IN JULY this year, that two people had been found guilty of murder, based largely on evidence provided by a brain-scanning technique known as brain electrical oscillations signature (BEOS) profiling. According to the report, the state police of Maharashtra 鈥渃an now bank on a forensic tool to achieve speedy convictions鈥�.
I choose the following words carefully: the utter irresponsibility involved here, and its attendant outrage of justice, is staggering. It is yet another example of how technology is increasingly misapplied and abused, and represents a major threat to civil liberties.
BEOS profiling is a hopelessly crude procedure piggy-backing on sophisticated brain scanning techniques which reveal the involvement of regions of the brain in emotion, movement, memory and other functions. It involves an electroencephalogram combined with a word association test. EEG electrodes are placed on a subject鈥檚 head, and a text is read out. Intensification of EEG readings simultaneous with given phrases are interpreted as constituting the sought-for evidence of 鈥� in the case of the accused in the Maharashtra murder trial 鈥� guilt.
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How so? The BEOS technique, developed by Bangalore neuroscientist C. R. Mukundan, proceeds thus. The subject sits in silence, eyes closed, with the electrodes in place. A policeman reads out the police account of the crime. The EEG shows the brain 鈥渓ighting up鈥� in those regions 鈥渁ssociated鈥� with 鈥渕emory of actual involvement鈥� in the events being described. This actual involvement is distinguishable, allegedly, from a memory of having read about the crime, say, and from stress or other emotional states incident upon being accused of murder and subjected to a 鈥渢est of guilt鈥� no different in probative value from a ducking stool.
Functional MRI scans are able to correlate activity in brain regions with specifiable autonomic and psychological functions. The correlations hold between types of brain activity and general functions, such as memory, but neither fMRI nor any other scan can allow a researcher to say 鈥測ou are thinking of Doris Day鈥�, or 鈥測ou are visualising the colour red鈥�. Such fine-grained discriminations might forever be an impossibility, given the unique learning and memory-storing history of individual brains.
The BEOS technique claims to identify activity that occurs in brains only when memories acquired through actual participation in an event are evoked by word association.
This is vastly less plausible even than the theory behind the now-discredited 鈥渓ie detector test鈥�, which postulates that when people lie, the electrochemistry underlying their emotional states can be registered by the polygraph, as if everyone feels stress when lying, and as if lying-specific stress were distinguishable from other motives for stress, such as being under suspicion.
In fact, we now know that what polygraphs detect is anxiety, and since anxiety has many more sources than lying, and since lying does not always provoke anxiety, polygraphs are not merely useless but dangerous. How much worse, then, is the BEOS technique?
India鈥檚 BEOS-condemned suspects may indeed be murderers, but proving their guilt beyond reasonable doubt requires objective evidence. An evidentially unsupported confession of guilt cannot be regarded as legally safe in a court of law, because it might have been coerced or made under abnormal stress. EEG readings from the head of a silent suspect are infinitely less reliable than such a confession.
India has seen a travesty of justice in this case, which should send a loud warning to the world: there is a long way to go even before greatly more sophisticated brain-scanning methods than EEG can be used as a reliable means of gaining involuntary access to people鈥檚 thoughts and memories 鈥� if ever such an Orwellian thing could be tolerated in a civilised society.
鈥淚ndia has seen a travesty of justice, and this should send a loud warning鈥�
Read all A C Grayling鈥檚 columns here
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