thought, while polygraphs focus on pulse and respiratory rate, etc. Langleben adds that this train of events is output that is 10 times removed from what’s happening in the brain. Not even the fMRI measures neurons themselves, instead it measures the oxygen in the nearby bloodstream by oxygenated to deoxygenated blood. Therefore, the fMRI is slightly flawed in testing thoughts because it is not fast enough to catch a thought. A possibly smart approach to achieve good resolution in both space and time would be to combine fMRI with EEG. This approach makes true mind reading possible. Professor Niels Birbaumer has been successful in training patients immobilized by nerve damage to spell out sentences on a computer screen by usage of brain waves. Going one step further, Professor Marcel A. Just has caught words and concepts exactly when they formed themselves in the brain. He does so by “keeping it simple”. By using 12 subjects and limiting the categories to 12 as well, Just has an 80 to 90 percent accuracy on determining what the subjects are thinking. He can even distinguish a brain from another whether one is reading a clear sentence from an unclear one. Just’s colleague, Tom Mitchell, came up with the idea to classify the the brain images their experiments produce. Ross concludes his article, curious if fMRI were paired with EEG, a more sophisticated tool would emerge. Law-enforcement officers may even use the combination technology to question criminals. Creating a near-perfect lie detection device may be much easier than making a thought reader; however, the consequences of such a machine are too threatening for human society today. In compliance to, Daedalus it would be best reserved as some sort of an ultimate social weapon.