“It’s not wrong to say there are weird ethical implications to this,” Finn says, “but we’re still a long way from doing this with enough accuracy to apply in the real world.” Neuroscience will be waiting for its sorting hat for a while yet.
Damn, I was hoping a real Sorting Hat would be around soon!
Personalized medicine has been a mantra of futurists in medical research for more than a decade, maybe a couple decades now. As projects such as the Human Genome Project (http://www.genome.gov/10001772), the Connectome Project (http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/), and the Microbiome Project (http://hmpdacc.org/) progress, the reality is growing rapidly close, but there are also significant ethical issues involved, and realistically, we need far greater public education and awareness of these projects. We need to be holding open discussions on how, what, where, and how fast to proceed. With CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies advancing rapidly, it’s not just computer technology that is rapidly outstripping our legal and ethical societal frameworks, it is the biotech field. No doubt this is what contributes to the fears regarding GMO foods, etc……the public simply is not educated nor aware enough of what is being done, what is established science and what is leading-edge.
The benefits of neural mapping such as described in this article could be tremendous indeed…….but so could the abuses. With concurrent progress on brain-computer interfacing, what seemed like science fiction just a couple decades ago is now within sight.
Originally shared by Ciro Villa
Neuroscientists have used maps of people’s brains to accurately predict intelligence
“By intelligence, in this case, the scientists mean abstract reasoning ability, which they inferred by mapping and analyzing the connections within people’s brains. But the study, published today in Nature, is compelling because it gets at a fundamental and very uncomfortable truth: Some brains are better than others at certain things, simply because of the way they’re wired. And now, scientists are closer to being able to determine precisely which brains those are, and how they got that way.”
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/scientists-can-now-predict-intelligence-brain-activity/
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/scientists-can-now-predict-intelligence-brain-activity
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