Section A
Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the pas sage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words on Answer Sheet 2.
Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.
The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI(磁共振成像) scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of ten cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1 000 attempts.
The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person’s dreams or memory. Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said, "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brainreading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time."
It will inevitably also raise fears that a suspect’s brain could be interrogated against his will, raising the nightmarish possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes". The researchers say this is currently firmly in the realm of science fiction because the technique can only be applied to visual images and, to date, the experiments rely on clumsy MRI scanning equipment and extremely powerful magnets. The software decoder itself has to be adapted to each individual during hours of training while in the scanner.
However the team have warned about potential privacy issues in the future when scanning techniques improve. "It is possible that decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications downstream in, say, the 30-to-50-year time frame," said Prof Gallant. "We believe strongly that no one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, or without complete informed consent." With the brain-reading technology, what is feared to happen to a suspect