Last week, we visited a billboard on Prince Street in New York City that is among the first of its kind to find a way past the indifference of even the most detached New Yorker. The billboard is flanked by devices that look like speakers but which direct highly focused sound at unsuspecting persons who trigger a sensor by walking by.
The sound is sent at a frequency that can only be heard by them. That's because the transmitter uses the skull as a speaker and so the sound resonates inside the head.
So, one example of reading what's inside your head is the increasing use of MRIs to do lie detection. And obviously that's something you sort of have to volunteer for, because you have to be lying down with your head inside an MRI tube. But there's a lot of development of technologies that can do it without you knowing that they're doing it.
There's a bunch of scientists that I've spoken to that have been working on using infrared light to essentially shine it at your forehead, and they read the blood activity in your prefrontal cortex. And what they've discovered is that by seeing what the blood activity, the amount of oxygen being carried to your prefrontal cortex is, they can tell whether or not you're sort of in [LAUGHS] it's a lovely phrase mental anguish.
And they've noticed and it's true that you experience a lot of mental anguish, for example, a millisecond before you formulate a lie. In fact, I've experienced this myself. I've had this infrared beam shot into my skull, and I've seen the scans, and you can tell, milliseconds before I even know that I'm going to lie, that I'm going to lie.
The scientists that are working on that are developing techniques for doing it at a distance, maybe, you know, eight or nine or ten feet, so that they could conceivably do it without you knowing it's being done to you like, for example, in an airport. You would be scanned not just for the presence of explosives but for the presence of mental anguish.
