From BBC news June 7th 7:00AM 2010

Brain scans being misused as lie detectors, experts sayBy Caroline Parkinson Health reporter, BBC NewsMRI scans are an established way of diagnosing brain conditionsMeasures are needed to stop brain scans being misused by courts, insurers and employers, experts have warned.

Some research suggests the technique can show whether a person is lying if certain areas of the brain "light-up".

At least one US company is offering scans to employers recruiting staff but American courts have already rejected attempts to use them in legal cases.

The University of Edinburgh's Burkhard Schafer said there were issues over privacy and reliability of technology.

The subject is being discussed by experts from around the world at a conference at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Glasgow.

'The next frontier'

Attempts have been made to use magnetic resonance imaging scans as lie detectors or to demonstrate mental health problems in more than 90 capital punishment cases in the US, as well as in other proceedings in Europe and Asia.



 As soon as public awareness increases there will be interest from everyone from daytime entertainment programmes to employers and the legal system Burkhard Schafer, University of EdinburghWhile they have been rejected in many cases, scan results have sometimes been accepted as evidence.

Mr Schafer, co-director of the SCRIPT Centre for Research in Intellectual Property and Technology at the University of Edinburgh's school of law, said the UK had to consider how to prevent MRI scans being misused - and how to protect people's privacy.

"After data mining and online profiling, brain imaging could well become the next frontier in the privacy wars.

"The promise to read a person's mind is beguiling, and some applications will be greatly beneficial.

IBM lab builds computerized cat brain

By Austin Modine in San Francisco @ THEREGISTER


Mad scientists at IBM say they've made "significant progress" towards creating a computer chip that can emulate the human brain's ability to sense, perceive, comprehend, and interact with the real world*.

Big Blue says its ultimate goal is to develop computer systems that can handle with real-world ambiguity and interact with complex environments in a context-dependent manner.

The rise of our robotic overlords is not quite nigh, but IBM said it has already simulated a cat-sized cerebral cortex — the area of the brain that's key to memory, attention, and consciousness — using a massive Blue Gene supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

This feline-scale cortical simulation, which was made with the help of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, included 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time, said Dharmendra Modha, manager of IBM's Cognitive Computing unit at its Almaden Research Center, in a blog post.

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By Brandon Keim from CNN.COM

(WIRED) -- Scientists are one step closer to knowing what you've seen by reading your mind.

Researchers used fMRI technology to try to pull images out of peoples' brains.

 Having modeled how images are represented in the brain, the researchers translated recorded patterns of neural activity into pictures of what test subjects had seen.

Though practical applications are decades away, the research could someday lead to dream-readers and thought-controlled computers.

"It's what you would actually use if you were going to build a functional brain-reading device," said Jack Gallant, a University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist.

The research, led by Gallant and Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Thomas Naselaris, builds on earlier work in which they used neural patterns to identify pictures from within a limited set of options.

The current approach, described this week in Neuron, uses a more complete view of the brain's visual centers. Its results are closer to reconstruction than identification, which Gallant likened to "the magician's card trick where you pick a card from a deck, and he guesses which card you picked. The magician knows all the cards you could have seen."

In the latest study, "the card could be a photograph of anything in the universe. The magician has to figure it out without ever seeing it," said Gallant.

To construct their model, the researchers used an fMRI machine, which measures blood flow through the brain, to track neural activity in three people as they looked at pictures of everyday settings and objects.

As in the earlier study, they looked at parts of the brain linked to the shape of objects. Unlike before, they looked at regions whose activity correlates with general classifications, such as "buildings" or "small groups of people."

Once the model was calibrated, the test subjects looked at another set of pictures. After interpreting the resulting neural patterns, the researchers' program plucked corresponding pictures from a database of 6 million images.

Frank Tong, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who studies how thoughts are manifested in the brain, said the Neuron study wasn't quite a pure, draw-from-scratch reconstruction. But it was impressive nonetheless, especially for the detail it gathered from measurements that are still extremely coarse.

The researchers' fMRI readings bundled the output of millions of neurons into single output blocks. "At the finer level, there is a ton of information. We just don't have a way to tap into that without opening the skull and accessing it directly," said Tong.

Gallant hopes to develop methods of interpreting other types of brain activity measurement, such as optical laser scans or EEG readings.

He mentioned medical communication devices as a possible application, and computer programs for which visual thinking makes sense -- CAD-CAM or Photoshop, straight from the brain.

Such applications are decades away, but "you could use algorithms like this to decode other things than vision," said Gallant. "In theory, you could analyze internal speech. You could have someone talk to themselves, and have it come out in a machine."