Thought Identification

What follow are relevant excerpts from Wikipedia's entry on "Thought Identification," a term coined in 2009 by neuroscientist Marcel Just:

"Thought identification refers to the empirically verified use of technology to, in some sense, read people's minds. Advances in research have made this possible by using human neuroimaging to decode a person's conscious experience based on non-invasive measurements of an individual's brain activity.

"Professor of neuropsychology Barbara Sahakian qualifies, 'A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty^{' [...].}

"With brain scanning technology becoming increasingly accurate, experts predict important debates over how and when it should be used. One potential area of application is criminal law. Haynes states that simply refusing to use brain scans on suspects also prevents the wrongly accused from proving their innocence. It has been argued that allowing brain scans in the United States would violate the 5th Amendment's right to not self incriminate. One of thousands of important questions is whether brain imaging is like testimony, or instead like DNA, blood, or semen. Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta predicts that this question will be decided by a Supreme Court case.

"In other countries outside the United States, thought Identification has already been used in criminal law. In 2008 an Indian woman was convicted of murder after an EEG of her brain allegedly revealed that she was familiar with the circumstances surrounding the poisoning of her ex-fiancé. Some neuroscientists and legal scholars doubt the validity of using thought identification as a whole for anything past research on the nature of deception and the brain.^"

To read the entire entry, click HERE.