Dr. Steven Novella

You know what this made me think of, too?

Remember we talked about the Stroop effect, which is when you make people read the color of the ink rather than the number that's spelled out?

So if you see the word yellow in red ink, you're supposed to say red rather than read yellow.

And that's the Stroop effect.

It delays you from saying the color.

It is a good way to find out if you're a native speaker.

So it's like a way to flesh out spies.

But now imagine if you could give people a quick battery of tests and then analyze all the results using AI or whatever, right?

And say, oh yeah, this guy's 99% probable to be an American, let's say, or to be an Asian.

So you have to choose your spies, you have to pretest them to make sure they can pass a foreign neurological bias test or whatever?

Yeah, it'd be hard to purge you of all the subtle cultural things that you absorb, you know, to purge yourself of that.

But, you know, it's easy to imagine, and I know this exists to some extent now.

You guys all do that, I think it was a New York Times test where you ask a bunch of questions about words and it tells you where you live and where you're from.

So, you know, AI plus big data.

could peer into our soul.

It could tell so much about us, and it's only getting worse, which kind of leads me to the next news item, which is digital privacy.

I want to ask you guys a question.

Where do you think...

The most, you know, where, how, in what context, what behavior is the most information being gathered about you?

The most personal information.