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Truth or fiction with fMRI
By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 08/11/05
There's a really thought provoking book titled "The Truth Machine" by James Halperin. In the story a scientist develops a machine that can tell with near perfect accuracy if you are telling the truth or not. The book's strength lies in the futurism rather than its literary qualities (Publisher's Weekly commented: "His prose is at best workmanlike, and his plotting and character development tend toward the simplistic.").
In the book, Halperin's machine is a combination of technologies central to which is what sounds like Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) -- a technique that measures neural activity in the brain. The consequences of this machine is what the book is really about and Halperin does a great job extrapolating how our culture would change if we all had no choice but to tell the truth.
Sounds unbelievable to you? An Arstechnica blog item, "Reading minds and remote control people", discusses research at UCL in London and UCLA in the US. The UK researchers "used fMRI to detect brain activity when volunteers were looking at different images with their left and right eyes. As focus and attention switched between eyes, different areas of the brain would light up, and the scientists discovered that they could predict what the subject was looking at. Using this concept, the work conducted at UCLA went even further."
Read the Arstechnica article and then try to tell us that Halperin was on the wrong track. That said, even Halperin is surprised at how fast his theorizing and reality are converging ...
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