Future Implications of Brain Monitoring

Welcome to the Rest of Science. I'm Hann Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens right now I'm thinking in illegal thought Uh Or am I? I can't tell. You can't tell. I could be committing all kinds of crimes up here right now. But is it to think it to commit the crime? That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the power of thoughts, the responsibilities you have as a thinker, and whether you have any Can you own a thought Can you be punished for it, even Should you be?. I want to talk about this today because I read a few weeks ago like a startling fact which is that the police are allowed to collect evidence from you by unlocking your phone if it has face ID or fingerprint recognition encrypting it. But however, if you lock up your phone with a passcode They can't get into it legally. What? So wait, hang on, I need to understand this. So if you've got face ID on there, they can like hold the phone up and basically take the image of your face as it were. that sort of belongs to them you in some sense, they have an ability to take that from you. Likewise your fingerprint, they can take your fingerprint from you, but they can't take the thing that's in your mind, which is exactly. That's what I thought was so exciting that we are treating legally What's in your mind with more priority and privilege than your body. If the cops arrest you And they tell you, hey, you got to tell me your passcode. You do. They get into your phone with that passcode and they find text messages where do you admit to this crime. This statement, I read it on the internet was that they cannot actually charge you or bring that as evidence in court. However, if they found the texts because they just pointed your phone at your face and it unlocked, that's allowed. As it turns out, that is correct. Kind of This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than jeans The genes that build our cells make up only two percent of our DNA. and for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how disees like cancer It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over two hundred types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past fifty years. For more information about canancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them Visit cancerreesearchuK. org forward slash the rest is science No one goes to Hanks for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the one dollar slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M three sixty five coopilot dot com slash work So good, so good New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to sixty percent off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas, and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack Michael Hes, I are you trying to tell me here that something you read on the internet wasn't quite right? Be well that seems' It's really close. I looked into it and as it turns out We don't really know yet. Different courts in the United States have ruled differently on this. The Oregon Supreme Court case where this woman, last name Pittman pulled over And police found a whole lot of meth in her car. And they also found a whole lot of little baggies. And they were like, she's selling meth. We just want to unlock your phone to see And they used her fingerprint there at the scene to unlock the phone And they were able to read messages showing that she was definitely selling drugs to people. in court Her lawyers said, hey, this violates her Fifth Amendment right to not have to incriminate herself. Because you should be able to say, no comment, you know, I take the Fifth Aendment, whatever. That right to not incriminate yourself is famous because we see it in movies all the time. Oh, I plead the fifth And we also have been living for hundreds of years under that kind of a law What does that specifically mean It means that the contents of your own mind cannot be used by a prosecution to convict you Now you can let them use it. If you want to get caught, you can totally tell them, I did it, right? But you cannot be compelled to If you refuse to answer their questions, you cannot be penalized. Other people, of course, can be. That's what a subpoena is If you have information about something that I've done that's illegal, the court can compel you to witness against me. But it's not inside of your own head. And so Day when we have So much information about where we've been, what we've been saying, like actually documented on this little phone And they're locked not within our minds, but within ours. Devices It becomes really important for us to answer the question is the contents of your phone the same as the contents of your mind. But we should talk about what exactly it means so that we can figure out what we're talking about today. Prior to the year twelve fifteen. So we're going back a long time. people were found guilty or innocent was a little bit more loosey goosey. okay? I'm sure you've heard things likeQite a lot was loosey goosey. Yeah. the eleven hundred. If you go back that far, hey, this is the twelve hundreds.. But not everything is up to date in the world in the twelve hundreds. still isn't. But the point is that prior to then In England, in Europe, there were trials by ordeal. You arrest someone You think they're guilty of a crime, but they say they didn't do it Easy We don't need a jury, we don't need to find evidence. Let's just have them do something wild, like hold on to a red hot piece of metal, or we could throw them into the ocean with rocks tied to them. If they're truly innocent Surely God Himself will intervene miraculously save them and we will all know that they're innocent. This is brilliantly flawless logic. It's brilliantly flawless. They used this quite a lot on the witch trials, didn't they? Although I seem to remember the witch trials, they did it kind of the other way around. If you managed to save yourself from the bottom of the ocean where you were tied down with rocks, then that demonstrated you're a witch. and if you did indeed die, then o, whoops, we just killed an innocent woman. Because if you were saved, it's because the devil saved sure. But in different circumstances, it's God saving you because you're innocent. So here's the thing. Lucy Goosey is the key worord. There were trials by fire, trials by water, trials by ingestion. If you're truly innocent, then we'll give you this poison and God will intervene Believe it or not, that wasn't really popular. Okay, I am surprised. To be fair no criminals all the public at large. Well, with anyone, as I researched this, I found that actually a lot of modern scholars have said to be Honest, like it wasn't that bad of an idea Because if you look at the records of people who were subjected to trials of ordeal There's like a lot of people who were vindicated by it Okay, like what really would happen is that someone who was guilty would just refuse to do it and they would settle and they would accept a punishment. If someone really said I will walk across the hot coals because surely God will save me and everyone believed that he would, then an innocent person would decide to do it And often there was a lot of leeway over how terrible the ordeal was And so it would kind of like be orchestrated such that, all right, none of us believe they did it if they're willing to go through with it, so we won't make it too hard and then we'll demonstrate to the public that they're innocent. Oh nice. So another problem with early justice was coerced confessions. This was a much more common practice. I'm like, well, if we torture the person enough, they'll eventually tell us that they did it They'll tell us the truth. As it turns out, no, coerced confessions tend to be very unreliable. I mean, I would say that that remains a relatively modern problem, Michael, I think, like coerced confessions I think that one hasn't really gone away. Well, I know the problem is like people still call confessed confessions like a war crime. They'll call it out, but whether or not it gets, you know, justice ever served is a different question. These rights to not be compelled to incriminate yourself. grew out of that historical context. A lot of the original people who came up with the importance of not being forced or compelled to witness against yourself We're also people motivated by Freedom of expression, where they just didn't believe what they were supposed to believe according to the church or the political powers that be And they thought I shouldn't be compelled to admit my beliefs because I believe them strongly and I don't think that thoughts should be criminalized. Here's the thing though, okay, because I think you could argue that in a lot of ways, if they take your blood or your hair samples or your saliva, you're sort of incriminating yourself there as well, though, right? Like why didn't they come under the fififth Aendment? That's the exception Yes, the Fifth A amendment has been interpreted as purely being contents of your mind In that case of the state of Oregon versus Pittman, it was found that Biometrics are an exemption from the Fifth Amendment They really can force you to use your fingerprint to unlock your phone. So this comes down on the side of blood samples, hair samples, saliva samples. Exactly and this was the motivation. The court said that if her phone had been locked with a passcode could not have asked her to provide that passcode If she provides the passcode, She is conveying information that's in her mind that can indirectly cause them to learn all kinds of things about her. Whereas, if you ask her to simply put her fingerprint on the phone All you're really asking her to do is demonstrate that she can move her finger Okay. The actual court said this. Yes. Wow. So biometrics are not a violation of your Fifth Amendment right, according to Oregon versus Pittman. Okay, everybody immediately, go and change your phones particularly if you happen to be in the mafia, you know, it's a good idea. Well maybe, you see, there have been court cases that found biometrics, unlocking with face ID or a fingerprint is considered testimonial. That's a key word here. Testimony is when you divulge information that's in your mind. And that's opposed to physical evidence, which is parts of your body. That's right. And so in US vers. Brown, that case was in twenty twenty five, so just last year They found that unlocking a person's phone with their fingerprint was actually a violation of their Fifth Amendment right. And this was actually a case that pertained to some people who were at the january sixth events at the U. S Capitol. The plaintiffs in that case had their phones looked through, and the court there ruled that it was inadmissible. because they were compelled to give a fingerprint. And in that case, the court said they shouldn't have been forced Even the fingerprint was not okay. Even the fingerprint wasn't okay. Interesting. you're safe with the passcode. You may or may not be safe with the fingerprint. It's still definitely the case that a passcode is always upheld as, yeah, that's their information, which means the contents of your phone when protected by a passcode is treated like the contents of your own mind where showing it is your choice. You have a right to be silent and your phone has a right to be silent Unless you lock it with your fingerprint or face ID In which case, Game over buddy. See in thirty years If you've committed some crimes, yeah my mum as I was growing up would always tell me, don't ever put in writing anything that you wouldn't want. yourour mother, your accountant or your Catholic priest to see. And I think overall actually, in life that's been pretty good advice, but it does make me wonder what kind of shady shit that woman was up to. Yeah, this was like a rule of hers that she needed to teach you being like a YouTuber, I feel like don't write anything down that you wouldn't want to put on your YouTube channel. because it will always wind up being discovered Okay, I see. sorry, I understand. Your YouTube channel is your version of my Catholic priest. Exactly R. Exactly. You know, Google searches for a really, really long time, I was really careful not to put anything into a Google search that I wouldn't want my Catholic bace of my cathic to see But actually, as time has gone on, I feel like I've relaxed that. You know, I think if you looked through my history of Google searches, you'd be like, what kind of weird stuff is this woman having anxiety dreams about three o'clock. Oh sure. For mine, people would be like, this guy can't spell anything. What the heck people have been done for that yo, you know, their Google searches, you know, how do you dissolve a body? How do I poison my wife, that kind of thing? Like people have those hold up in core, even though actually that sort of feels like A very private Google search in the middle of the night feels as close to what's going on inside your own head, inside your own thoughts as it's possible to be. You're not even really sharing it with anyone. Unlocking someone's phone to look at their search history different than looking in their own mind because that search history is them reaching out into the world and performing an action. whereas Photos they've taken I feel like that's a much more private action Yeah, because if they've taken the photos and they haven't shared them then kind of like an externalized prosthetic version of just looking at something and remembering it. Interesting. The one I'm I think is going to quite a lot in the future is whether chatbot logs. You know, if you're talking to chat GPT, I mean, I know they've already been used because the guy who's been fingered for starting the palisades fire in California, right? He was known to be in the in the area where it started rightight after or soon after he started the fire. He was asking Chat GPT like, hey, can I be found liable for a fire if I'm the one who threw the cigarette out And the authorities had access to that and that was part of the case against him And that was the thing that convicted him. That or any other Yeah, yeah, sure. sure Hm. All right, so so far we've been talking about whether or not authorities, the state have the right to tell you to share information that's within your mind And today, by extension in your phone. I think the history of the law being in place makes a lot of sense, but it sort of feels like in the past, For something to leave your mind, there was a much bigger action that you had to take, you know, You sort of had to make much more effort for you to broadcast something out of the world. But once you reduce that barrier entry of something leaving your mind, I mean, I'm thinking here about the neurotransmitters, you know, the things that are being tried on real humans at the moment, things like neeuralink where you are essentially implanting computer chips into the brains of humans I mean, what about in that situation? Is that leaving your brain? It is But once it's out of your brain And we don't have laws that are clearly built for those scenarios. Who owns all that data from my brain That's now on a computer hard drive Because in the past, the only way ideas would get out on my brain is that I said them, I wrote them down, and now it becomes witness testimony and it's a thing that can be shared. But if a computer has a big log of my thoughts Well then, do I own it or does the company own it? and how can it be used by that company? And these are still questions that we're trying to resolve. It's a big part of neuroethics. Like what do we do now that we can look inside someone's brain? After the break, I want to look into something a little bit different, which is extxtracting information compelling the person to share it, but by just looking directly into their own brain. That's what I'm That's what I'm doing right now. Are' looking at Oh my gosh. putut that down. Put that. I can't believe you're thinking that right now. That's a good point Yeah, you should go to the bathroom. Wow, I just was flooded with viewer thoughts as I did that. That not that much. But should I be allowed to do that after the break? I live seven thousand six hundred and thirty six kilometers away from Hannah. So we rarely get to see each other in person. That's what makes this such genuinely thrilling news for us and maybe for you too. because for the first time ever, you can see both of us live on stage at Golhanger's Inaugural Festival. It's going be amazing to be able to reach through the screen and meet those of you who watch and listen to the show in the flesh. The restest is Fest runs from the fourth to the sixth of September at London's South Bank Center. So get some tickets and get ready for some fun. Some serious Go to southbankccenter. co. uk to find out more Hi, this is Garalinka from Goldhangers. The restest is foootball. This episode is brought to you by Wise. 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Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGlS. Before starting EBGlS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection Ask your doctor about EBglS, and visit EvglS. liily d. com or call whenin it hundred Lillily R X or onein in hundred five four five five nine seven nine. One of the more Pressing applications pressing, I mean that this has been going on for decades is what's known as the P three hundred signal This is a signal in the brain. It's like an activation event of neurons. only happens when you recognize something So if I showed you your children, It would light up If I showed you a picture of my best friend from fifth grade, Yours would not light up I mean, it could. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah really cool. But this this was known to psychologists for a long time. and then the scientist Dr. Lawrence Farwell Well, this could be used in court Yeah Oh Lord, right? Yeah. Like now hold on a second. This guy says he didn't do it. Well let's show him phhotographs of the crim scen And if his brain lights up then he recognizes it. And that's physical evidence rather than testimonial. O is That's the question. Is it testimonial? Testimonial means information from your mind. I mean, it's information from your mind. It's information from your mind, but if we sccan your brain for it, you aren't Willingly giving it up. There's like three prongs to defining allowed testimony. It cannot be compelled It must be information and it must come from the mind. If someone volunteered to be part of a P three hundred, test on the recognition could be allowed because they've consented to it And that's how it's happened so far in courts. But you could just close your eyes and be like, I refuseed to look. About twenty years ago There was a guy named Terry Harrington who had been convicted of a murder back in the seventies and had always always denied that he was part of it. He always proclaimed his innocence. When this technology for the P three hundred event related potential came around, he reached out and said, do it to me because I wasn't even there. I'd never even been there before where the murder happened And Larence Farwell went there and tested the guy's brain, and sure enough, all the locations and information that only the murderer would have known any recognition signal in the guy's brain. Here's the problem though, they didn't bring it to court because all they did is they confronted the witness who had Finger him It was this guy Hughes who said, Ohh yeah Harrington did it They came to the guy and they said, you know, we just did this brain scan and like, he passed. He wasn't there that night And the guy went Oh Um, Well I Can I recant becausecauseuse I actually lied. Wow. So the witness recanted. thirty years later, wow. And the guy was released. That's incredible. So it wasn't because of the P three hundred brain scan.ure. But this was in Iowa, by the way. The Iowa courts said that They would consider that evidence admissible However, it wasn't necessary for them to reverse his conviction. But then in a lot of ways, this is going back to your trial by ordeal thing, right? which is if the P three hundred test, if it's so good at detecting whether you recognize a piece of evidence an individual, whatever it might be, only innocent people would ever want to go through that Yeah, right? Surely the neuroscience machine will vindicate me Now, ever since that Iowa case, a lot of other courts have said that P three hundred scans are inadmissible If the defendant really wants to do it, then that's their right. I see. They can divulge whatever. They can say whatever they want but they cannot be compelled to say or be scanned in the brain against their will. But there isn't a constitutional amendment about this. It comes down to what different courts have decided in different contexts. Did you see the paper twenty twenty three, I think it was, where admittedly with willing volunteers, there was a group of scientists who managed to reconstruct images participants were looking at while they were in an FMRI scanner. I hope we'll be able to put a few of these pictures up on the screen, but it's phenomenal how close these images were. So people were given certain images to look at and just purely based on the readout from the FMRI, having been trained on Tens of thousands of images in the past, these algorithms were able to reconstruct what they were looking at with really, really incredible accuracy. I looked into this in a minefield episode. Oh yeah. And yeah, the idea is that, well, if I'm just looking at your brain activity, even really vaguely, even with like an EEG, MRI is better. But if I do this and I just show you a bunch of images and I know which ones you're looking at Over time, I can learn to associate certain activities with certain colors and certain shapes and certain faces. and you do this ten thousand times You can start to show the person something and you don't even know what it is, but you look at the activity and a computer algorithm can go, I think they're looking at a question mark On Minefield, we looked even a step further, which is well, we should be running this on someone's brain while they're dreaming. Because then we will be able to create on a computer screen they are seen in their dreams And did you Maybe. The problem is people don't really remember a whole lot about their dreams. Okay. So you wake them up and you go, wereere you dreaming about a tomato? And they're like, I don't, maybe yeah, there was something red and you're like, o, maybe we did it. Okay. We certainly don't know that it looked exactly the way it did on the computer. Oh, I'd like the idea of having a high res replay of my dream. Wouldn't that be amazing? It would be c One of the problems is that Dreams aren't necessarily a movie being played in your head. I think in a lot of ways, they're a collection of feelings and recollections and information being arbitrarily moved around and stored or not And then when you wake up, I think you can fabulate a lot of what that dream was. Stitch it together. Stitch it together and it makes sense and then you remember it very differently than it was when it happened So that's the biggest problem for this like recording people's dreams idea if we're able to figure out what you're dreaming about or what you're looking at or what you saw in the past Well then shouldhould we be allowed to use that as evidence against you But if the P three hundred thing is anything to go by, then the answer is no. Yeah. There is something special about your thoughts. There is something special about what's going on in your mind. That's right. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think we should protect People's thoughts And by extension, today, I think that we should protect what's on their phones because it's basically just a prosthetic brain And if your case requires breaking into someone's private mind or private phone, then you have a good enough case. But then hold on, you said a Google search is you're putting something out there in the world. Don't you think putting something in a phone is putting something out? Okay here Okay, todayod, I believe that yeah, I think that eventually we're going to need to have a much clearer idea. of just how private someone's phone is. becausecause while legally, it seems to be the case that pretty much all courts are agreeing that your passcode is protected and you don't have to give it. Your phone itself is not So if the police take the phone and you refuse to give them your password or your like symbol or whatever, they can still take it down to headquarters and hack into it And that's completely allowed That's not a violation of your Fifth Amendment right. Okay, sorry, Matthew bosses. We might give you incorrect advice earlier. Yeah, right. should I should have mentioned that. Yeah. Now they're coming from our families so. That makes it feel a little complicated because in that case, the P three hundred, is it equivalent to pelling testimony against myself Or is it the same as them just like looking around in my house with a warrant Could they get a warrant for my brain Because maybe there will be a point in the future where you can and where you can sort of strap somebody to a gurney, make them you know, and St stick them in an FMRI scanner, watch what's going on inside their brain, reconstruct everything that they're thinking and feeling, show them images of the victim, see how they react to it and use that in order to really truly determine somebody's guilt. But know, maybe here's the thing about it. That sort feels pretty uncomfortable to me in a lot of ways. But at the same time, I think we do need to ask ourselves, what is the point of a judicial system, right? Because all of these techniques that we have of like juries and reasonable doubt the Fifth Amendment are all constructed because We're in a situation where you don't have access to the ground truth of somebody's guilt or innocence. You have no real way, no real real way of accessing what actually happened. But if what you're know describing here of like getting a warrant for somebody's brain, if suddenly there were a way to be absolutely sure, I mean, I'm sed playing Devil's advocate here, but maybe all of the other stuff is unnecessary Yeah And you know what? if we could accurately search people's brains and issue warrants for a search like that. A lot fewer innocent people would be punished or convicted. The problem then becomes M They can look into my brain They'll find that I didn't commit the crime that I'm charged with, but they might also find someome embarrassing thoughts I've had or some other crimes I've been a part of So I don't know how they would have to devise these brain searchers to like you're only allowed to search memories from this time to this time And you're only allowed to look at their memories involving u this particular glove, you know, I think we can we can concoct a technique in our minds that is satisfactory to us. But at the moment, it's very nascent. Like this technology is only so good. Absolutely. And that's predominantly why courts have been turning down P three hundred scans because it's just still too unknown how accurate it really is. I do also think on the other side of that same argument, right? I do actually think that a lot of our society works because of the assumption that not every time that a law is broken is that law enforced. You know Imagine if there was a system where Automatically every single time you broke the speed limit, you would immediately get a fine, right? It becomes a real totalitarian state almost immediately. We live in a world where actually there is quite a lot of leeway, there is fuzziness around the edges, there is randomness, there is noise, and we're kind of a bit more comfortable with that. Yeah. But if we yeah, as soon as we've got a really accurate way Determ Determine guilt by scanning your brain Th then it's going become a hat that everyone has to wear. And as soon as you commit a crime, boom. we already know you did it. know you did it. You would no longer have to have juries or judges. It would just be like st. Thank. You were speeding or yeep, you had an unclean thought. But at the moment, thoughts aren't crimes. There's one case where your thought is quite relevant to the court, of course. I mean, the most obvious one is intent, mensrea.. You can't just have done something wrong. You have to have known that you were doing something wrong and you have a guilty mind other way is Let's say fantasizing about committing a crime Not a crime But it can be relevant to a court if I'm already in prison for the crime and I'm up for parole And they're like, look, do you still fantasize about committing this crime? If I'm like, Yeah, I do, actually, then I probably won't get parole., But is that not in part because the Joma parole board is at least in part to try and work out your chance of committing another crime if you're Exactly Eactly. And you fantasizing about doing something is a strong indicator Perhaps that you may do it when' given the opportunity. That's right. But if I said that I fantasize about committing acts of vandalism every night, I'm not currently in prison for vandalizing anything. so it's okay that I do But I do, by the way, I've mentioned this on the podcast. Like instead of counting sheep, I imagine how I would sneak in and vandalize the Hollywood sign It like I did that hike a lot and so I know like where the cameras are and I know where the paths are and I keep thinking Oh and I know what color to wear based on like the color of the grass So basically I'm planing out this whole vandalizing crime every night. But that's not bad. and't it doesn't hurt my life, It doesn't get me in trouble. But if I already was in prison for vandalizing the Hollywood sign and I kept admitting that I was fantasizing at night about it then there's a problem. I'd probably have to keep serving my time in prison. What's good here is that we've learned that that's a thought that you were happy to be within a YouTube video because you just said it on a YouTube video. Yeah Right Then when it comes to knowledge, another thing that I was really interested in was is there anything that it's just illegal to know interestnterestingly There are things that you can be convicted of you didn't know But if you don't ask because you kind of suspect, then you've committed a crime, even though you don't know for sure. Yeah. So now we're going to talk about an emerging huge question in neuroethics, which is Hm, Okaykay, I can I'm a police officer. I can search someone's home if I get a warrant from a judge. What about a warrant for someone's brain That would certainly help us solve a lot of crimes, right? Yeah. If I could go, lookook, I can't compel you to say your password But I can take this little scanner out and go and find your password For example, I was reading about a school at like an elementary school in China where the children wear these headbands that vaguely measure brain activity. It's definitely not recording exactly what they're thinking, but it can give us information about how focused they are. And I think these began as a bio feeedback kind of thing where the kids can become more focused, they can get feedback on how focused their thoughts are and it's very meditative. But then you can also start using it to catch the kids that aren't focused during class. And it doesn't take much to imagine a world where we can collect more specific data from their brains and go, hey, you were thinking about cheating on this test. And so therefore I'm going to treat you differently And what do we do about that? We're not there yet. The technology hasn't yet forced us to bring this in front of a judge or a court, but I think we'll be there pretty soon. I think we'll be there pretty soon. There's a company who I went to go and meet in Brooklyn. where they are creating a set of headphones that around the padding of the earpiece is essentially the same technology which is measuring the brain waves as you can through the skull And the idea of using a very similar technology to your Chinese school, example, they can tell essentially how concentrated you are And kind of the main hope for this is that it's a little bit like a fitbit for your brain. So you want to concentrate more. It says you've concentrated for this many hours a day. It's like for your own information, your own personal information And I tried it and it was pretty good actually. And it was good that there was this learning element to the algorithm, right? So it would tell that you could feed in your other data like how well you'd slept and stuff and know how much hydration you'd had and what kind of music made you concentrate more. sort I can see where that's going But I also think that while this technology might have a really beneficial side that people and consumers want to get. As soon as that data is out there Right? It's like there's a very dodgy the Chinese school thing could easily happen within a corporate environment where they want to ensure that people are focusing. and if they're not focusing, they get fired. There' a very dark slippery slope. evenven before you get to. let's reconstruct people's thoughts. Oh, I know. yeah. imagine that your boss knocks on your door, Hey, Michael So I'm looking at your brain scans and you were having a lot of fun for two hours today. You shouldn't be having that much fun at work. And then they cut your hours or something. Yeah,. It doesn't take very much of a leap either to think about what you enjoyed doing with the feedback and oh, what's relaxing me Men suddenly The Coca Cola company says we'd like that data, we'd like to be able to say to Hannah, hey When you're hydrated, you're feeling good. So maybe you should buy a Coke because we're noticing that you're a little bit like less relaxed in your brain right now. And we can get like super targeted ads. Hey, Michael, you're feeling kind of frustrated by that thing that happened at work today. Some chocolate would help. Or you know Yeah it's like the TiTok algorithm, but blast, blast, blast, blast, blast. Yes, the TikTok algorithm, but instead of just knowing how long I've had a reel open or what buttons I've tapped, it actually looks at how my brain is reacting. And then things get pretty scary because I could even be told by a government by an advertiser, I know you don't think you like this Our analysis of your brain shows that you do enjoy it. So we're going to give you more of this. And I'm like, I don't want this and they're like, you do though at a subconscious level. So here you go Yeah, that's quite dark, isn't it? But it's also going back to the thing that you were talking about right at the beginning, you know, if you are buying products you're sort of voluntarily collecting this data for yourself. I mean, I wear one of the rings, right? that collects this kind of bio data for myself. I've worn the whoop and various other things in the past If you're kind of creating that data for yourself, buying the headphones, whatever, you're all being compelled to construct it. It was your choice to construct it, but I think that choice is probably made with the expectation of some kind of privacy. In fact, in that case U. S. versus Pain They specifically ruled that biometrics to unlock a phone. like I think in that case it was a thumbprint. is not testimonial especially because the parolee in that case had a diminished expectation of privacy So a lot comes down to what the person expects. I think we also are going to find ourselves hitting a wall which is Does the brain tell the truth? A scan might say that I recognize something Do I consciously recognize it? Here's where this is coming from. I just read Patricia Churchill's Conscience. It's a book about the evolution of the human conscience. I feel guilt and shame all the time, but as far as we know, Amadillos don't really seem to have as much of a concern for obeying their conscience. I mean an embarrassed armadillo is an embarass armadillo, I'm sure it can happen. Like I'm not going to take that dignity away from them But did how did this come about? Like we certainly know that rocks don't appear to have moral codes and feelings of guilt Anyway, I highly recommend the book. But one thing she talked about was that Brain scans that try to look for disgsed reactions to things like images that are shocking or or revolting. Your brain's reaction does not seem to correlate with people's reaction on surveys So you can show a person a photograph of like a guy with a mouthful of worms and they'll be either like, oh, oh, I hated that. And some are like, noah, I mean it's I wouldn't do it, butm not I'm not feeling like horrified horrified or uncomfortable But then their brains will show something different and willll be like, I don't know. you were spiking in your amygdala and your fear center and the person's like, I don't know what to tell you. And so it could be that there's multiple layers in the brain And which one we spy on really matters becausecause my brain might react with horror to something. But that doesn't become the salient feature in my awareness. You remember a few weeks ago we had a field note where someone was asking about consciousness and we were talking about whether there even is this single little humunculus inside of you, where there really really is like a single entity that is you or whether actually the sort consciousness that you feel is just an illusion of these different processes that are pulling in all sorts of different directions I do kind of wonder as we get further and further down this road whether actually this idea is going to splinter apart quite a bit and that maybe there is way more and simultaneously less to us than we ever thought imaginedable. Exactly. Yeah. I don't want to be held responsible because my brain involuntarily recognized a crime scene that I don't remember being at I can't control how it reacts to things. At least I feel like I can. So Yeah, boy, future lawyers and legal scholars out there, you've got your work cut out for you. I'll tell you one thing that would be quite good there if you can properly read people's minds I think we' realize just how weird all humans are I think the real weirdness of people I think people are still quite quiet quite private about how actually weird they are. Yes. Once we are able to collect lots and lots of data from your brain about what you're thinking and feeling, it's not going to clarify anything about ourselves. If anything, it's going to make us go, o, maybe I donon't love that person like I thought I did There's going to be so much information that it's good to make everything more difficult including human Privacy rights, so I think actually we go back to the Haliian days of the Lucy Goosey twelve hundreds. Yeah. well'll go back there. I mean, it was it's weird. Like there's a whole body of work around people admitting that like, you know what The trial by ordeal was kind of like very well suited for small communities There was almost like a An unspoken idea of like whether the person was guilty or not. But no one wanted to be the one to proclaim that person's innocence or guilt So they would intentionally like subconsciously rig up an ordeal that the person could pass or not depending on what the community sentiment was. And then when the person miraculously survived their ordeal that actually wasn't that hard to survive, they all went wh God solved it. We didn't have to none of us had to come forward and be the one that claim to the sentence. Let's go back to those days, I think As long as we're in small enough groups. Okay do. But in really big in really big societies, you develop this pererhaps you develop a need for an authority that can say guuilty or not and that's how it's going to be done. We just feel a little bit more comfortable about it when it's got a bit of fuzziness around. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah So I hope your brain is doing well out there. I do recommend using a passcode to lock up your phone. Yeah, I'm gonna to be changing mind immediately. If you do, if you switch to a passcode, just email us the passcode at the rest is science at gooldhanger. comot We will file it into our brains and promise never to speak of it on YouTube to your Catholic priests or mothers. Yeah