Privacy is About to Take Another Hundred Steps Backward

Science Fridays

      This was a rough week for me.  I had to work a lot of overtime, and was out of town last weekend, so I didn't get to add too many posts.  Sorry about that.  Anyway, here's this weeks edition of Science Fridays.

      The things that were science fiction only a decade or so ago are becoming realities today.  Researchers in Kyoto, Japan have been successful in creating a computer program that is able to read people's dreams.  Yes, you read that right.  Although it is in its preliminary phases, they have created a dream reading machine.

      "Training" the machine came in three stages so far.  They monitored sleeping subjects in their test study to see when they were experiencing REM sleep.  When this was occurring they then monitored very specific places in the visual centers of the subjects' brains.  This was cataloged in their computer.  When I say specific places in the brain, I mean VERY specific.  They were looking into the minutia of the data storage of the brain.
      When the subjects were no longer in REM sleep, they were awakened and asked what they had dreamed.  This was fed into the computer and cataloged with the areas of data storage.
      Their next step was to show the subjects a wide variety of visual images, including images of what they saw in their dreams.  Their brains were also monitored during this phase.  This was to pinpoint exactly where in the brains these images were stored.

      In the third phase the subjects were monitored again while sleeping.  The computers marked where in the subjects' brains the activity was happening.  When the subjects awoke the researchers were able to explain with a good degree of accuracy what the subjects saw in their dreams.
      They still have a lot of work to do in this, but they are well under way.  They need to compare specific data storage in many peoples' brains to see if specific images are stored in at least similar places in other peoples brains.  After they get the images and their locations in the brain all recorded, they want to work on speech.  They would like to be able to read the words that come out in people's dreams.

      If they are successful at all this (and it sure seems like they will be, with all the success they have already had), they could also use this same technology to see what people are thinking when they are awake.  They could seriously be able read our thoughts.  I'm sure that the intelligence agencies and of every nation in the world would love this.  Law enforcement agencies would love it too.  A machine like this would make the old polygraph machine seem like a flint spear compared to a Goa'uld Zatnik'tel, or a Star Wars laser/phaser blaster gun.  They wouldn't even need a verbal confession if they got one from inside the brain itself.
      Once someone figures out how to read a brain from a scan at a distance, rather than hooking up electrodes and putting people through an MRI machine, the applications could be even more notorious.  The camera at football games that focuses on someone on the bleachers could become a "thought reader."  News people would bring them to the scene of a disaster or crime.  They could be set up in malls so everyone can see exactly how vain teenagers are (now that would be funny).
      If you don't like how much your privacy has vanished because of Facebook and Twitter posts, (and if you thought you could get in trouble over them), just wait until the "dream reader" and the "thought reader" reach their final development and ultimate applications.  Yikes!

      This research was published in World Science on April 4th 2013, in case you want to read more about it.