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Test politicians using Neuroscience

We live in a time where technology allows us to inflict ever greater evil. Technology is merely a tool of course, a hammer, a frying pan or even a rock can be a weapon if you decide to use it as such. It doesn't make all rocks evil.

As you probably know, our technological capabilities develop constantly in quite a lot of directions, like an octopus spreading it's legs even to places we often would rather not see it or at least not know about it.

The results drawn from MRI brain scans become ever more "scary", machines can generate images from thoughts, turn private thoughts into audible sound. But also project sounds and images into the mind. This is mainly the result of ever increasing computing power, if relations can be found in the data it becomes merely a question of attaching enough raw computing power to find them. Using such tech one could see the difference between the 1 and the 2 Euro coin and if it is fast enough the machine would actually know it before the subject does.

Basic emotions are very easy to identify compared to such small details. Some (primarily) man even faint if they see a bit of blood. It is not what we call subtitle changes. We know there are both people who cant stomach seeing others suffer and people who can emotionally watch the most horrible things.

Doing business relies heavily on empathy. One needs to understand how other people feel in order to sell them something. Corruption however demands the exact opposite. Just looking at a person it doesn't have to be obvious which kind of person you are looking at. It of course also depends on your own view on life.

This technology will soon find it's way into job interviews. Nothing can stop it, such a test will start out voluntary because it gives the applicant an edge over his competitors. At first sight this seems like a horrible development but if we look at the needless pain and suffering people caused throughout our history, the hundreds of millions of people who died in most brutal ways it doesn't take a leap of imagination such leaders can not have empathic capacities. They would be unable to live with themselves. It becomes very obvious the privacy of the idevidual barely has any value compared to this massacre if it has any value at all in that context.

Freedom is not the right to kill large number of humans indiscriminately, the right to cruelly. To kill and slaughter indiscriminately is not what freedom is about. People are already offended by the F word and posting a picture to illustrate the level of brutality will cause the moderator to delete it.

A logical step would be to moderate the people who inflict such acts of cruelty out of the decision making process. We want to know how our politicians feel about things.

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can lecture us about, equality, human rights and dignity it would be of great value to know if he is actually capable of such emotions or if they are just words to be utilized as political tools.

We have been invading the lives of professional athletes with doping check ups. This while their actions affect primarily their own life. In contrast a simple blood test would reveal how much pot Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger smoked in their lives. To see them strongly opposing legalization. Yes, I live in the Netherlands but lets not even get into recreational use. Lets limit the example to medical marijuana prescribed by trained and licensed doctors. The contrast with federal raids and the imprisonment of ill and dieing people really goes beyond any disgust. I'm not a doctor and neither are Obama and Schwarzenegger. Putting just their blood test on the table would really wreck this political game in all the right ways.

This is just an example of something we could have done 30 years ago. To give another example. Who wouldn't like to see Tony Blair's emotional spectrum when he sends soldiers to die on the other side of the globe? If we really have honorable things to do it should be clearly visible in a simple MRI scan. In fact we already have test results, the simple refusal to device such system or to take part in it really says enough about the person.

I think we should look at it in the spirit of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This was a new technology at some stage of the war game. When its potential was sufficiently demonstrated we needed to device new methods to manage the technology.

Here are some articles. Please try find some more information and share.




What Can Neuroscience Tell Us about Evil?

Advanced brain-imaging techniques have begun to point to specific brain patterns common among sociopaths.


Telling images: These scans show brain activity in empathy-generating centers of the limbic system in normal individuals (left) and in psychopathic individuals (right) when they are exposed to violent images. Credit: Department of Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Heidelberg


Brain scan replaces job interview in 5 years?
MRI scans for candidates in top jobs such as bank directors could soon become part of the job-application package, says Erasmus University researcher Prof Willem Verbeke of Rotterdam, He’s confident brain scans will replace job interviews within 5 years.

Prof. Verbeke heads the department of neuro-economics, (NSIM), at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He predicts in an interview with Good Morning Netherlands radio station that employers demanding compulsory brain scans from their job applicants will soon become the most normal thing in the world – in fact within five years’ time’, he believes.

Financial chaos by psychopathic behavior:
Especially after the economic fiascos which are plunging the world into recession, a great deal of interest is being shown by the economic sector in their neuro-testing job application scheme, which is now being developed and tested, he said. Neuro-economics is a new research field, combining economics, psychology, genetics and neuro-science.

One of the most important developments in this field are the use of EEGs and MRI-scans to determine the suitability of candidates for specific jobs, he said. It’s been known for the past thirty years that one can determine human psychological disabilities such as autism and psychopathic tendencies in brain-scans, he said. However exact guidelines are only now being developed for practical applications in industry and the economic field by his department.

While brain-scanning their volunteers, the Erasmus University researchers can identify exactly to which extent people react ’spontaneously’, i.e. subconsciously, to specific social interactions - such as financial trading on the stock market or shop personnel interacting with customers.

Thus they could also test job applicants for important posts such as bank directors and financial institutions to determine whether they are even suitable — or whether they have psychopathic tendencies which would exclude them from such jobs.

“In a brain scan one can see what people notice spontaneously, such as sales personnel interacting with customers,’ he said.

They have already discovered that people with slight autism, for instance, are totally unable to notice that customers may be responding negatively towards specific suggestions they make.


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politics, mind, brain, biology, bionics, war