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  3. A team of world-leading neuro-scientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brai

A team of world-leading neuro-scientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brai

admin2014-01-09  63
问题     A team of world-leading neuro-scientists has developed a powerful technique that allows 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 minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future. The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.
    "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 a wall," said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.
    The research builds on a series of recent studies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked to lying, violent behaviour and racial prejudice. The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuro-science is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues surrounding future uses for the technology.
    If brain-reading can be refined, it could quickly be adopted to assist interrogations of criminals arid terrorists, and even usher in a "Minority Report" era(as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg science fiction film of that name), where judgments are handed down before the law is broken on the strength of an incriminating brain scan.
    "These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we’re not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared," Professor Haynes said. The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Haynes. "We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren’t going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence. "
    During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person’s intentions with 70 percent accuracy.
    Because brains differ so much, the scientists need a good idea of what a person’s brain activity looks like when they are thinking something to be able to spot it in a scan, but researchers are already devising ways of deducing what patterns are associated with different thoughts.
According to the passage, the brain-reading technology can be used______.
选项 A、to eavesdrop on potential criminals and terrorists.
B、to probe people’s minds and read their intentions.
C、to design a software to spot subtle differences in brain activity.
D、to suppress activities linked to lying, violence and discrimination.
答案B
解析
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