Berlin Scientists Developing Precognition Brain Scanner To End Terrorism

The brain scanner, the developers say can read people's intentions, before they act.

SIFY
Posted: May 25, 2007

Berlin: It is a machine that is in the midst of a controversy. A machine many might fear. It is a high resolution brain scanner developed by John Dylan Haynes and a team of researchers at Berlin's Bernstein center for Neuroscience.

The brain scanner, the developers say can read people's intentions, before they act.

"If you look at this region here at the front of the brain, if we zoom in, what we find is that there's like a micro pattern of brain activity depending on what a person is currently thinking of," says John-Dylan Haynes.

That's just the beginning. Haynes says, he believes, soon he will be able to look even deeper into the thought process, to predict actions people didn't even know they were going to take.

So what are the practical applications of this device? It could drive advances in computers controlled by your brain helping people with disabilities write emails just by thinking what they want to write, for example.

It could help companies determine what brain functions make people like certain products. It could even help fight terrorism.

"We might be able to tell from a brain activity pattern if someone has been in a specific place before, such as an al-Qaeda terrorist camp. That's something that we should be able to do within the next couple of years," says Haynes.

However, others think that the machine is quite dangerous if it falls in the wrong hands.

Even the physicists at the Bernstein center in Berlin say science has advanced to a point where society needs to debate and decide how far it's willing to let researchers go and in what fields mind reading should be employed.