鈥淵ou want the truth?鈥� yells Jack Nicholson at the end of A Few Good
Men, 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 handle the truth!鈥�
Apparently Kevin Warwick, the inventive and media-friendly professor of
cybernetics at the University of Reading, thinks we can. Warwick has been
talking about the potential for telepathy in the relatively near future. He鈥檚
working on microchip implants that could give us a Spock-like bond with light
switches, computers and maybe even other people. The devices will work by
detecting nerve impulses generated inside the body and transmitting them in some
form to receiver chips elsewhere.
A new form of noise-free communication beckons, an unmediated communion of
minds, a window to the truth of the soul. Perhaps.
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Stripped of its attendant hype, such technology clearly has some potential
for healing. Microchips attached to nerves, for example, might be used to convey
to paralysed strokes victims what different movements should feel like, thereby
helping them to recover. But where鈥檚 the fun in stripping things of hype?
High-tech physiotherapy is all very well; but mind-reading is what really
interests us. And the problem with this notion of telepathy through shared
feelings is brilliantly summed up in one of the spoof headlines for which the
American satirical magazine The Onion is justly famous: 鈥淧resident
feels nation鈥檚 pain, breasts鈥�. Though linked, physical sensations and emotional
ones are not the same sort of thing.
Making sense of the physical sensations of our bodies鈥攇iving them
meanings鈥� requires a great deal of mental interpretation, and it seems
pretty debatable whether we could interpret other people鈥檚 bodily sensations
with the precision needed to communicate any subtleties. You might get over this
by developing special codes to carry content; but once coding becomes necessary,
nervous-system-to-nervous-system telepathy is reduced to a complicated sign
language.
Nevertheless, if I were head of R&D for RADA or the New York School of
Performing Arts鈥攐r a politician or con-man鈥擨 would be fascinated.
Forget telepathy: these chips might be the key to a new technology of
untruthfulness. For sound evolutionary reasons, it is hard to look very sad, or
very happy, if you aren鈥檛. Reliable communication requires good guarantees of
sincerity, and we鈥檝e evolved to be pretty reliable. There are all sorts of
muscles that people use when behaving honestly that they don鈥檛 and mostly can鈥檛
when lying鈥攎uscles that affect the quality of a smile or a grimace, its
smoothness, its all-over-the-faceness and so on.
If Method actors have an advantage, perhaps it comes from inhabiting the
emotions of a character so thoroughly that these muscles mobilise themselves.
Maybe they end up believing the artful lies they entertain us with are true.
When Oliver Sacks watched Robert De Niro playing one of his patients in the film
of Awakenings, he found the portrayal so good he wondered if it might be
detectable in De Niro鈥檚 brain chemistry.
What if, thanks to Warwickite chips, actors were able to feel how their
muscles worked in genuine displays of emotion while not being distracted or
confused by any attempt to portray the emotion itself? It seems to me that such
a system might make it a lot easier to mimic such displays. The ability to
deceive would be greatly enhanced.
Technological telepathy might not after all bring us any closer to the truth.
But Jack Nicholson and his colleagues would be able to handle their lies better
than ever.