"Mind Reading and Mind Control Technologies Are Coming"

What follow are a few relevant excerpts from R. Douglas Fields' 3-10-20 Scientific American article entitled "Mind Reading and Mind Control Technologies Are Coming":

The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways. Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing this threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us [...].

Armed with the ability to know what a person is thinking, scientists can do even more. They can predict what a person might do. [Neuroscientist Marcel] Just and his team are able to tell if a person is contemplating suicide, simply by watching how the person’s brain responds to hearing words like “death” or “happiness.” As the tragic deaths of comedian Robin Williams and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain show, suicide often comes as a shock because people tend to conceal their thoughts of suicide, even from loved ones and therapists.

Such “brain hacking” to uncover that someone is thinking of suicide could be lifesaving. The technique applied to the Columbine high school mass murderers might have prevented the horror of two troubled teens slaughtering their classmates and teachers, as well as their own suicides. But this insight into suicidal ideation is gleaned by judging that the pattern of brain activity in an individual’s brain deviates from what is considered “normal” as defined as the average response from a large population. At what point do we remove a person from society because their brain activity deviates from what is considered normal? [...]

[T]he prospect of “mind control” frightens many, and brain stimulation to modify behavior and treat mental illness has a sordid history. In the 1970s neuropsychologist Robert Heath at Tulane University inserted electrodes into a homosexual man’s brain to “cure” him of his homosexual nature by stimulating his brain’s pleasure center. Spanish neuroscientist José Delgado used brain stimulation in monkeys, people and even a charging bull to understand how, at a neural circuit level, specific behaviors and functions are controlled—and to control them at will by pushing buttons on his radio-controlled device energizing electrodes implanted in the brain. Controlling movements, altering thoughts, evoking memories, rage and passion were all at Delgado’s fingertips. Delgado’s goal was to relieve the world of deviant behavior through brain stimulation and produce a “psychocivilized” society [...].

Against the historical backdrop of ethical lapses and concerns that curtailed brain stimulation research for mental illnesses decades ago, we are reaching a point where it will become unethical to deny people suffering from severe mental or neurological illness treatments by optogenetic or electrical stimulation of their brain, or to withhold diagnosing their conditions objectively by reading their brain’s electrical activity. The new capabilities of being able to directly monitor and manipulate the brain’s electrical activity raise daunting ethical questions from technology that has not existed previously. But the genie is out of the bottle. We better get to know her.

To read the entire article, click HERE.