psydoc8

People who are thinking about killing themselves appear to have distinctive brain activity that can now be measured by a computer.

In these people, words like “death” and “trouble” produce a distinctive “neural signature” not found in others, scientists report in the journal Nature Human Behavior. More than 44,000 people commit suicide in the U.S. each year.

“There really is a difference in the way [suicidal] people think about certain concepts,” says Marcel Just, an author of the paper and the D. O. Hebb professor of cognitive neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University.

That difference allowed a computer program to distinguish people who thought about suicide from people who did not more than 90 percent of the time. It also allowed the computer program to distinguish people who had attempted suicide from people who had only thought about it.

Brain Patterns May Predict People At Risk Of Suicide

Also means we gotta start thinking about the potential - and dangers - this could pose. One sticky question: Can this be used as evidence in court? What if they run a brainscan and it says, “yeah, this guy has really murderous brain-patterns”? Will police need a warrant to do a brainscan? Or even for just general mental health, do we allow doctors to routinely probe our subconscious in ways we can’t control?

Lot of potential for good, but gotta consider the whole picture.

Former state and federal prosecutors urging the Supreme Court to invalidate Timothy Foster’s conviction because of “blatant prosecutorial misconduct.” They point to study after study showing that when it comes to getting rid of racial discrimination, the current system doesn’t work.

Supreme Court Takes On Racial Discrimination In Jury Selection