This is pure
Philip K. Dick: in June a judge in India found a woman guilty of murdering her former fiancé and sentenced her to life in prison. The smoking gun? Test results obtained using the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test (BEOS) developed by Indian neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan. The BEOS software uses an EEG to determine whether the subject is recalling specific details of a crime as they are being read aloud. BEOS "works" because as the crime's details are recited to a subject, their brain lights up in specific regions -- the areas that (in theory) show measurable changes when experiences are relived. According to Mukundan, the system can distinguish between peoples' memories of events they witnessed and deeds they committed. Gee, now that we have the technology to read criminal's
minds and predict crimes we'll be expecting a crime-free society any minute now.
Update: The headline error in the post has been fixed -- thanks commenters!
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posted Sep 15th 2008 9:34PM
These should be installed in the lunch room of every bussiness to find out who the thiving basterd is who eats other co workers lunches...
Hey, I didn't see your name on that sandwich.
hmmm looks like SOMEBODY has been reading Lifehacker . . . ;-)
Yea! Good idea. I walked into work today and all four bottles of SoBe I had in the fridge were empty!
Sandvich?! nom nom nom nom
Wow that's lame..Though i really don't believe it worked, I think they just needed some evidence to put her away, and this is the best they could come up with, which is kinda sad.
I thank God for this great country we live in. It's far from perfect, but it's pretty amazing and this just shores that up...
No love for the Point Break reference? Tough crowd...
they sentenced someone to life in prison on theory? if that really works then great, but what if she's innocent?
Then somone, somewhere is about to loose alot of money...
loose is fine, as long as they don't lose it.
Whoa! You can loose money? Can you tighten it too?
Uh, i think that's the point of this article.
I AM AN FBI AGENT!
Sorry.
not anymore
I'm an illegal immigrant!!
...from Canada
I'm a cop you idiot!
...or much less convincing arguments against capital punishment...
Minority Report anyone?
A Scanner Darkly...
I was just thinking that too.
I'll join the "Future Crime" Fighters, and beat crime before they even happen... lol
what about Wanted? Ofcourse it will never be used on people of power or otherwise deemed inconclusive.
If it works with identification of details as they are being read aloud, I would imagine that sights, sounds and smells would cause intense activity in those 'specific regions'
Think naughty thoughts, think naughty thoughts.
always
I wonder what guilt looks like. I think it might look something like Bush or Cheney.
BEOS or BS? No, I think this is a very interesting concept, but what is the realistic accuracy of such technology? We can have very strong emotional responses to events we never actually participated in -- novels, films are probably the most obvious examples. So how do we know that these brain signals we're reading are not just from the person's activated imagination?
I think the emotional response from imagining someone being killed vs. actually having the memory of killing someone would be quite different regardless of how active an imagination would be.
- This message was sent from my tricorder
I have mixed feelings. On one hand BEOS has such a slick interface. On the other hand its liable to get me incarcerated if I'm not careful.
Shut up! Someone hacked my brain and put those thoughts there!
you weren't supposed to remember that!
They should try this on OJ.
i like orange juice, but OJ is guilty!!!!
What's the point? Everyone already knows he was guilty.
well i highly doubt it can be used in the us without other evidence pointing to one individual as the culprit. i know if i were found guilty of something with this tech i would try to get a retrial. but this is very interesting. i would love to hear the legal wranglings that are going to happen because of the highly criminal us government trying to use this in the "drug war."
Yeah sure, crime free anytime now. I am not gonna hold my breath though. I am just a rebel that way.
What if you recount some similar event from a movie? This is so flawed.
Argument against: Describe to me a breakfast. (Bear with me) My brains reaction and readings withing BEOS, are they signifying that particular breakfast read aloud or a breakfast that I've had quite like it?
If someone is supposedly "re-experiencing" the event in regions of their brain, how is it proof they are guilty and not envisioning a similar occurence?
I can see it now.... Maury 2.0. YOU ARE THE FATHER!!! oh and while I was in there I noticed that he wants to sleep with your sister!
Yall dont know Me!!
Someone should port ReiserFS to BeOS....
Sadly, it doesn't work. Wired did a piece on this a while back that seemed to do a decent job of explaining why Mukundan's analysis is mostly fantasy. There are other papers in the primary literature saying the same thing, but this should give you the gist of things.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-06/mf_neurohacks
When they mentioned Guilt all I could think of was Trauma Center...
The charlatan who is pedaling this crap is not a neurosurgeon. Please correct your title.
Was anyone else saddened by the fact that the acronym that some of us used to know as "BeOS" is now being recycled for a different meaning? Long live BeOS.
Hey, as long as they don't start asking me about my massive porn addiction, I'm good to go.
That shit is embarrassing.
Oh thank goodness. I thought they wrote it for BeOS and I was about to headdesk.
Now if I were only an illiterate criminal...
If she was repeatedly told of crime story, she'll have visual memory of the crime even if she didn't commit it. Also, she may even start to think that she was part of the crime (kind of brainwash). This technology is not a very reliable way to prove crime.
Sounds like rubbish science, but good enough for convicting some presumably powerless woman who anyway committed the
unspeakable crime of eloping with another man. Not good enough to convict a powerful man any time soon, I'll bet you.
omg its going to turn into a real life 'batman forever' with jim carey stealing our brains!
Sounds like the truth detector in HB Pipers Fuzzy books, the only way NOT to tell a lie in court is just to plead the fifth, though I am not sure if the 5th was allowed in the book
This new BEOS better be backwards compatible with the old BeOS!
While I disagree with the use of this technology in a criminal trial,
the general principles behind it, as far as I am aware, are
scientifically valid.
See:
Farwell, L. A. (1993) Brain MERMERs: Detection of FBI Agents and
Crime-Relevant Information with the Farwell MERA System. Proceedings
of the International Security Systems Symposium, Washington, D.C.
Farwell, L. A. and Smith, S. S. (2001). Using Brain MERMER Testing to
Detect Concealed Knowledge Despite Efforts to Conceal Journal of
Forensic Sciences 46,1:1-9
Also you can search on Wikipedia for 'P300.'
Correction: This is pure Alfred Bester
ever read The Demolished Man?
Question: Do I have to remove my tin foil hat before the scan?
Was it murder or self defense?
If I only recite the details of the actions done by one person to another, then of course the memories would be activated, but does it also include the points where no memory was activated?
This would require massively substantiated evidence, and psychological analysis, before referring to this technique, for all we know she could be very susceptible to suggestion, and the wording used in questioning would activate memories from dreams, and not reality.
There is really no way to know what someone is actually thinking, unless they want to tell you.
For an example, try to think about a certain object for a long period of time, how long does it take before your brain starts to wander, how long before you are describing that object in your thoughts, by referring to other memories, it's not easy because our thoughts are not linear.
VERY SCARY - NEVER let this type of thing be introduced in your own country.. it will be instantly abused..
Use it on OJ!!!
Very scary. There is a difference between fantasizing a criminal deed than to commit one. Such a system will take issue on differentiating the two. Such a system can find us all quilty.
It says more about the value of women in India than about this new technology used to convict one...
This is very sad and somewhat scary. While I live in the UK and think it is unlikely it would come here, similar ideas are floated in the US. Specifically using MRI technology, which is currently equally inappropriate (I'm a neuroimager). @ Reneer, just because there are some journal articles, does not in any way mean that the general ideas are sound. There are many crazy journal articles (look for the one reporting an association between the use of high-heeled shoes and schizophrenia.
As has been said: do not let this come to your country. Do just about anything to stop it. And give some money to Amnesty International to help the stop this kind of bullshit in countries that don't know better.
Again @ Reener, Just to add:
'Using Brain MERMER Testing to Detect Concealed Knowledge Despite Efforts to Conceal' comes from the Journal of Forsensic Sciences which has an impact factor of about 1. Not very impressive (although does not necessarily mean the article is bad). Add to this: n=6 subjects. Add to this, the fact that the author is chairman and chief scientist at a company selling such techniques. Now let us add this: Dr Quackwell 'discovered that the P300 was one aspect of a larger brain-wave response that he named and patented'. He has patented a brain wave response!
Oh and there is more: 'Dr. Farwell conducted a Brain Fingerprinting test on Terry Harrington, who is serving a life sentence in Iowa for a 1977 murder. The test showed that the record stored in Harrington's brain did not match the crime scene and did match the alibi.' The RECORD STORED IN HARRINGTONS brain!! Has someone possibly missed the last few decades of memory research.
'The article concludes with a discussion of areas of future research and the potential for using this new technology as an investigative tool in criminal cases.' This is exactly what such methods could POSSIBLY be useful for. As long as it's a tool of investigation and not a tool of lawyers, we might be safe.
Never quote scientific sources before you've had time to read and critique them (I say despite only reading the abstract)!