‘Reading the brains with scans’: het ontdekken van menselijke bedoelingen

27 februari 2007

Klinische studies binnen het Max-Planck-Institut Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften kunnen er toe leiden dat specifieke gedachten opgepikt kunnen worden tijdens scans die van de hersenen worden gemaakt en dat deze vervolgens kunnen worden omgezet in daaraan gerelateerde, nuttige handelingen. De onderzoekers van het Max-Planck-Institut hebben tonen met hun onderzoek aan dat hersenscans bedoelingen van mensen kunnen onthullen. Onderzoekers binnen het Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience hebben aangetoond dat algoritmen, aangevuld met MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), bepaalden dat deelnemers aan het onderzoek van plan waren om cijfergroepen toe te voegen of weg te halen. 'It has never before been possible to read out of brain activity how a person has decided to act in the future', zo wordt in een verklaring van het Max-Planck-Instituut verklaard. 'The participants chose one of the two math functions and held the thought in their minds while getting an MRI. The images revealed fine-grained patterns of activity and computers read their covert intentions, before participants received sets of numbers and performed the math problems. The computers, programmed to recognise patterns that commonly occur with specific thoughts, determined participants' intentions 70 percent of the time. The computers use a method called multivariate pattern recognition to pick up brain activity across extended regions to determine what a person has decided to do'.

Dr. John-Dylan Haynes, die in het verleden veel gelijksoortig onderzoek heeft gedaan en nu leider van het onderzoeksteam, stelde dat de conclusies van het onderzoek verlamde patiënten eens zullen kunnen helpen, net als politie-rechercheurs. Het onderzoeksteam bestond verder uit Katsuyuki Sakai (Universiteit van Tokyo), Geraint Rees, Sam Gilbert en Chris Frith (University College London) en Richard Passingham (University of Oxford). 'Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall', zo zegt Haynes. Technologie helpt vandaag de dag al veel gehandicapten in het werken met computers, maar de recente onderzoeksresultaten geven mogelijkheden voor grote sprongen voorwaarts. 'With the brain-scanning current technology, you can read out something like left or right', zegt Haynes. 'So, you can control a cursor on a screen of letters. It's powerful and fast, but very restricted and very tedious to click your way through some string of letters in order to spell a word or a sentence. In the future, it will be possible to read even abstract thoughts and intentions out of patients' brains. One day, even the intention to "open the blue folder" or "reply to the email" could be picked up by brain scans and turned into the appropriate action'. Haynes verklaarde dat eerder onderzoek heeft aangetoond dat er gebieden in de hersenen zijn die emotionele reacties als jaloezie en romantische liefde sturen, maar dat geen detail bekend zijn geworden. 'It's like they point toward a book — the book that has written in it all of your romantic love partners or the book with religious experiences in it — but they can't look inside the book. They don't open the book. The thing is, we can really read them. It's like we shined a torch-light in the brain'. Hij stelde dat het slechts een maand of twee gekost had om de computers te programmeren en oude algoritmen aan te passen. 'Since researchers have demonstrated the ability to distinguish between two possible thoughts, it shouldn't be difficult to determine a "yes" or "no" answer to whether someone is lying or not', zo zegt Haynes. 'That's easier to read out than if we have infinite alternatives'. De technologie stelt wel een aantal ethische dilemma's, zo zegt Haynes. 'We might want to protect someone's mental privacy and the ability to control what leaves their brains'. Neuromarketing, mensen via neurale prikkels een bepaalde richting opsturen of hun opvattingen meten, kan de mentale privaxy aantasten. Hij stelt dat het van belang is dat politici, wetenschappers en burgers zich gaan bezighouden met het bepalen van de do's en don'ts van de techniek. Barbara Sahakian, professor in Neuro-Psychology op Cambridge University, stelde dat de snelle ontwikkelingen de wetenschappers gedwongen heeft een eigen Neuroethics Society op te zetten om de gevolgen van het onderzoek voortdurend te overwegen. 'Do we want to become a 'Minority Report' society where we're preventing crimes that might not happen?', zo vraagt ze zich af. 'For some of these techniques, it's just a matter of time. It is just another new technology that society has to come to terms with and use for the good, but we should discuss and debate it now because what we don't want is for it to leak into use in court willy nilly without people having thought about the consequences. A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty'. Professor Colin Blakemore, directeur van de Medical Research Council, zegt: 'We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions. Some of that is extremely desirable, because it will help with diagnosis, education and so on, but we need to be thinking the ethical issues through. It adds a whole new gloss to personal medical data and how it might be used'.

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