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OB OY oF VEN? "BRAIN-READING" DEVICE CAN PREDICT WHAT PEOPLE SEE CAPTURED BRITISH SAILORS WERE NOT IN IRAQI WATERS new computer program can \ match brain activity with visual images and even predict what people are seeing, a study has shown. The work raises the possibility that one day computers could "read" a person's brain to digitally re-create memories, dreams or imaginings. Previous attempts to decode vision in this way could only extract simple information about images, such as their physical orientation, and could not identify images that participants were seeing for the first time. The researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in the visual cortices of participants’ brains as they looked at photographs of animals, food, people and common objects. The fMRI technique is a relatively new way to measure changes in the brain's blood- oxygen levels, which have strong links to neural activity. The collected data were used to "teach" a computer program to associate certain blood-flow patterns with particular kinds of images. Participants were then asked to look at a second set of images they had never encountered before. The model was ifteen British sailors and marines captured by Iran last year were not in Iraq's maritime territory as the UK government claimed, according to official documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. The sailors were apprehended in March 2007 because the US-led coalition designated a sea boundary for Iran's territorial waters without telling the Iranians where it was, according to internal Ministry of Defence (MoD) briefing papers. At the time, Defence Secretary Des Browne repeatedly insisted to Parliament that the military personnel from their mother ship HMS Cornwall were seized in programmed to take what it had learned from the previous pairings and figure out what was being shown in the new set of images. For a collection of 120 images, the model correctly identified what a person was looking at 90 per cent of the time. When the set was enlarged to 1,000 images, accuracy was about 80 per cent. (Source: National Geographic News, 5 March 2008, http://news.national geographic.com/news/2008/03/080305- brain-scan.html; Nature, vol. 452, 6 March 2008, published online 5 March) Iraqi waters. A fictitious map claiming to show a line in the Persian Gulf called the "Iraq/Iran Territorial Water Boundary" was also produced in a televised briefing by Vice- Admiral Charles Style, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff. But according to the partially censored documents obtained by the Times newspaper (17 April 2008), the arrests took place in waters that are not internationally agreed as Iraqi territory. The so-called dividing line was invented by the US-UK coalition occupying Iraq, without telling Iranian authorities about their unilateral designation, the daily said. A report, addressed to Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, blames the incident on the absence of an agreed boundary and a failure to coordinate between Iraq, Iran and the coalition. It also reveals that it was the British who apparently raised their weapons first before the Iranian gunboats came alongside the British boats carrying the sailors. A subsequent all-party parliamentary inquiry described the incident as a "national disaster" for the UK. Former Defence Secretary Lord Heseltine said the MoD was humiliated at every step, including the permission for selling sailors' stories for propaganda purposes. (Source: Global Research, Canada, 19 April 2008, http://globalresearch.ca/index. php? context=va&aid=8732) 6 = NEXUS JUNE — JULY 2008 www.nexusmagazine.com