on Die Puny Humans I saw this particular link:
Science’s mind games | Brain scans can now tell whether you’re lying or racist.
The University of Sydney’s Brain Dynamics Centre at Westmead Hospital was first to identify the brain networks that lie behind our emotional responses, by monitoring physical reactions to experiences at the same time as imaging their brains.
The centre’s director, Lea Williams, says we appear to have evolved a special brain network to store memories of emotional states that are critical to our survival – physical and social. This network involves the body, a primitive part of our brain known as the amygdala, and a frontal area involved in rational thinking.
Events can unconsciously trigger recall of the stored emotions, and working out what happens in the healthy “emotional brain”, and how this differs with gender or age, will help improve treatments for severe emotional disorders such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress and borderline personalities, she says.
the commercial applications of this kind of research are substantial (maybe it’s time Rushkoff wrote Coercion II?) and the ethical use of this information is certainly up for debate, but what interested me most isn’t that television has been recognized as a sensory apparatus and we’re finally getting to the science, but instead the implications this has for personal identity and emotional intelligence in a post-human society.