 I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. For those of you who have come off campus onto campus, welcome to the Australian National University. Before introducing our distinguished speaker for tonight's public lecture, I would like to make as the Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences here at the Australian National University a few introductory remarks regarding the motivation for hosting this lecture. This lecture is actually the culmination of a workshop that's been running this afternoon entitled Imminent Citizenships, Personhood and Identity Politics in the Informatics Age, organised by Dr Gavin Smith and hosted by the Research School of Social Sciences and the School of Sociology. And the workshop was about exploring the notion of what is citizenship in an age of extensive surveillance. Our capacity both to survey our own bodily functions, right through to surveillance of how institutions operate, is an important issue that needs serious debate on how we regulate and respond to this phenomenon. The expanding capacity of governments, institutions, corporations, criminal and terrorist groups, just to name a few, to collate data on a massive scale on all aspects of our world and then to rapidly examine thousands upon thousands of data points, has ramifications for us as individuals and as communities. The post-Snowden revelations in a global media environment should leave none of us in under any illusion as to how serious this issue is and the potential for unintended consequences. The ubiquitous presence of large-scale data or big data, as some people refer to it, being collected, often without us realising it raises questions about our rights and responsibilities within the ever-expanding collections made up of our personal data. A key question is, how far are we willing to tolerate the presence of surveillance in our lives? Last night, I attended a very interesting presentation by an eminent local criminal barrister. He was talking about forensic science and how it impacts on his work. He began by pointing out that at every moment of our lives, we are leaving markers about who we are, where we have been and what we have been doing. Did you know that when you use your mobile phone, as I do, as the alarm to wake me up in the morning, somewhere in the cloud is a record of that event? And so the surveillance of my daily life begins. And who knows who has access to that information and how it could be used? Interestingly, we are increasingly using technology to monitor our own bodily functions. How many of us have used those apps to see how we sleep during the night? How many steps we take each day? And how many of us have paid luminosity and measured our brain performance? Tonight's distinguished speaker, Professor Nicholas Rose, will focus our attention on the practice of mind reading, the attempt by neuroscientists to subject the brain to detailed analysis so that its contours and functions can be better understood and modulated. The ultimate aspiration for some is the development of technology that can access the thoughts of individuals as they process the past, engage the present and deliberate the future. There is no better person in the world to introduce us to this topic. Nicholas Rose is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine in the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King's College London. He's a co-director of the Centre of Synthetic Biology and Innovation, a major research collaboration between King's and Imperial College London. He's a member of numerous advisory groups and has also held high level academic posts at LSE and Goldsmiths. He's published widely in numerous fields and disciplines and as a young sociology student, I had read his earlier work and his work has been translated into 13 different languages. So it goes without saying that we and I am delighted to welcome to ANU Professor Nicholas Rose to discuss the mind transparent reading the human brain. Please join with me in welcoming Professor Rose. Well, many thanks to the Dean for that very generous introduction and thanks to Gavin Smith for bringing me here to Canberra. We've had a very stimulating afternoon of discussion, some terrific papers done by colleagues whom are here in the audience and compared to those papers, I'm afraid my presentation to you here this evening is going to be really rather simple minded and descriptive. To try and just outline to you some of the new technologies that are coming into existence, which have the objective of reading the mind through the human brain. So this work arises out of a question that's really the question that I've been focusing on for the last three decades, just one question. And that one question is the one I put up on the screen here. What kind of creatures do we think we are? Us contemporary human beings? How have we come to think of ourselves in this way? And with what consequences for how we're governed and how we govern ourselves? In my earliest work, I traced that out in relation to the rise of the psychological sciences to their role, social and political role, and to the ways in which they reshaped human subjectivity, opening up a deep psychological space within within each individual, the space of the psyche or the space of the mind. In my more recent work, I studied the emergence of somatic conceptions of the human being, the way in which so much of our fate and our beliefs in what mobilizes us on what we must look after now shaped around our somatic or corporeal existence. And in my most recent work with Joelle Abbey Rashad, published in a book called Neuro, which I published a year or so ago, I've tried to outline the emergence of a belief that identifiable neuro biological processes underline mental events, functions and activities to put it crudely and simply the belief that mind is what brain does. And what's emerging here, I suggest and I'm going to try and illustrate that through my talk this evening, is a new materialist ontology of the person. Now our philosophers, and maybe there are some of our philosophers in the audience, plates a great emphasis on the fact that despite the growing knowledge of the human brain, and its processes, there remains an explanatory gap. It is impossible to understand the way in which these physical, chemical, electrical, magnetic transformations in the tissues of the brain give rise to thoughts, to beliefs, to intentions. But despite this explanatory gap, and despite the many critiques of neuro reductionism, and the criticisms of philosophers that we're falsely attributing to the brain, those things that we should only attribute to the person, something is happening. And it's not uninteresting. Not the belief that mind is brain. But as I say, the belief that mind is what brain does, a refusal of that Cartesian distinction between the flesh and the spirit between the tissues, and the thought, and perhaps just perhaps, there's something that we might learn from that. The brain as a knowable molecular mechanism, despite the challenges of complexity, and emergent, we know a huge amount about each individual neuron about the structure of its membranes about its iron channels, etc. But what we're less able to do is to understand how those neurons work, if they're connected up into circuits, etc, etc, etc. But despite those challenges, the premise of contemporary neuroscience is that it must be possible, in principle, to identify neuro biological traces of all mental events. Now the word neuroscience, although it slips easily off our tongue these days was only invented in 1962. So there's about a half a century of neuroscience. But after the first 40 years of that neuroscience, that is to say around the late, the end of the last century in the beginning of this one, something significant happened. And that was neuroscience move from being a predominantly laboratory based discipline, to something that had salience in the world outside the laboratory. I've argued in the book I wrote with Joel Abbey Rashad that there were three key dimensions along which neuroscience moved out into the world. One was neurochemistry, you're all familiar with the psychiatric drugs that so many of us take, even though we really don't understand how they work, why they work or if they work, but that's a different question. The second is plasticity, the growing belief that our brains are plastic and open to environmental stimulation. I'm not going to talk about that today. And the third is visuality. And this is what I'm going to focus on today, the mind transparent. And of course, I'm doing this in the context of surveillance. And in fact, I should acknowledge that this paper began its life in a request from Gavin to write a small afterward to a collection that he was developing on surveillance and the body. Why not write something on surveillance and the mind? So he is entirely to blame for what you're about to receive. So here's the question. Do you know what I'm thinking? Do I know what you're thinking? Do they know what we are thinking? If you are reading Nature a couple of years ago, you might have come across this little item, terrorist pre crime detector field tested in the United States screening system aims to pinpoint passengers with malicious intentions. And this was reporting on a field study, a field trial of a kind of a technology developed by the US Department of Homeland Security called fast, which is a program which was designed to be installed in airports and stations and so on, to seek to detect those who had malicious intentions or mal intent, as it's often called. And here on the screen, I just take some shots from the Department of Homeland Security own description of this past technology, future attribute screening technology. And while you can probably get the idea from this little cartoon here, here's the potentially problematic individual wandering through the airport scanner. And there's someone sitting at the table behind there monitoring their attributes. And as this person walks through this little shielded system here, the fast system identifies whether or not they have malicious intent. In fact, as we'll see in a moment, this attempt to read intention into the mind of that individual is not based on these modern mind reading techniques. And I'll come back to that in a moment. But you can see the intent behind the intent to identify those who have malicious intent. My bro of its face reading, etc, etc, etc. If you are reading the Guardian in 2007, you'll come across this little item here in the Guardian science on neuroscience, the brain scan that can read people's intentions call for ethical debate over the possible use of new technology in interrogation. A team of world leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that enables them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act. The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists ability to probe people's mind, eavesdrops on their thoughts and raises serious ethical issues over how brain reading technology may be used in the future. And John Dylan Haynes, the neuroscientist who developed this technology says, quote, using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside, there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around looking for writing on the wall. The neuroscientists come turned ethicist Barbara Sahakian at the University of Cambridge said, and this is a repeated refrain. Do we want to become a minority report society where we're preventing crimes that might not happen? But some of these techniques, it's just a matter of time. And more recently, just this year, you might have read in the very same Guardian, a neuroscient, I built a brain decoder reporting on the work of a neuroscientist called Jack Gallant, who can find out what you're looking at by decoding your thoughts. Now, of course, humans have always had their methods for reading the minds of others. We read eyes, we read faces, we read gestures, we read comportment. It's taken for granted in everyday life. It's dramatized in novels and movies. And it's now theorized in social neuroscience. This notion of everyday ordinary mind reading, the capacity to attribute to you intentions and beliefs on the basis of my observation of you, is kind of what's necessary for human sociality. And actually, these techniques have also been turned technical in an interesting way, but I'm not going to talk about those today. What I want to focus on is these new technologies that claim to read thoughts and intentions in the brain itself, and the hopes that these can be deployed in a whole range of ecological niches. And most crucially, and these are the two that I'm going to focus on today, in clinical sites where individuals cannot express their thoughts and intentions in the quote, normal way, and in practices of prediction, preclusion, preemption, and prevention, all those P's with which we're surrounded these days. Now, as I've said, philosophers confronted by these new technologies agonize over the relations of mind and brain, the attribution to the brain of those things that properly belong to the mind or a embodied person or a distributed assemblage of person. Many of the researchers object to the epithet of mind reading, which is applied to their work, but nonetheless, they benefit from it, as we've seen by the popular representations. But most are untroubled by these concerns. They are premised, their work is premised on the belief that mind is what brain does. There must be identifiable material traces in the brain of mental events and dispositions, and that these might be, in principle, identified by new technologies of visualisation. And the question then is about how we should respond. And I want to suggest to you in this talk today that actually this new materialist ontology of the mind, this refusal of the distinction between mind and brain, although it does indeed raise problematic questions concerning surveillance, is actually perhaps a rather fundamental transformation in what we think we are as human beings. So here's the structure of the talk I'm going to give you. Firstly, I'm just going to run very, very quickly through what I've called the new engines of visualisation. Those of you who are neuroscientists who know about this, please forgive me, this is really a very rapid cook's tour just to explain to those who don't know what's kind of going on. I then want to look at three particular areas, deception, intention and thought identification. And I want to end by asking, so what and towards the end, I'm going to show you if the technology works, a few little videos and if time permits. So please excuse me, I've been travelling quite a lot over the last how many days or weeks or months it is and too much time in aeroplane so my voice is going. To see the mind in the living brain. How do we see the mind in the living brain? We know about the invention of x-rays. We know about the belief that with the x-ray and all the techniques of visualisation that followed it, the mind of the clinician could kind of wander around through the human tissues themselves. But the skull presented a pretty impenetrable obstacle to those x-ray technologies of visualisation. So in order to understand what was going on within the brain, something new or something different had to happen and what I'm going to show you very quickly in this little cook's tour as I said is the move from visualising structure to visualising function to visualising content and those three are very different in their epistemological underpinnings and I'm also just going to try and emphasise to you the crucial importance in many of these ways of thinking of localisation of the belief that functions will localise in particular areas of the brain because as we'll see later on when I get to it those ideas about localisation are absolutely crucial. All right well most of you I think will have heard of phrenology in the attempt to read human dispositions by feeling the bumps on the head associated with with gall and associated with sport time, the attempt to induce the interior from feeling around the exterior and phrenology has become a bit of a figure of fun but I think there are just two things that are probably worth pointing out about these images that are obviously familiar to most of us about where the different faculties like amativeness, attentiveness, concentration, combativeness are located in the skull and how they could locate in the brain and how they can be identified on the outside. The first is the thesis of localisation the belief that there were locations within the brain that were responsible for particular functions and secondly and this probably gets gets rather short shrift in our ways of thinking about phrenology the incredible risk that people like Gaul took in proposing this argument Gaul was a materialist he was an atheist he was drummed out of his job he was drummed out of his country he was forced into exile because he argued the brain was where thought was the brain was where the person was the brain not the soul was what had to be examined this thesis whoops that's not working this thesis of localisation was intensified in especially amongst German and French neurologists in the 19th century these names a vernica brokka fleshig will be familiar to any student who studied basic biology and certainly everyone who studied neuroscience who argued through looking at lesions in particular areas of the brain who argued that there were localisations of particular functions as now memorised in vernica's area and brokka's area in fleshig's area these areas where if they're damaged by insult or injury or stroke certain things fail to happen unable to speak unable to understand speak speech unable to form new thoughts etc etc etc of course the problem for brokka and fleshig and vernica was simply this that the only time they had access to the human brain was after the individual was dead when they could take the brain out and they could look at what was going on in the brain look at it in a rather gross kind of way and they could try and correlate the lesion with the function that that appeared to be disturbed and the other problem that brokka and his colleagues had is that the most of the brains they had available to them were the brains of people who died in lunatic asylums or who died as paupers or who died through execution hence brokka was one of the key people who founded the delightfully named Society for Mutual Autopsy in France in the late 19th century when beautifully studied by Jennifer Michael Hecht in this book called the end of the soul intellectuals in Paris joined together and agreed one with another that when any of them died they would give their brain for dissection by the others because of course if you only had the brains of criminals and lunatics and paupers to look at you would not understand the way in which the refined nature of the human brain was manifested in its in its structure as many many things that one can say about this this led to a whole lot of arguments about brain measurements the size of brains of people with different races the bigger size of brains of women the men the fact that many criminals seemed to have very big brains and was that because they're because they've been executed and something happened to their brain when they were executed the the argument that there's the the shape of the brain the wrinkles and curves on the outside of the brain were somehow indicated the refinement of the intellect that the the more refined the these these shapes on the brain whose names I've completely forgotten now excuse me I'm going a bit gargoyle the more refined the intellect again that proved to be unhelpful but the key thing I think that one wants to think that maybe goes beyond our amusement here is that Broca was an atheist and a materialist that's why this book by Jennifer Michael Hecht is called the end of the soul the radical thesis that they put forward was that there was no soul there was just brain for that they were vilified and for that their work was very highly criticized again they could only look at the brains of those who had died so what happened to try and make the brains of those who are still alive available to thought the first attempts were those like Walter Dandy a neurosurgeon who in a very painful procedure introduced air into the spinal cord which went up into the brain which enabled the visualization of the ventricles of the brain on on x-ray some of you may have heard of Egas Monitz who although he came to fame because of his work on the on frontal the bottom is actually got his Nobel Prize for this work on cerebral angiography which involved putting dye into the into the blood vessels in the brain which again enabled them to be visualized which enabled one to identify where anomalies and tumors and so on and so forth were another very painful procedure yes as I said you'll probably have heard of Egas Monitz from his work on the frontal lobotomy again the beginnings of a belief or the development of a belief that it was the brain itself that was at stake here the brain itself that was at stake in in psychiatric disorder some of you may have heard of the name of Walter Penn of Wilder Penfield who mapped out these wonderful pictures of the sensory areas on the on the cortex which he did when he was opening the skull of people who had intractable epilepsy in order to ablate the areas that he thought were going to be the foci of that epilepsy so again the only way you could get into the skull was in these very exceptional cases we begin to find ways of thinking about the living brain with the EEG with electroencephalography excuse me for that non-invasive reading of brain activity developed by Hans Berger in the 1920s really refined by Douglas by Edgar Douglas Adrian who got the Nobel Prize for this and other work which begins to be able to at least monitor activity in the brain in the brain of the living individual by putting the helmet with electrodes on it this will be rather significant a little bit later on but perhaps the things that we most identify with contemporary visualizations of the brain are CTs and MRIs and PET and FMRIs CT structural imaging of the brain by using computerized tomography to image repetitive slices of the brain and then put those slices together into a 3D image of the brain developed in the work of Alan Cormack and Jeffrey Newbold how this field in the 1970s and rapidly became an incredibly subtle and sophisticated way of imaging structure in the brain but perhaps for us the most significant change was the move from imaging structure to the move from imaging function it's one thing to image the tissue of the brain which is although difficult is a bit like imaging the tissue of the body but suppose you're trying to image the activity of the brain it might seem as if you're looking at the same kind of pictures but actually you're looking at something very different you're looking at proxy measures of activity in the brain in this case positive emit positron emission tomography the first version you're looking at areas in the brain that take up a radioactive ligand a radioactive material and their belief is that where brain activity is occurring more of this material will be taken up into the brain you image thought you image brain activity by looking at the take up into the brain of this proxy this substitute that stands in for brain activity when the because pet scanning is rather difficult because it involves creating radioactive ligands and you've got to have a cyclotron all sorts of rather complicated and expensive things in order to do that very short lived the technology that's become most popular now and probably the one that all of us have seen because there are hundreds of thousands of papers published in using this technology is fmri functional magnetic resonance imaging again it images a proxy it images blood oxygenation and deoxygenation in the brain and which has different magnetic properties oxygenated blood and non oxygenated blood you can capture those magnetic properties you measure the so-called bold response the blood oxygenation level response in the brain and you take that to be a proxy of activity this has become a very potent technique as we'll see in a moment but trying to understand what's going on in the living brain and then perhaps most recently these uses of functional near infrared spectroscopy which again look at the take up of blood in the brain in this case blood in the brain in the area very very close to the skull puts a light in here measures the light coming out and see whether or not oxygenated blood is being taken up in this brain this area of the brain now the advantage of this over this you can see in this this requires the individual to be chopped into a big scanner with a huge magnet and it's very very uncomfortable this can be done in pretty much normal circumstances individuals can wear these helmets and look here they are carrying out a relatively normal task and their brain activities are being monitored right now we're getting to the point of this because this particular paper on functional near infrared spectroscopy by Scott Bunce and his colleagues again argues for the crucial importance of nears as it's called makes this a viable option for the study of cognition and emotional related changes in both adults and children in either stationary or ambulant conditions but just look at the acknowledgement this work has been sponsored in part by funds from the defense advanced research project agency DARPA the augmented cognition program of the office of naval research on our own home and security under agreements etc etc etc to which we shall return okay now there are a host of scientific and technical questions in all these technologies not least because they all work on this basic thesis of localization they sit they attempt to find the low side the places in the brain where something is happening they're very crude because they the their resolution is very low hundreds of thousands of nerve cells and synapses are involved in every pixel or voxel of those images you see they use proxy measures of activity like uptake of blood or uptake of a radioactive material and in most cases they're done in highly artificial situations but perhaps over and above all those things that is this basic premise that mind is visible in the tissues of the brain we've moved from these gross studies of the brain like those in phrenology to looking at the molecules themselves and we've moved from structure to function and pretty soon as we'll see to the contents and what we're seeing taking shape here as I'm arguing is a new ontology despite the criticisms of many philosophers and others the belief that the technology the visualization itself demonstrates beyond question that mind is what brain does or rather at the very least that their objective material correlates to everything that goes on in that mental space okay I'm going to now move on to some of the uses of this I see by the way that there are some people standing uncomfortably over there and there are a few chairs over here so if any of you feel like I'll just take a drink of water and you can maybe find yourself somewhere a little bit more comfortable for the next half hour or so of course if you want to keep out of the gaze of the surveillance and the camera that you're into your absolutely free to do so now if you know about these technologies at all and I guess many of you will you'll probably have come mostly into contact with them in the area of deception or lie detection now we're familiar I think with the use of non brain reading modes of lie detection of the polygraph the polygraph which by the way is not admissible in most courtroom situations but is still used quite widely detects whether or not someone is lying or telling the truth or claims to do so by measuring the galvanic skin response by measuring the the conductivity of the skin then it looks at perspiration and things like that which increase or decrease the conductivity of the skin and there are various other technologies which we'll see in a moment which seem to do something the same what's happening as a result of the deployment of these technologies that appear to render mind visible in the brain has been the emergence largely by private entrepreneurial individuals standing rather outside the mainstream of neuroscience the emergence of a number of claims that it is possible to use these technologies for lie detection so here's the first one which is the most well known and the most parodied and no lie MRI no lie MRA a new truth verification technology no lie MRI provides unbiased methods for the detection of deception and other information stored in the brain as you might guess the clue is in the the clue is in the title it uses fMRI use functional magnetic resonance imaging to image areas of the brain that are active when an individual is asked to carry out a certain task or given a question have you seen this did you do that have you seen this before etc etc and claims base is based on the claim that different areas of the brain are activated when the individual is lying and when the individual is telling the truth I don't know how well you can see that but you can probably see that what the claim is is that when an individual is lying these red areas where they would be red wouldn't they cause red danger they'd be the coloration of the brain in fMRI is entirely conventional it's it's entirely conventional that you color some things red and some things blue rather than green and orange or whatever it happens to be so you can change all the images as you like and you can quote dial up a defect by changing the color scheme but that's by the bye for the moment and the blue areas like when the individual is telling the truth here is no lie MRI which bypasses conscious cognitive processing and measures the activity of the central neuro nervous system rather than the peripheral nervous system which is what the polygraph does it goes straight to the brain the brain it is claimed cannot lie this is the other technology which is used in in deception this is the so-called P 300 technology this is a technology which you can possibly see I don't know how well you can see that image there but this lady here is wearing an EEG type helmet a helmet that picks up her brain waves and it is argued that when an individual recognizes something this P 300 a very specific brain wave is activated at the moment of recognition have you seen this terrorist training camp before do you recognize this bomb making manual have you seen this weapon before have you seen this crime scene before if you have if you've shown the picture and you have seen it before or shown or given the word and you've seen it before the P 300 wave is activated so this is work done by Larry Falwell who has a very ebullient website let's just call it call it that an ebullient website it's got a lot of information about Dr. Falwell and his history and his and his abilities it claims it claims that this technology has been accepted in the in the United States court system although I don't actually think that claim is entirely true it's it's provided highly accurate results in over 200 tests including tests on FBI agents and tests sponsored by the CIA and the US Navy and Falwell suggests that its uses include identifying terrorists and memory of a training camp reaction to a code word bomb making procedures and so on so it's not surprising that as Melissa Littlefield has shown in her historical work on this lie on brain based deception technologies deception identification technologies that much of this early work has been sponsored by the US security agencies by the CIA by Homeland Security and that that radically increased after 9 11 but as I said these lie detection technologies a bit like the polygraph have not proved acceptable in the court system why because what is a lie is a deliberate falsehood a lie is an accidental falsehood a lie is a white lie a lie is a mistake a lie all these fundamental questions about what it is to tell the truth are not actually evaded by these technologies that goes straight to the brain actually these technologies have had some impact in the court in Europe where they've been promulgated very actively by some neuroscientists seeking to make a name for themselves and in some cases the judges and the jurors seem to have accepted them there's a famous case in India as the whose name is just suddenly flown out of my head for which which forgive me where the claim was that someone Aditi Sharma Aditi Sharma forgive me for having a lapse only I could read my brain that'd be great Aditi Sharma was convicted on the basis that she had guilty knowledge of the site where the crime of particular murder had taken place there was much publicity when she was convicted using a detection a deception technology something like the P300 wave there was much less publicity when she was released from jail on on bail on the grounds that her conviction was probably insecure and in most jurisdictions the courts and the legal systems have been very wary of these devices which only tried and tested in highly artificial laboratory environments where individuals are instructed to lie or tell the truth it's because you're instructed to lie or tell the truth that they can work out these correlations and in most real life situations especially when you've got an al-Qaeda agent or a or a hardened criminal whatever it happens to be those are the people who are most likely to be able to employ the techniques in order to to disable these detection technologies it's not to say that they're not going to be used anywhere because the courtroom especially the British and the American courtroom system and I think the Australian system where there's a conflict between the defense and the prosecution and the and where different expert witnesses are brought into play to criticize one another and where the judges rule over this adversarial system courts have proved rather good at defending themselves against and interrogating the viability of these technologies but like the polygraph it's outside the courtroom it's in the investigative procedures themselves or maybe it's employment procedures or maybe it's in industry or maybe it's in the military those are the places where these technologies are likely to find their handholds and that's what we see with the polygraph how about intentions well I showed you at the beginning this fast technology and I said well actually this was not a brain reading technology because fast technology is based if it works at all on reading these physiological signs on reading cardiovascular respiration eye movement body movement on reading faces and on in inducing from those external signs inducing from those external signs what's going on in the interior so despite all the arguments about it it's not really doing the job that brain reading claims to be doing so let's return for a moment to this claim by John Dylan Haynes and colleagues that I showed you right at the beginning the brain scan that can read people's intentions a minority report society it's like shining a torch inside the skull and seeing what's there there's something interesting about the way in which these claims are reported a kind of fascination and a dread that we could actually read mind in the brain and despite the fact that I'm going to argue if I get there towards the end of my talk that something interesting is going on I think it's really important that we keep our critical faculties alert so what did John Dylan Haynes and his colleagues actually do in this sleepwalking into a minority report society they took eight volunteers and they gave these volunteers a particular task they asked them that they had to decide whether they were going to be shown two numbers they were in a MRI machine fMRI machine and they were going to be asked to decide themselves whether or not they were going to add or subtract those two numbers they were scanned with an fMRI which focused on the media prefrontal cortex and in two thirds of the cases after the experiments had taken place researchers looked at the scans and they found that they could predict whether the subject would add or subtract on the basis of the brain region that was activated eight subjects instructed to add or subtract two numbers in a scanner in two thirds of cases after the experiment the researchers could predict okay so there are a lot of experiments on volition that looks something like this and they are clearly a very long way away from what might one what one might consider to be intentions in the real world and I think when you read those headlines in the paper you need absolutely to keep your critical faculties about you but nonetheless something interesting is happening here the idea that intentions have legible traces in the brain alright this is a silly little experiment it's a very simple experiment it's using a technology which as I said has many problems with it using a very crude proxy for brain activity but nonetheless a thought leaves a visible trace in the brain those who do this work for for a living as it were are quite hostile often to the idea of mind reading they don't like that they think that well of course they profit from it because it gives good headlines and their universities can can issue press releases which get a lot of publicity in the media but they prefer the term thought identification is it possible to identify thought in the brain if you looked at the National Geographical magazine about six months ago I actually saw this in my dentist's surgery it's an introduction to a new science of the brain so you might ask yourself why in this introduction to a new science of the brain you are seeing 64 pictures or something of Jennifer Aniston does your brain have a Jennifer Aniston neuron neurons in your brain adapt to particular recurring stimuli which is why your head contains at least one specialized neuron that reacts specifically to images of Jennifer Aniston this is Professor Christoph Koch and he's explaining to his audience here that why there is a particular area in the brain a particular neuron each particular neuron that has reacted in a specialized way that in a sense contains the memory and in this case the memory of Jennifer Aniston he's saying not of course not everybody has a Jennifer Aniston neuron but nonetheless the belief that every memory is encoded in a localized spot within the brain that can be then identified by Professor Koch here so this is another index of thought identification I'll tell you what it said what's going to happen and then if the video doesn't work we're not lost anything you can see what the video is going to be because there they are on the video and this is a study which was done by Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon and they did an experiment where there are subjects to think about 10 objects five of them tools like screwdriver and hammer and five of them dwellings like igloo and castle and they then recorded and analyzed the activity in the subject's brain for each and this is what Marcel just said the computer found the place in the brain where that person was thinking screwdriver screwdriver isn't one place in the brain it's many places in the brain when you think of a screwdriver you think about how you hold it how you twist it what it looks like what you use it for oh no that was a style sorry just explain when we think screwdriver or igloo for example neurons start firing at various levels of intensity in different areas in the brain and we found that we could identify which object they were thinking about from their brain activation patterns we're identifying the thought that's occurring it's incredible just incredible he added is it worth me trying this let's see what's kind of interesting here is the fact that this is term mind reading it's cool thought identification it's for the first time in human history we're able to identify exactly what's going on in the brain when person thinks a specific thought not just when an area of the brain is activated because you're emotional because you're fearful of a specific thought in this case screwdriver or igloo and it's the dean said right at the very beginning about the crucial power of very power of data mining technologies so this uses very powerful data mining technologies to begin to work through those masses and masses and masses of images in order to identify those thoughts here's another one what the brain sees versus what the eye sees mind eyes so this was another experiment done by Jack Gallant who I showed you right at the beginning and Shinji Nishimoto and they claim to be able to reconstruct movies using only the results from brain imaging using a modified version of the bold response what they did was they showed people trailers of movies they did the fMRI scan they looked at the bold response that the individual had in specific areas of the brain and they sought to reconstruct from those brain images exactly what the person was seeing well it's not too great really is it but nonetheless isn't that kind of interesting and what does that indicate to you about the materiality of the thought itself here's something else mind-boggling science creates computer that can decode your thoughts and put them into words researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words so here is a case where individuals were given a number of words I don't think you'll be able to read this as it happens these were individuals who are undergoing brain surgery they had a number of electrodes implanted into their brain they were given a number of words and they listened to the individual speaking those words a computer program analyzed how those were being processed in the brain and afterwards the computer process was capable of reproducing the word that the individual had heard or some of the words that the individuals had heard from brain activity itself 15 people 256 electrodes only 47 words but nonetheless something which is not uninteresting it seems to me and of course here although we've been talking a lot about the security implications here this first application of this technology is not for the security implications it's for understanding what might be going on in the brains of individuals who are in persistent vegetative states that is to say individuals who clinicians cannot identify as having consciousness and in this work much publicized by Adrian Owen and his group it became possible to identify consciousness in a small number of patients who were in those persistent vegetative states as you can see they use brain imaging technologies here in order to read the brain what did they do they said to these patients right if the answer to the question I'm going to ask you is yes think of yourself as walking through your house if the answer to the question I'm going to give you is no think of yourself as playing a game of tennis these activate very different areas of the brain the spatial and the whatever people do when they play tennis tennis imagery kind of indicated there and then they would ask in particular this particular patient Scott are you in pain if you're in pain activate one area if you're not in pain activate another area and learn behold they were able for the first time to communicate with this patient in persistent vegetative states okay again the activity of the brain itself seems to be sufficient to answer a question thought seems to be inscribed in the tissues of the brain itself use caused major ethical issues actually for the patients families who suddenly now believe that their loved one on a life support machine has consciousness it exacerbates the ethical choices that they have to make for the clinicians who can no longer rely on the normal technologies that they have in order to see whether there's consciousness and for all those around who have to decide whether patients in a persistent vegetative state are to be kept on life support on life support machines it's not easy it requires this very complicated technology and it's not possible for all patients to be able to do it but nonetheless it's kind of interesting now those examples that I've give you that I've shown you demonstrate I think very clearly the dual use capacities of these technologies on the one hand in clinical situations in situations of patients with persistent vegetative state or in situations where patients have spinal cord injuries and they're unable to move their limbs harnessing the intentions and thought in the brain itself seems to have although not unproblematic very significant ethical very significant clinical advances and yet on the other hand if we go back to the other uses of these we can see that they have major security interests so let's just go back to DARPA and you can see here I think just from the quotes that I put on the screen the investment that DARPA that's the defense and allied research projects agency of the United States which of course invests in a load of pretty crazy things anything that's possible it will invest in but it's certainly absolutely and crucially interested in these projects of using the mind to control artifacts to control prostheses and in fact the other way around in perhaps reading brain signals in real time to to control robotic devices to control drones and to control all sorts of other kinds of things now I just want to pause for this just before I get to my conclusion on this little bit of this slide down here amongst the many things that I do in my current strange role where I moved from being Michel Foucault nihilist to an advisor on social and ethical issues in so many in so many areas of emerging biotechnologies I'm a member of the social and ethical division of the human brain project the human brain project funded by 1.3 billion euros from the European Commission aims to produce a simulation of the human brain neuron by neuron in a neuromorphic computer the human brain project has set its face very firmly against military funding and argues that it doesn't want any of its work to be used for military implications shortly after the human brain project was launched president Obama started to fund his brain initiative his brain initiative is funded 40% by the defense and allied research project association this project of brain reading mind control whatever you like to call it is part of that brain initiative DARPA is collaborating with the National Institute of Health the National Science Foundation and soliciting program proposal from various research teams to be able to do this work so there are just some of the images that you'll get from DARPA this is a brain reading technology on a particular cockroach this one here is attempt to identify and strengthen brain resistance to sleep deprivation this one here is using monkey implants to move a joystick just by thinking so these are some of the projects that are currently being funded by DARPA so what to just conclude is this mind reading well many object to the term but these are indeed technologies for identifying accessing and using mental events specific thoughts specific mental objects specific intentions clearly these developments are in their infancy but something is happening they are not innocent they emerge because of a intersection between clinical demands forensic demands security demands and the aspirations of neuroscientists to understand more and more and more about what's going on inside the brain the brains located at this intersection of ways of knowing of ways of visualizing forms of expertise and strategies of intervention certainly these technologies are dual use technologies and that raises an ethical conundrum for us because the more for instance that we divert these technologies for looking into the minds of patients in persistent vegetative states the more they will be able to be used in military and security contexts nonetheless I think that something as I said right at the beginning which is not unimportant is happening here these technologies are both premised on and they claim to demonstrate a certain materialism beyond dualism that mind is what brain does a new way of thinking about what goes on inside the person beyond the objection of the philosophers it seems that the technology itself is shaping the way in which we're coming to understand human beings of course these are highly individualistic technologies the brain alone but not the brain in the body not the brain in relation to others brains not brains in the world these thoughts these intentions these beliefs these lies seem to exist in the isolated brain in a vat and maybe that's one area where we'll want to direct a certain cynicism skepticism and criticism towards the claims that are being made nonetheless since I've gone on far too long already I'll just close by say something is happening here we can chart how it's come into existence and indeed a lot of my work up until now has been doing that historical that genealogical charting looking at the rules of the game which have brought these things into existence but also I think it's important to be focused on the stakes here can brains think can brains know must we still suppose a mental realm that's different in substance different in extension from the brain or perhaps is there something which we need to affirm in this new materialism a new ethics a new way of thinking about brains and persons and if we do think about brains and persons in this new materialistic way what would be the implications I think we're just at the beginning of something which is quite interesting and so perhaps the more we can try and understand it the more we have a possibility of shaping the way in which it develops with apologies for going on for so long but I blame the movies thank you very much for your attention thank you very much because even though we've gone over time I hope you'll take a couple absolutely yeah so would anyone like to ask a question I really enjoyed that I just wanted to ask I guess it's a question you were raising at the end there this sort of quality implications and I like the fact that you went from so I guess you seem to have a precise historical genealogy going on but then you were also raising children around the states as there was a more logical kind of question there about the new materialism and I guess just returning to the starting questions that you raised about you know what kind of thing we consider ourselves as humans how have we come to do consider ourselves as that kind of thing and what kinds of reasons and I just wondered if you could say anything more about the implications not so much of the uses of these technologies but what says about assistive things so for example you know I'm thinking you know someone like Justice Stigl would say well what it says to us is that we're always already technological we're always defined by a leg and yet science I think sort of uses it as evidence about mastering something so just yeah those of you know my work know that I was quite influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and he was sensible enough to focus his attention on things that had happened 150 years ago when it was kind of a bit clearer what was going to turn out as I said to in our workshop today we're right in the middle or something or rather we don't even know if we're right in the middle of something we're right at the beginning of something right at the beginning of something when I started doing this work on the neurosciences my view was that neuroscience was already displacing psychological understandings of human beings and in fact you find that's not the case what's happening is that neuroscience is beginning to provide an account or what they what is argued to be an adequate account of the neurobiological underpinnings of those things that we think of as psychological and those neurobiological underpinnings seem to have seen in a way to respond to that criticism of the science sciences that they lack objectivity because of the supposed objectivity of the forms of visualization although if we had much longer we could talk about the way in which that objectivity is highly artfully produced so I think something is happening here it's certainly not that we are seen as puppets of our brains it's certainly not that we are fated by our brains fated to a certain destiny by our brains as I said right at the very beginning when I was talking about these three pathways another crucial thing that is happening in neuroscience is the recognition that the brain is perhaps the most modifiable organ of the whole body that the brain develops from the moment of from the moment of conception even if not before that you are what your mother at and all that kind of thing in a kind of constant transaction with its milieu with its internal milieu with the body with the guts with the muscles with the sense sensorium and with the world outside and with other brains and cultural artefacts and so on so contrary to those who argue that neuro reductionism was going to lead to a complete kind of elimination of those kinds of hopeful ideas actually these ideas about the brain in the world and the brain has modified in the world are beginning to reshape not only what we think about our biology but also what we think about ourselves so I wish I had a better answer to your question at the end of about six years work Joelle, Abby Rashad and I at least could pose the question but I don't think we were able to answer it so maybe come back in a hundred and fifty years and I'll be able to answer it Excuse me I'd like to pick up a bit on that question and say I have seen a glimpse of the future that relates to this and I want to go back to your government solve and what I do professionally is around the area of emotional competencies and so what I've seen that we came out of what you're writing in government solve is this change that's starting to occur in workplaces where the idea that emotional competency is now so critical that because it has such a you can now put a dollar amount attached to it in organizations so you start to see a future that we have some real emotional competency and I want to get good jobs and then you start to say well how do I get good emotional competency and you start to see the rise of the coaching industry and one of the aspects of the coaching industry of the coaching industry is the neuroplasticity so I mean neuroplasticity has become a way of reframing a whole series of other interventions actually they just in a sense it's just a translation of the hopes of psychological transformation into neurobiological transformation and if you look on the internet you don't have to look very far you see all these harnessed neuroplasticity for personal growth harnessed neuroplasticity for increasing your intellect parents should work on their children to use the capacities of their plastic brain etc etc etc what's happening here to quote the title of a book whose author I can't currently remember is a kind of move from soul to brain but not a fatalistic move the belief that all those things you could do in the soul you can now do under brain I've been interested I had a research student who did work on emotional abuse which has become certainly in the UK one of the leading reasons why children are taken away from their parents not physical or sexual abuse but emotional abuse then the argument arises emotional abuse can be demonstrated by brain scans you can actually see in the brain of the child the physical marks of emotional abuse also you see a big argument in the UK at the moment about the consequences of early childhood deprivation on the brain showing apparently objectively here is the brain of a child who's been stimulated adequately by its parent here is the brain of a child who hasn't so something is happening here often one wants to be very critical of the way in which those images are deployed but nonetheless over and above all those criticisms one is beginning to see the brain playing a crucial part in all sorts of social and political explanations and reciprocally as it were neuroscientists aspiring to that capacity or to that status of experts in management of childhood in management of a whole series of affairs that used to be the province of the psychologist this is kind of remarkable as I say neuroscientists got its name in 1962 for the first 40 years it was a matter of the laboratory so something happened really rather quickly around the turn of the millennium in which neuroscience suddenly moved out into the world in those areas that you're talking about and a whole lot of others I think too earlier forms of brain imaging which often compare different types of people are struck by how the technologies that you showed us were quite universalizing when they talk about human brain and they seem to suggest that we're all sort of alike in some sense so I wonder whether you think in that that more traditional forms of categories of types of people like gender and race and so forth whether they're becoming less salient and especially in the sort of surveillance a short answer to that question is no but to really answer that question you need to back up a bit and say quite a lot about how these images are produced so and that would take too long but I'll just say it as quickly as I can okay so when you see these images of a brain scan or whatever the implication is that you are seeing the pattern of activity in the actual structure of the brain of the person who is being scanned that unfortunately is almost always a mistake what happens is that you take a readout of activation in voxels in a three dimensional space in a box okay your head's in the scanner the voxels are in a three dimensional space in a box they don't actually know what the structure is of your brain if your brain is in the scanner so what they do is they warp or they shape these images onto a standard brain space a standard brain space in a standard brain atlas and the standard brain atlas is a kind of average of the configuration of the normal brain or a normal brain that was cut up and dissected ages and ages ago seems to identify where the parietal lobes are where the amygdala where the hypothalamus is and so on and so forth okay now those standard atlases are being disputed in Japan there is an argument that there should be a different atlas for the Japanese brain there are arguments that these brain atlases which were developed many years ago now are completely inadequate to the new technologies one of the aspirations of the human brain project is indeed to create a new brain atlas so this idea that there is a single standard brain is in a sense a temporary holding place on the other hand it's a holding place that is built very deep into the technologies that are a part of these brain scanners in the words of Bruno Latour there's an awful lot that's black box especially in the way in which the algorithms are developed to process the voxels into something like the image that you see in front of you that could be a much longer explanation but what there are now are increasing attempts to look at the brains to do scans of the brains of people in China people in Japan, people in India to begin to demarcate and differentiate and so on and so on and so forth and let the brain speak for itself you know the argument is that we don't have to impose our own classificatory system the brain will tell us what classifications are pertinent so there's a huge, not a huge, overestimation there's a lot of rather interesting work to be done to look at the ways in which these images are being developed the assumptions that are in them and the way in which they are being deployed and also to look at the way in which contemporary neuroscience is transforming them but as I said, we're in the middle of something we can be critical, we can be skeptical we can subject a lot of these arguments to critique we can show quite convincingly that the hype and the claims of the scientists are not justified by the experiments that they've done all that is important work to be done we mustn't lose our critical faculties but we shouldn't, it seems to me throw the baby out with the bathwater and be so defensive against these new ways of thinking about ourselves that are coming into existence we should perhaps see if there's something interesting in this new materialist ontology of the human and for those who want to have a kind of authoritative guru in order to challenge the dualism if you read some of the work of Gilles Deleuze on the brain you will see exactly an attempt to move away from that Cartesian dualism which differentiates between the brain and thought and argues about the radical potential of recognizing that brain and mental activity are not two separate realms but they're two aspects of exactly the same substance and on that very long answer to your question non-answer to your question, I'll stop thank you