Ghost from the Machine: A Sketch of an Ideal Brain Scanner

                

If given the opportunity to design any brain- or mind-reading device, it would be difficult to restrain oneself from creating an ideal scanner unconstrained by the limitations of current technology.  To that end, my device would render the highest spatial and temporal resolution possible, and it would not, through some miracle of technology, sacrifice one for the other.  It would essentially be able to read brain activity in real time as well as locate the activity with utmost precision.

 

                I admit that I don’t have the technical expertise to suggest its mechanism with certainty, but I have a hunch it would be based upon measuring the brain’s electrical activity.  It would be a direct measure, similar to an EEG, but the device would be able to locate this activity with a high degree of precision similar to an fMRI.  However, it would avoid the problems inherent in fMRI readings, specifically the fact that fMRI merely measures the correlation between brain activity and blood flow.

                With a sufficiently advanced degree of precision and knowledge about the brain, it is conceivable that the device could read conscious thought from brain activity.  The advantages of such a device are innumerable and would conceivably allow us, with enough time and experiments, to unlock all or nearly all the secrets of the brain.  We could, for instance, measure the brain activity related to a certain task and determine which aspects of this activity contribute to conscious experience and which are effectively subconscious.  Whether such a device is realistic now or at any point is an open question, but the increasing growth rate of technological sophistication provides plausible enough grounds to think that we can at least approximate this ideal some day.