Ensuring Best Practice amongst the Thought Police

I've been wondering about the revolutionary changes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scanners might bring to our society. My conclusions, to summarise for those who can't be bothered to read this whole post: the Thought Police will be able to catch all deviants; they will know when you are really rubbish at your job and have only been pretending all these years; and at last it will be easy to get a reliable builder.

First the deviants. Recent MRI experiments have spatially mapped brain activity in patients suffering from psychopathologies. Patients are shown pictures of happy people and pictures of frightened people. It turns out the brain of the psychopath (not sure that's the right word but anyway...) responds quite differently to 'normal' brains. Response to sight of a happy-looking person is markedly reduced compared to Johnny Normal; response to a frightened-looking person is totally different.

The potential consequence (likely to become reality pretty soon as we spiral deeper into our social paranoia, helped along by a feverishly 'security-conscious' government) of this sort of research is clear: why not scan everyone once a year for signs of deviation. Lock up those whose brains unwisely drift from the norm and start flashing in the wrong places in the MRI machine.

At last a way to actually achieve the dream of the Thought Police.

The second example of MRI brain-gazing concerns mathematicians (as far removed as you can get from psychopaths, of course). Experiments with MRI show that most people, if shown a number printed on a card, asked to memorise it, and then asked to recall it later, actually visualise the number again as they recall it. This even though the original visual stimulus is no longer there, of course, at time of recall. However, the best mathematicians, as opposed to us ordinaries, apparently do not visualise as they go about their mathematical tasks: visualisation is bad for mathematics.

The implication is that you can tell a good mathematician because he or she isn't visualising--and most importantly this is something you can detect and measure directly, by MRI brain scan. You can tell, in other words, when the mathematician is doing his job properly.

There are presumably similar 'best practice' (apologies for using this horrible phrase) patterns of brain activity for other professions and activities. Which bits of the brain does your top physicist crank up when trying to make a recalcitrant oscillscope do what it's supposed to instead of throwing out random data because the wires are loose...? Which mind-portions are flashing wildly as a doctor makes an insightful diagnosis, turning accepted medical science on its head in the best 'Casualty' tradition? What's the pattern in a politician's brain as he or she invents yet another vacuous 'initiative' instead of doing something useful? (All right, that last one's just a joke--of course politicians don't use brains.)

MRI brain scanning seems to offer the possibility, then, of direct measurement of performance. Once you have classified (and perhaps here is the rub, as they say) just what brain activity pattern corresponds to a job done well, you have a way to directly measure how well your candidate is doing.

This has huge potential consequences. At last we will not have to suffer the havoc wreaked by cowboy builders--just scan the chap's mind while he's scratching behind his ear and saying 'tsk tsk and then there's your overheads, mate...' At last no more navigationally-challenged cab-drivers: 'You're not taking me south of the river at this time of night, especially not when your frontal lobe's hardly even registering above noise level, driver.'

And then there's education. As a university teacher (at Nottingham, home of the invention of MRI no less), trying desperately to communicate the enlightening principles of my subject to the generation that is to come after me, I am constantly wondering if any of it is registering. Now all I have to do is scan my students' brains to see if they're learning to think the right way. We won't even need exams anymore.

Except for the teachers, of course, whose brain patterns we will examine judiciously before we give them jobs.

But none of us are safe, of course. George Bernard Shaw once said that everyone should be required to justify their existence, once every five years--on pain of death. Well, now we can do it--we can all be tested--and no amount of bullshit and use of fashionable buzzwords will help you. Because it's the lights in your brain that count.

Here's hoping I'm not in the wrong profession...