Letting Computers Read Our Minds: What Should We Share With Them?

Emotiv's new EEG deviceYesterday, the NewScientist used the news of Adam Wilson performing the first electroencephalogram (EEG) -signaled tweet, to remind us of some other tech tools hitting the marketplace that read brain waves.

(Side note: it gives me a wry smile to think about the self-propagating effects of "Twitter news." The network effect feeding the growth of the network.)

This hit me, as it may some of you, with a "Wow!" The technology I knew about, I just had no idea it was so close to becoming a consumer packaged good.  The story highlights two companies, Emotiv and NeuroSky, that are releasing devices designed initially to function as video game devices. (I suspect that, as space technologies were once well known for spinning off into broader applications, the same will be true of video games.)

While some of the comments in the NewScientist story are hyperbolically leaping ahead to the government reading our minds, the initial thing that piqued my interest was the note that these devices can "read emotions." Emotiv sees this as a way to enhance video game avatars by animating them in coordination with the device's read of a user's emotions. My thought is that this might provide "too much information."

You see, I've become a fan of the TV drama Lie To Me, in which a detective team uncovers people's lies and emotions due to the microexpressions that all people reveal instinctually due to emotions--expressions that leak out just before we might hide them through self-control.

This is a concept I remembered from my college psychology classes, and it is something I even pick up on occasionally. But usually I don't, and usually most people don't. And, to be honest, I'd rather we keep that little bit of mystery going. Although, I suppose this would open us up to incredibly honest two-way digital conversations if we want to have them in the future.

And the "reading your mind" fears I noted above aren't completely far fetched. In fact, there are ethical discussions now underway about how neural imaging will be used in the future--far beyond video game avatars.

The most robust discussions so far have been in the life sciences field concerning the use of these techniques for medical prognosis.  But another early issue on the radar screen is the possible use of neural imaging in court cases. Could they eventually become "scientifically proven" lie detectors?

Tricky policy decisions are ahead as these devices become more and more prevalent. Here's hoping that as we tap further into the frontier of the mind, it isn't as chaotic as the wild wild West.