The Right to Not Have Your Mind Read
Can “neurorights” protect us from the future?
...In theory, nothing about the brain’s squishy wetware prevents its internal states from being observed. “If you could measure every single neuron in the brain in real time, you could potentially decode everything that was percolating around in there,” Jack Gallant, a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley, told me. That includes “all of your perceptions, all of your intentions, all of your motor actions, and also a bunch of stuff you’re not even consciously aware of,” he said.
Scientists have no way of measuring the individual activity of every neuron in the brain, or even a sizable fraction of them, so mind reading of the sort that Gallant described would be impossible. But there are cruder ways to get at neural data: A person could be slid into an MRI machine, for example, and have their .......
theatlantic.com |
