With The Ability To Identify Brain States Making Mistakes Could Be A Thing Of The Past

Imagine yourself in anyone of the following scenarios:

1. After a long and hard day at work, you step into your car with a splitting headache. You think that you would be able to make it back to your house which is about 20 kilometers away and press the ignition switch to power on. As soon as you do so a biofeedback system present on the dashboard of your vehicle springs to life and starts scanning your brain signals to identify your brain state. Eager to move on, you move the gear into drive, but the car doesn’t allow you to move. It has sensed your reduced mind capacity and displays a warning that you’re not in a safe state to drive.
2. If you work hard then you must party harder, so now imagine yourself in a similar state as the above with the only difference being that you’re too drunk to drive and the car won’t allow itself to be driven.

All this sounds like a work of fiction and the car seems to be a commercial version of the new Knight Rider 2008, however all of this could very much be a part of our lives in another decade. Researchers have shown in a study that many seemingly mindless mistakes result from a cascade of neurological shifts. In the half-minute preceding an error, activity increases in the brain’s at-rest areas (red) and decreases in the brain’s focus-maintaining regions (blue, checkout this image). “People could be made aware that they’re not in the best condition to be working. Or people might learn to identify their ‘bad’ brain state,” said study co-author Tom Eichele, a neuroscientist at the University of Bergen in Norway. Up to 30 seconds before Eichele’s test subjects carelessly said that an arrow pointing in one direction was pointing in another, blood flow decreased in their posterior medial frontal cortex, a brain region associated with sustaining effort and focus.

At the same time, activity increased in the so-called default mode network — a region of the brain spanning the precuneus, retrosplenial cortex and anterior medial frontal cortex. The default mode network is associated with maintaining baseline routines, and tends to be most active during sleep and sedation. In short, the conscious brain started to shut down while the system usually responsible for preventing that failed.

“This matches with our subjective perception of making mistakes on a boring task,” said Michael Fox, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study. “As time goes on, you get more and more bored, and that builds up until you screw up. This study shows that scientifically” (Source). Well, such a technology would certainly have a huge range of applications in daily life and would certainly signal the arrival of an advanced age, where machines would have the ability to pre-determine human actions based on one’s thoughts and mind state.