Friday, September 25, 2009

Science Friday #1!!!

I do plan on doing an update on this blog (about the wedding and the honeymoon) at some point this weekend when I can go through my pictures and pick out some of my favorites to show you have everything went. In the meantime, in my effort to become better at regularly posting things I have decided to have a few theme days! Playing off of NPR’s Science Fridays, I’ll be posting my own Science Fridays.

Those of you who know me know that I am a complete science nerd. I love all kinds of science (particularly life sciences) and try to get everybody around me to like science, too. I’m also missing being a teacher and sharing all of my neat current events with my students, sooo…you guys get to be my students (you lucky ducks!) Here’s the first article…

Brain Scans Reveal What You've Seen
I saw this on CNN and on ScienceDaily so it must be good. Basically (if you don’t feel like reading) scientists are able to use a technology called fMRIs which measure the blood flow through different parts of your brain and can use that data to determine what types of pictures you were looking at. Obviously they can’t get too detailed and it’s still in its multiple choice phase, but I find this kind of creepy. Fascinating, but creepy. Given that science knowledge increases on an exponential scale (meaning that the more we know the faster we learn more) I wonder what this technology would be able to do in 5, 10, or 20 years? Is this the kind of thing that one day would make our lie detector tests obsolete because we could just plug someone in to an fMRI machine and know their thoughts? What would happen to our privacy? Our copyright laws? Creative licensure? What do you think?

No comments:

Post a Comment