We all lead an inner life. Our thoughts flow through our heads, some fleeting, some lingering. We think about an upcoming celebration or we remember a moment from years past. We plan, speculate, love, fear, obsess, reason and interpret our lives in an ongoing inner dialogue that characterizes who we are as individuals. The inner dialogue, which exists wholly in our heads, is, in some sense, our single most private possession.
The private nature of the inner workings of our minds is our one impenetrable refuge. No one can see what I am thinking or feel what I am feeling. We take it for granted that the contents of our thoughts are ours alone, that they are safely hidden away in the sanctum of our mind.
At least until now. Neuroscience has, for the first time, demonstrated that there may be ways to directly access human thought–even, perhaps, without the thinker’s consent. While the research is still preliminary, the science is advancing at an astonishing rate. While many obstacles need to be overcome and the technology is not yet practicable, the implications for our current state of knowledge are profound.
Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), scientists can infer all kinds of information by looking at brain activity while subjects perform designated tasks. Early research showed a scan could reveal the orientation of stripes a subject looked at (e.g., horizontal, vertical, diagonal), or whether subjects had been looking at specific objects such as faces, cats, man-made objects, or at nonsense pictures. As the research advanced, scientists began to correlate traits and abilities such as extroversion and introversion, racist ideology and navigational ability with specific activation patterns in the brain.
If research was limited to those kinds of studies, concern might be premature. But more recent studies seem to have taken significant steps toward what most would consider mind-reading. A study in Berlin gave subjects two numbers, and told them to decide privately whether or not they were going to add or subtract them, and then to reveal it after a brief interval. Researchers imaging the brains of the subjects during the interval found that they could predict whether the subject had decided to add or subtract. In other words, they could predict the subjects’ intention. A study at Carnegie Mellon showed that researchers could predict the specific pattern of brain activation in a subject when they thought of a specific word, effectively identifying through a brain scan what word the individual was thinking of, even if they had never scanned that word in that individual’s brain before. The study crossed undeniably into mind-reading: identifying a specific word in a subject’s mind.
As you can imagine, courts, security agencies and the military would love to get their hands on this technology. And the march of neuroscience does not end with “mind-reading.” For example, a number of researchers have been working on brain imaging for lie detection, and two companies (Cephos and No Lie MRI) are situating themselves to offer brain imaging lie detection to the general public. Studies of learning disabilities have identified specific areas of the brain used in reading, which suggests that we may be able to flash words in various languages in front of a subject and tell whether or not they can read a particular language and even, perhaps, understand it. Imagine the usefulness of that technology in identifying insurgents.
Neurotechnology is making its way into business, politics and other civic realms as well. The booming field of neuromarketing has been peering into the brains of consumers as they think about products or look at advertising. Political scientists have used fMRI to try to determine voter preferences, and a book by Drew Westen, titled The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, drew on such research and played a prominent role in the Democratic strategy in the last presidential election.
While our abilities in these areas are still quite limited, and while there is always the possibility that the technology will never progress to the point where it can extract truly useful information from anyone, the time to think about the implications of this endeavor is now, before the technology is upon us. The appeal of the technology to the state is obvious. So we need to ask ourselves: What are the limits of the use of this technology? Should we ever allow the courts, or the state, to demand access to the recesses of our minds?
My answer is no. The skull should be designated as a domain of absolute privacy. No one should be able to probe an individual’s mind against their will. We should not permit it with a court order. We should not permit it for military or national security. We should forgo the use of the technology under coercive circumstances even though using it may serve the public good.
Jean-Paul Sartre declared that the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a person is the ability to say “no.” To keep silent even in the face of torture or death is humanity’s most powerful, final act of will. What if that ability were to be lost? What if that final freedom is taken away and information can be taken from a person despite their act of resistance? Something precious will have been lost to the human condition because our inner lives will no longer be ours alone.
Of course, we are not facing that stark decision yet. But in the cloisters of academia neuroscience is progressing, and we ignore the implications of this technology at our peril. A public conversation should begin on who, ultimately, has a right to access the inner workings of the mind.
Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Bioethics and the director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University. He is editor of the American Journal of Bioethics–Neuroscience, and is past president of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities.
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