Section A Directions: In this section, there is a short
passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the pas sage carefully.
Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible
words on Answer Sheet 2.
Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading
technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking
at by using scanners to study brain activity. The breakthrough
by American scientists took MRI(磁共振成像) scanning equipment normally used in
hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined
a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly
predict in nine out of ten cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork
would have been accurate only eight times in every 1 000 attempts.
The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being
harnessed to visualise scenes from a person’s dreams or memory. Writing in the
journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of
California at Berkeley, said, "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible
to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of
brain activity alone. Imagine a general brainreading device that could
reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in
time." It will inevitably also raise fears that a suspect’s
brain could be interrogated against his will, raising the nightmarish
possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes". The researchers say this is
currently firmly in the realm of science fiction because the technique can only
be applied to visual images and, to date, the experiments rely on clumsy MRI
scanning equipment and extremely powerful magnets. The software decoder itself
has to be adapted to each individual during hours of training while in the
scanner. However the team have warned about potential privacy
issues in the future when scanning techniques improve. "It is possible that
decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications
downstream in, say, the 30-to-50-year time frame," said Prof Gallant. "We
believe strongly that no one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading
process involuntarily, or without complete informed consent." What did the American scientists use to scrutinize patterns of brain activity