Haven’t We Seen This Movie? Future Crimes Can Be Predicted Perfectly, Scientists Say

We have seen this movie and it didn’t work out well for anyone but Big Brother…  a good lesson of where we don’t want to go!

AFP

Scientists read a woman's mind by examining her brain waves.

A team from Northwestern University claim they have achieved 100 percent accuracy in reading the minds of make-believe terrorists -- simply by attaching electrodes to their scalps and examining their brain waves.

For the study, 29 students were given mock terrorist plans and 30 minutes to learn about an attack on a certain U.S. city. They were asked to work out their own details based on information they were given regarding weapons and methods.

The researchers, who also knew about the mock terrorist plans, monitored the students' brain waves to find out whether they gave away details of where and when the attacks were to take place. They correlated a rise in brain wave activity to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy across all the students that participated.

According to psychology professor J. Peter Rosenfeld, the "guilty" patterns occur in "P300" brain waves when meaningful information is shown to a person with "guilty knowledge."

What makes the result so impressive is that in a real-life situation, the knowledge would be much more deeper entrenched, given the months or years of planning that a participant would be subject to.

But how does such technology get used to save us from another 9/11?

Such testing would be done on people picked up on the basis of activity or "chatter," Rosenfeld said.

The investigators would have heard prior chatter that detailed specifics such as weapons, time and place and the P300 testing would be carried out on suspects in order to determine their level of culpability and confirm the details of the attack.

Obviously, that means authorities need some prior knowledge of an attack, but a more impressive result from another test hinted at a future whereby non-suspects could be scanned for potential crimes.

In the second range of tests, researchers had no idea what they were looking for.

"Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime-related details," he said.

"The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity."