#brain activity map

Is the government on the way to reading our minds?

In February of this year, a program, known as BAM (Brain Activity Map), was planned by the Obama administration that seeks to map the human brain. What does this mean, you ask? Psychologists are currently trying to identify what people are thinking (referred to as thought identification in lieu of the term "mind reading"), in real-time, by creating a map of the inner workings of the brain. A professor from Colombia, Rafael Yuste, says that the model will not be a "static" model that simply shows how neurons connect with each other, but rather a "functional" model that will show each individual action of every cell. I don't know about you, but to me the thought that someone could theoretically look into my brain and know what I'm thinking without my consent is a bit sketchy. There are some positive aspects of this program, including the possibility that it will shine more light onto the subject of incurable diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and improve our understanding of said diseases, but at what cost? There are opposing views as well, and two major concerns with the plan. The first common concern is money. If the government is already in debt, how are they going to find the resources to allocate $300 million for a decade to this project? Many psychologists are concerned that money will be reappropriated in the neuro fund from other smaller projects in order to accommodate the brain mapping project. Other scientists fear that money from all scientific fields will be redistributed to accommodate for the program. This could be a major drawback to the scientific field and could unintentionally significantly hinder the evolution of science. Even if the government did find money, or redistribute funds, in order to research this project, there is the possibility that it would fail, like numerous other projects including ENCODE.

Whenever I would watch a Brewers game and Ryan Braun would knock yet another ball out of the park, I would sit there and as myself, "What if I played baseball?  That teeny ball is going way to fast... I would strike out every time."  And then I would get sad because yet another unrealistic and crazy dream of mine was shot down.  But the real question is: how is Braun able to track a small object traveling at a high speed?

According to the article linked above, scientists might have the answer.

(Brewers player Ryan Braun)

At UC Berkeley, vision scientists conducted study that revealed that the brain has the ability to predict the path of a moving object, even a high speed object such as a baseball.  According to Gerrit Maus, a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at UC Berkeley, the brain takes one-tenth of a second to process an object seen.  In order to compensate for this delay, the brain shifts the object forward in the direction that it's moving.  Instead of seeing the object, the brain is predicting where the object will be.  The study is explained in more detail in the article linked above.

So how does this affect everyday society?