Ed Boyden: belief

Transcript context

…Would it be good if we had a fairly accurate lie detector? It could read your brain waves, maybe the tone of your voice, your micro expressions, but it would be able to tell if you’re telling the truth or not, and you wouldn’t even have to consent to be hooked up to it. You’d go out on a date. You’d turn on your lie detector. It would give you feedback throughout the course of the date. Is this a net social good? If it’s bad, do we have a way of stopping it? That’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of questions about lies and memories that make the question very nuanced. For example, there’s a field in memory research where they look at what’s called reconsolidation. What happens is, basically, when you recall a memory, it becomes fragile, and there are studies about how even false memories can be induced. They’ve done experiments where you show somebody something in a photograph or in a story, and then a week later you ask, “Oh, how was your experience?” It wasn’t their experience. It was in a photograph or a story. Some fraction of the people will remember it as their experience. If we start thinking about these kinds of topics that connect to everyday human experience, like lies and memories and so forth, I think we also have to delve very deeply into the underlying neuroscience so we know what we’re talking about and what we’re doing. For example, if somebody talks about something in a certain way, but it was not an intentional lie, it was a false memory — what are the subcategories of different things that people say? What about things that are coupled to external influence, like the example I just gave, where the memory was affected by an external photograph or story? Anyway, I think that we have to make sure that the science accelerates as fast as the technology. Sometimes I say that the hard part of neurotechnology is the neuro part. Maybe we’ll have the ability to scan brains and read out information with unprecedented accuracy at some point in the future, but if we don’t understand the underlying processes and what the information means, then we might do the wrong thing with that information. In the middle of all these dialogues, we have a segment, “overrated versus underrated,” and I’ll toss out a few names of things, and you tell me what you think. You’re free to pass on any of them. Waking up at 4:00 in the morning — underrated or overrated?…

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