New directions and applications in EEG have significant implications for the future of society and raise the need for ethics frameworks.
Last week the South China Morning Post reported that workers in a factory China were made to wear EEG brain sensors in their helmets. These were purportedly used to determine the alertness, concentration and emotional state of workers so that workers could be reassigned or taken off duty when their state of mind was not optimal for a particular job. The factory representative said that ‘it was working well’.
The Verge followed on an article with expert opinions on whether or not it was actually possible to read the mind in this way. Probably not, was the expert opinion – dry electrodes aren’t great, EMG contamination is a huge source of artifact and it is not yet been convincingly shown that emotional states or concentration can be well predicted from the EEG signal.
Perhaps so, but it is not at all beyond the realm of possibility. Eventually we will be able to do that and more. How do we create ethical guard rails for this adventure?
The ethical dilemma
The brain is the most personal of organs, tethered most tightly to our sense of self. While we may not think much about someone looking in on the pulsing of our heart or lungs, the brain can be another matter. As brain imaging techniques get better and our analytical insights deeper, our ability to make predictions about a brain’s capability and perceptual content are getting better.
It is human nature to seek out knowledge, and human beings have pursued understanding of the self for centuries with all the means available to them. Our scientific quest to understand the mind and the organ connected with it will not stop. It is also important to continue in this pursuit for the many potential benefits to mental health and function.
It is also human nature to seek better and more efficient ways to accomplish practical goals – be they more efficient ways to build something, drive revenue growth or expand influence and empire. In any endeavor, being able to know and influence the minds of others by any means possible, has always played a role. We do it all the time, in many different ways, from storytelling, well meaning conversation to playing to our understanding of human cognition, emotion, bias and addiction and even at times physical intimidation. But when we bypass the sensory filters and go directly for the brain, it feels like a greater violation. Under what circumstances is it OK to extract and use knowledge about a person’s inner mental state? Who should be able to do it?
Who has the knowledge and capability?
The first issue is who has the knowledge and capability to do this? Where once this was the realm of western academia, this is rapidly shifting. In terms of funding and focus, academic research in the US has long favored a more reductionist cellular level science, with an almost visceral disdain for human neuroscience. ‘It is not of interest because it doesn’t explain the underlying mechanism’ I was once told by an editor of one of the ‘top tier’ American journals. China on the other hand has doubled down its efforts in human neuroscience – its academic output in EEG and related technologies growing several-fold faster than any other country in the past decade (and that is only what is published in English). The knowledge is tipping increasingly in favor of East Asia. If China finds it first, they will exploit it first and they do not shy away from surveillance of its citizens.
But even as the knowledge is shifting geographically, what is more significant is that it is shifting away from academia to companies. And China isn’t the only place where this is happening. DARPA funded start-ups test similar types of applications for soldiers. Companies doing EEG research, for the most part, are not required to have to get ethics approvals for such non-invasive studies as long as they don’t want to publish their results in academic journals. The IRB/ethics requirements of journals therefore keep a great deal of scientific knowledge out of public domain, and for the most part companies prefer it that way. Secondly, companies building EEG devices are increasingly the ones who own the largest datasets, enabling them to do research well beyond the capability of individual academic researchers. Indeed, academia is already falling behind.
See related post Taking Neurotechnology out of the Lab
The implications
What this means is that it is entirely possible that the Chinese EEG monitoring of its workers does indeed work to some degree but they simply haven’t bothered to publish their results in public domain. It also means that even if it doesn’t work particularly well so far, they are in a much better position to get it to work than any academic lab. Significantly, there may never be a way to know.
EEG today is a still nascent field but on the cusp of significant change. Today there is no regulation and no central body that has domain over the ethics of its advance. As it plays out, it is important that, as a collective community, we find ways to determine the authenticity of claims and the pros and cons of commercial applications and a strong neuroethics framework.