How Scientists Can Read Your Mind
Is it possible for our brains to get hacked right now? In the 1995 film Batman Forever, the Riddler used 3D television to secretly access viewers’ most personal thoughts in his hunt for Batman’s true identity. In 2011, this science-fiction theme took a step towards reality. The metrics company Nielsen, a leading global provider of insights and analytics into what consumers watch and buy, acquired NeuroFocus and created a “consumer neuroscience” division that uses integrated conscious and unconscious data to track customer decision-making habits.
For decades when people mention brain and computers in the same sentence, the question of mind reading is immediately brought up. It is a worry and a hope, a mountain and a precipice. Can scientists read our minds? And if not, how close are they? As it turns out, there are multiple teams working on this exact question, trying to crack the enigma that is the brain “code.”
It turns out that researchers are able to “see” what you are thinking, or if you recognize or know someone, mainly through the use of the P300 event-related potential. As explained in Chapter 1 of my book, the “potential” is the name given to the event of a group of neurons firing. The different frequencies with which they fire corresponds to different levels, one of which is called the P300 response. The P300 response is unique to each person, meaning my P300 signal will look a little different than yours, but they both act as a brain response to something we have experienced before. If we know the signal the brain gives off when we recognize something, and we know how to monitor the signals of the brain, then why can’t we see if people recognize things like their credit card number or their birth date? It turns out doing so is possible, and more than that, it is being tested to see how accurately someone could steal data from somebody’s brain. The P300 response is only enacted when the person is shown something they recognize. To steal someone’s credit card number, the thief would have to actually know the numbers to flash in order to incite the P300 response. Additionally, they wouldn’t necessarily know the order of them. This makes actually taking sensitive data by analyzing the P300 response difficult.
One team examining the accuracy of the P300 response is Catherine Pratt’s team out of the University of Washington’s (UW) BioRobotics Lab. This team includes an ethicist named Tim Brown, brought on to observe the neuroethics of the lab’s work. Tim Brown was a philosophy graduate student at the University of Washington and a member of the Center for Sensory Motor Neural Engineering, a symposium made up of engineers, neuroscientists, clinicians, and philosophers, among others. Five years ago, he and “a ragtag group of philosophy graduate students,” as he described his cohorts, were brought on to help examine the ethics of these new technologies. As part of their work, Brown was assigned to sit in on the BioRobotics Lab’s meetings. The BioRobotics Lab at UW currently is doing a lot of work on deep brain stimulation (DBS). Those meetings Brown sat in on proved fruitful: “They were starting a new project and asked if I wanted to join and I said, ‘yep,’” explains Brown.
Brown has been involved in a number of projects at the BioRobotics Lab, one of the most interesting of which was work that his team was doing with P300 signals. The project was initially started by Tamara Bonaci and later taken over by Catherine Pratt. The team used a game they developed, based on the popular “Flappy Bird” game, that consisted of flapping a whale through hoops. This game was aptly called “Jumpy Whale.” Bonaci’s team had volunteers come in and play this game while wearing an EEG headset.
The team used the headset to provide modular control, so when the volunteers imagined the whale rising on the screen, it would respond accordingly in real time. As the volunteers played the game, the researchers flashed subliminal images in the background. The game was set up on a high frame rate computer that flashed these pictures in a manner not visually perceivable but able to be “seen” by the subconscious brain. The team found that if you flashed certain images and read from particular areas of the brain, you could elicit the P300 event-related potential. Bonaci further found that different brain responses to the individual pictures could be matched and correlated, and this data could be used to piece together personal information. The correlation and predictions were done by a series of complex algorithms that became more accurate the more data they were fed. Near the end of the experiment, these algorithms were predicting at an alarmingly high-confidence level.
Later, Catherine Pratt took up the project and pivoted the team to try out a new experiment. In her work, she would use a similar set-up, but instead of playing Jumpy Whale, Pratt would have the volunteers pick a number between 1 and 10 and then would use the same procedure to guess which number the volunteer had chosen. Ideally, this process could be expanded and used to, say, tell what someone’s favorite sports team is, or, more seriously, it could be used to determine if they had committed a crime by flashing a picture of the crime scene on the screen. This fact isn’t that worrisome, because P300 signals are currently inadmissible, in a court of law, as proof of a crime. These results proved successful 60% of the time. The only way to calibrate the P300 signals for each individual, however, is to sit you down and flash items that researchers are certain will elicit the response and record this.
Stay tuned to hear more incredible stories of how these interfaces are changing people’s lives and our perception of the human mind. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect you can reach me here via email admangan2018@gmail.com or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I am super excited to share that my book will be live on Amazon this Tuesday! Here is the link to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H7RJLYC
