Power Over People: When Big Government Teams Up With Big Neuroscience
"In the recent State of the Union address, President Obama has said he will commit the United States to a ten-year project to build a comprehensive map of the activity of the brain. He believes that the proposed Brain Activity Map is an economic gold mine,” writes Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet.com.
But, as John Markoff reports in the New York Times:
Many neuroscientists are skeptical that a multiyear, multibillion dollar effort to unlock the brain’s mysteries will succeed. “I believe the scientific paradigm underlying this mapping project is, at best, out of date and at worst, simply wrong,” said Donald G. Stein, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “The search for a road map of stable, neural pathways that can represent brain functions is futile.”
And yet, if the project does succeed, what will the federal government do with the increased power over the human mind?
True enough, if the research succeeds, it might result in better prosthetics or speech technology for paralytics.
But it might also, as Markoff notes, result in better methods of mind control.
As C.S. Lewis warns, power over "nature" often means power over other people, using nature as the means.
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