What if others could literally read your mind? That's a scary prospect! We are already under scrutiny by security, traffic, and face recognition cameras; airport scanners; and other gadgets that monitor our actions and person. In the future we will need to be concerned about increasingly sophisticated devices to monitor our brains. Developments in magnetic resonance imaging and neuroscience make possible detection of brain activity patterns with ever increasing detail.

James is a retired English professor who has recently suffered a left hemisphere stroke. Once extremely articulate, when James now attempts to speak the result is slow and labored, causing an apparent degree of distress readily evident in James’s facial expression. Also apparent is the depression James now exhibits concerning his current situation. However, speech therapy and neuropsychological evaluations demonstrate that James is improving, albeit slowly.

 The chips are down. Americans have taken to gambling in a big way. In 1998, legalized gambling grossed more than the music industry, the motion picture industry, and theme parks combined ($50 billion).¹ Gambling problems have increased rapidly in the wake of these trends. Of greatest social concern is “pathological gambling,” a diagnosis established in 1980 by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III).

Should advertisers probe human minds as a means of boosting product sales? In a recent article in the online version of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, David Wahlberg describes a new use for an emerging technology that has some people scratching their heads.¹ Using sophisticated MRI scanners, doctors at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia are studying changes in brain activity that occur as people process images.