Ethics Newsline®

MUNICH
Researchers have called for an ethical debate on a new technology uses brain scans to read a person’s intentions before they act.

The CBC reports that an international team of researchers last week published a study showing that through use of functional magnetic resonance imaging they could decode patterns in the brain that predicted future activity.

In the study, the researchers asked volunteers to think about whether they were going to add two numbers or subtract two numbers. By monitoring brain activity with a computer, the team was able to predict the volunteers’ intentions with about 70 percent accuracy, according to the computer trade journal IT Week.

According to a report from the Sydney Morning Herald, the team acknowledged that the work could carry troublesome moral implications, such as adopting brain scans for use in interrogations of criminal suspects or for predicting whether people are likely to commit crimes.

Study leader John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute in Germany told the U.K. Guardian that “these techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we’re not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do.”

“These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared,” he said.