One Simple Question That Reveals Your Personality

What can a simple question reveal about you?

A lot, depending on the question.

One such question can easily pass as a fun party discussion. Here's the question:

“If you could choose between the super powers of flight or invisibility which would you pick and why?”

On the surface this is a seemingly innocuous question but the answer reveals whether one aspires for no-holds-barred freedom of expression (flight) or security of cunning and power (invisibility).

By asking “flight or invisibility?” it reveals our dreams and but also our fears, hopes and insecurities.

While this is not a scientific survey it is an enlightening one.

Go ahead ask it of someone. There is often a pattern to in their decision-making that follows five stages:

• Gut Reaction - Everyone instantly chose a power of the top of their head without much thought. In most cases, the super-power chosen was invisibility
  
  
• Practical Consideration - They would then try to justify the choice that they made, talking about the things they would do - Free movies, watching women taking showers, getting on planes without paying ...
  
  
• Philosophical Reconsideration - They would then start having doubts about their choice and start thinking about the bad things associated with their choice
  
  
• Self Recrimination - They would express concern that invisibility would lead them down a dark path of perversion
  
  
• Acceptance - "I would definitely have to choose flight !"

Various interpretations ....

• Flight is the hero, invisibility is the villain
  
  
• People who choose flight have nothing to hide, others want to hide themselves
  
  
• People with guile choose invisibility, those without choose flight - And the reason for our internal conflict is that people do have guile, but want to appear guileless

Full-Mental Nudity

The arrival of mind-reading machines.

Years ago, Woody Allen used to joke that he'd been thrown out of college as a freshman for cheating on his metaphysics final. "I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me," he confessed.

Today, the joke is on us. Cameras follow your car, GPS tracks your cell phone, software monitors your Web surfing, X-rays explore your purse, and airport scanners see through your clothes. Now comes the final indignity: machines that look into your soul.

With the aid of functional magnetic resonance imaging, neuroscientists have been hard at work on Allen's fantasy. Under controlled conditions, they can tell from a brain scan which of two images you're looking at. They can tell whether you're thinking of a face, an animal, or a scene. They can even tell which finger you're about to move.

But those feats barely scratch the brain's surface. Any animal can perceive objects and move limbs. To plumb the soul, you need a metaphysician. John-Dylan Haynes, a brilliant researcher at Germany's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, is leading the way. His mission, according to the center, is to predict thoughts and behavior from fMRI scans.

Haynes, a former philosophy student, is going for the soul's jugular. He's trying to clarify the physical basis of free will. "Why do we shape intentions in this way or another way?" he wonders. "Your wishes, your desires, your goals, your plans—that's the core of your identity." The best place to look for that core is in the brain's medial prefrontal cortex, which, he points out, is "especially involved in the initiation of willed movements and their protection against interference."

To get a clear snapshot of free will, Haynes designed an experiment that would isolate it from other mental functions. No objects to interpret; no physical movements to anticipate or execute; no reasoning to perform. Participants were put in an fMRI machine and were told they would soon be shown the word "select," followed a few seconds later by two numbers. Their job was to covertly decide, when they saw the "select" cue, whether to add or subtract the unseen numbers. Then, they were to perform the chosen calculation and punch a button corresponding to the correct answer. The snapshot was taken right after the "select" cue, when they had nothing to do but choose addition or subtraction.

Until this experiment, which was reported last month in Current Biology, nobody had ever tried to take a picture of free will. One reason is that fMRI is too crude to distinguish one abstract choice from another. It can only show which parts of the brain are demanding blood oxygen. That's too coarse to distinguish the configuration of cells that signifies addition from the configuration that signifies subtraction. So, Haynes used software to help the computer recognize complex patterns in the data. To dissect human thought, the computer had to emulate it.

Each participant took the test more than 250 times, choosing independently in each trial. The computer then looked at a sample of the scans, along with the final answers that revealed what choices had actually been made. It calculated a pattern and used this pattern to predict, from each participant's remaining scans, his or her decisions in the corresponding trials. Haynes checked the predictions—add or subtract—against the participants' answers. The computer got it right 71 percent of the time.

I know what you're thinking: Why would anyone want a machine to read his mind? But imagine being paralyzed, unable to walk, type, or speak. Imagine a helmet full of electrodes, or a chip implanted in your head, that lets your brain tell your computer which key to press. Those technologies are already here. And why endure the agony of mental hunt-and-peck? Why not design computers that, like a smart secretary, can discern and execute even abstract intentions? That's what Haynes has in mind. You want to open a folder or an e-mail, and your computer does it. Your wish is its command.

But if machines can read your mind when you want them to, they can also read it when you don't. And your will isn't necessarily the one they obey. Already, scans have been used to identify brain signatures of disgust, drug cravings, unconscious racism, and suppressed sexual arousal, not to mention psychopathy and propensity to kill.