It’s a scary thought, but it sounds like a real possibility, according to an article on TechCrunch titled “Brain Hacking: Scientists Extract Personal Secrets With Commercial Hardware“.

Participants were outfitted with commercial-grade brain-wave reading devices and shown a list of people, possible PIN numbers, and the likely location of their home. Often, when the researchers stumbled upon the actual information they were seeking, they saw an expected spike in brain-wave P300, which is known to activate when presented with familiar information.

To be fair, they weren’t extracting information from the subject’s brain, per se. Rather, they were determining whether data was familiar to the subject. Still, this is a first step down a road that could end up in a very scary place.

Do you think more advanced methods for getting data from people’s brains (potentially against their will) might become common in the future?