February 17, 2004

I KNOW What You Did Last Summer.
posted by Gyan 20 years ago
  • Interesting, but I'm still waiting for Pre-Cogs.
  • I wouldn't be surprised if someone finds the way to cincurvent this test. The brain has enough plasticity to pull up that kind of tricks after some hard training with the machine.
  • ok, that should have said circumvent.
  • Jimmy Ray Slaughter, huh? He even SOUNDS innocent.
  • His name won't go into italics! GUILTY!
  • holy friggin crap! I mean . .heh . . heh heh . . umm . nothing!
  • Stay tuned for Law & Order: Phrenology Files.
  • Part of me really wants to marvel at technology, but another part of me is very, very frightened by this. Science that tries to prove that people are the sum of their parts always scares me though.
  • Kimberley, the part that scares me isn't the reductionism (I'm not especially bothered by the idea I'm no more magical or special than, say, a pet cat, just more complex), but the fact that this is, as ulotrichous suggests, pretty much a modern phrenology. I don't claim to be an expert on the brain or nuerolinguistics, but I helped my wife study for her postgrad linguistics degree and picked up a layman's appreciation for the topic; we know very, very little about the precise functions of the brain. Sweeping proclamations by linguists aside, it's an area of study that's in its infancy. If a nuerolinguist can't explain the physical mechanisms for language aquisition and use in anything other than fairly vague terms, how the hell can we be deciding whether to fry someone based on claims that we can use brain imaging to determine guilt or innocence. There's evidence that came out in the who satanic abuse hysteria that suggests it may be fairly easy to create false memories by encouraging people to think about things that never happened. How can we be sure that the process described doesn't have much the same risk? Moreover, given that we *do* know the brain dynamically remaps itself to cope with damage due to age or injury, it seems entirely possible that a guilty person could cover for themselves by a week of drinking or a few sharp blows to the head. It all sounds disturbingly like junk science from the coverage in the Beeb article. But then, so are polygraphs, and people rely on them.