So it’s a pretty interesting article albeit written with too much faith in the ability of fMRI to “tell all”. The focus of the story is a neuroscience-law interdisciplinary program that’s at Vanderbilt University under the direction of Owen Jones, who is a professor of law and biology there. Front and center is VUIIS (Vanderbilt University Institute for Imaging Science) and its functional imaging capabilities.
Money quote:
Jones is turning Vanderbilt into a kind of Los Alamos for neurolaw. The university has just opened a $27 million neuroimaging center and has poached leading neuroscientists from around the world; soon, Jones hopes to enroll students in the nation’s first program in law and neuroscience. “It’s breathlessly exciting,” he says. “This is the new frontier in law and science — we’re peering into the black box to see how the brain is actually working, that hidden place in the dark quiet, where we have our private thoughts and private reactions — and the law will inevitably have to decide how to deal with this new technology.”
I guess my take is that we’ve got a very long way to go before we start accurately reading out private thoughts from the current technology–resolution is too low both in the spatial and temporal dimensions to pick up the neural code (or at least the version of it that relates to the sort of episodic memory Rosen is writing about).
Nevertheless, the ethical and legal issues raised are very real.
Click on the link above to read the whole thing.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 