Machines That Know What You're Thinking

We love technology. Most of us do, anyway.

Nothing short of magic these days, engineering wizardry allows us to do things no 20th century futurist could have predicted.

Just think: Today, in the time it once took to film a home movie on a camcorder and rewind the tape to view it, you can take that same video and share it with billions of potential viewers.

Technological leaps of yesterday that we take for granted today have shaped society on levels too deep for us to consciously appreciate anymore.

The ultimate illustration of not seeing the forest for the trees, technology and the modern consumer have become too unified to realistically imagine one without the other.

Well, I’m here to report that this unity is about to get even tighter.

The one barrier technology has not been able to cross so far is the barrier between the mind and the body.

To use your smartphone, tablet, laptop, or whatever else you happen to be glued to for most of your free time, you still needed to interact with the device.

Either through speech or touch, communicating with the machine requires a conscious effort on the part of the user.

That may all be rapidly changing, however, as neuroscience and technology are finally starting to merge in ways tomorrow’s consumer will find indispensible.

Right now, there are a handful of technologies in development to allow for the human mind to speak directly to machines without the need for a physical middleman.

Here are the three you should pay special attention to in the coming years or even months, as these products go from testing to commercialization.

Your Car More Responsible Than You?

If you think modern carmakers have gone a bit overboard with all the bells and whistles they cram into the modern cabin for drivers and passengers to look at, then here’s an even more unsettling thought…

As you watch the road and your GPS and interactive dashboard display of your next car, it might be watching you back.

Jaguar Land Rover is currently working on a project called Mind Sense, which tests the ability of sensors in a steering wheel to read a driver’s brain activity and pinpoint attention lapses such as daydreams.

If it catches the driver getting distracted, it’s just a matter of sending some vibrations through the wheel or a pedal, and the driver gets back on track in a hurry.

Jaguar Land Rover worked alongside NASA in researching these brain-wave readers, expanding the idea to include other astronaut-worthy tech like medical-grade vitals sensors in the seats.

So if you’re about to have a heart attack, your car will pull over and summon help without you having to do anything at all — except have the heart attack, of course.

Looking at the advancement of cellular and wireless Internet technology over the last decade, however, it’s hard to predict just how far these sensors and systems will go in the next decade.

The idea is that once reading brain waves becomes more of an exact science, machines will be able to actually act on a user’s thoughts as opposed to simply evaluate brain function.

Which brings me to the second idea…

Watch TV Without Moving a Muscle… Any Muscle

Using the TV remote too much of a chore these days?

Well, the BBC, in partnership with British-based studio This Place, has developed a “Mind Control TV” prototype for use with an experimental version of the BBC iPlayer.

Using a two-part sensor, one clipped to the ear and the other resting against the user’s forehead, the prototype can interpret levels of mental focus with enough accuracy to allow the user to select programs and change volume.

Testing is still in its internal stages, but every BBC staffer who’s tried it has achieved functional success — some proving to be quicker studies than others.

“It was much easier for some than it was for others,” commented Cyrus Saihan, head of business development for the BBC’s Digital division. “But they all managed to get it to work.”

Not the most world-changing application of this technology, the relative simplicity and ease of use with BBC’s prototype demonstrates more than anything its commercial viability.

As the kinks get worked out and the devices become smaller and more sensitive, you can be sure that this sort of thing will get just as common within the realm of consumer tech as the remote control it’s aiming to replace.

So mind-melding technology can make us safer and lazier through the basic interpretation of brainwaves.

But let’s go deeper. Let’s go into the part of your brain where you do your thinking… your most private, intimate thinking.

Your Thoughts Are No Longer Your Own

In Spielberg’s Minority Report, criminals were tried before being apprehended for crimes they were intending on committing but hadn’t actually carried out.

13 years ago, a society functioning in such a manner seemed like a far-flung dystopic nightmare.

Today, it’s becoming a technical reality.

Called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, this evolution of the common MRI process has given researches at the University College of London and Oxford University the ability to correlate patterns of activity in test subjects’ prefrontal cortexes with actions they were about to carry out.

The same method has been used as an advanced form of lie-detection, although in testing, subjects have proven to be able to simulate guilt just by visualizing themselves performing the actions being described.

This means the machine can actually see your thoughts regardless of whether you want it to or not… It just can’t always distinguish between actual and imagined.

That level of accuracy is obviously not sufficient when a person’s life or liberty is in question, but when it comes to marketing and product testing, fMRI is already being used to see what test consumers really think.

Neurosense, a self-proclaimed “neuromarketing research company,” uses fMRI to evaluate consumers’ responses to products, packaging, advertising, and even smell — without the consumer saying a word.

The premise is that people, no matter how sincere or well intentioned, are rarely fully descriptive of their emotions — more often than not tailoring their verbal response to the audience and situation.

Implementing this in focus groups, marketing firms like Neurosense can extract data far more valuable than anything verbal or written question-and-answer sessions might yield.

However, as with all things, the more accurate and sensitive fMRI becomes, the better it will be at seeing exactly what you’re thinking, what you’re considering, what you’re intending…

At which point the applications will broaden dramatically, affecting medicine, psychology, pharmacology, and perhaps one day even criminal justice.

That’s not a future many of us want to consider now, however. Hopefully if and when it arrives, we won’t be as immersed in the technology that brings us institutional mind reading as we are immersed in our iPhones and iPads today.

Regardless of how we respond, however, one thing is certain: It’s coming, and soon…

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Wealth Daily. To learn more about Alex, click here.