http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
from which -
The method used a sensor-equipped headband to spot a brain impulse called P300. If a patient sees a word or image on a computer screen that's familiar in memory, Farwell said, the impulse will flash. If the word or image is unfamiliar, the impulse won't flash.
<snip>
Wrye Sententia, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, said her organization is worried that demand is so strong for improved screening of terrorists in airports that brain-scanning technologies could be used against people's will and rushed into the market before being proven accurate.
[...]
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Good god, where to start deconstructing this techno-primitivism?
Here is rather strong evidence of our continued reliance upon magical thinking in the machine age.
Although the P300 region reaction is a verifiable fact, the interpretation of the response is subject to wide variance. Are we to place our faith in 'impulse flashes' to determine guilt, innocence or level of involvement in some criminal activity?
As the cyber age advances and belief in human cognitive excellence diminishes (a consequence in part no doubt, of the corporate led drive for a de-skilled populace, pushing idiot buttons on canned interfaces) we rely more and more upon crude instruments.
But, despite their simplicity, our science fiction dreams (dreamed even by those who do not love the genre - it is part of the air now) elevate the performance of our skill-replacing devices in our mind's eye, fooling us into believing that some startling breakthrough has been made when an interesting phenomena - poorly understood - is made the basis for a new industry.
This is how and why, in the early days of the Internet, enthusiasts hailed email as a cognition booster and new experience as deep as the total immersion "cyberspace" of William Gibson's "Sprawl" novels.
The crude tech the boosters actually had in hand was magically transformed into the Matrix though it is merely a somewhat more clever telegraph system.
Unreflective techno-worship and a mania for de-skilling are the drivers these enthusiasms.
As a technologist, I'm placed in an odd spot: I'm constantly arguing with the fictionalists who turn Palm Pilots into tri-corders and P300 region impulse flash detectors into Klingon mind probes.
DRM