Neuromarketing
Britton Manasco is dissing neuromarketing;marketing based off of measuring brainwaves. I agree that brainwave monitoring is not precise enough to distinguish between ?what a cool product? and ?what a dumb product?, but this neuroscience stuff is fascinating. I am really tempted to buy an EEG. Now my brother has pointed me to a Seattle company that is using brainwaves as a sort of ultimate lie detector test.
The claims are extraordinary, so I take them with a grain of salt. And especially WRT scientific methods of jailing people, I think that the appearanceof infallability is at least as important as the actual objective efficacy of a technique.Things like fingerprinting and lot exchange ballistics testinglong had a reputation of infallability, and were very useful tools for police and prosecutors. Those techniqueshave been discredited, but we still have DNA. And now neuroscience. As long as we have something that juries believe to be infallible, we’ll be protected from the hordes of criminals and terrorists who would surely be let free on legal technicalities otherwise.
The brain fingerprinting is amazing. I have to believe that there will be false positives, though. What if you have an episode of deja vu while they are testing you? False memories are not hard to implant through hypnosis. I think that carefully-crafted tests could probably reduce the possibility of false positives (or at least enough control cases could show that some positives were false, throwing a particular session into question). But I would probably be a mess of false positives no matter what. The value of the technique is that it should virtually eliminate false negatives, though; and that can be very useful.