Genuine Fake Technology: Using mentalism magic trick methods to simulate the experiences of future technologies

Recent advances in neuroscience and AI have made it increasingly possible to read human minds directly from brain activity, without participants reporting how they think or feel. Potentially, these developments could become the ultimate invasion of human privacy, threatening our subjective agency and integrity. Or perhaps the converse is true, that brain reading will deepen our understanding of ourselves and others, and further our empathy and social connections? These questions are critical to investigate, as humans are ill equipped to forecast their psychological reactions to future events. To address these challenges, the current project proposes to use techniques derived from performance magic—specifically mentalism—to simulate the psychological experiences of having one’s brain read or manipulated by future technology. Mentalism performances involve creating the appearance of supernormal powers. By pairing mentalism tricks with realistic, but fake technologies (e.g. an inert EEG cap or sham computer software), we can create compelling illusions of actual mind reading or mind control. We are interested in how they will subjectively experience those illusions and how they influence beliefs about technology. At the end of the experiments, all participants will be thoroughly debriefed about the illusory nature of what they have just experienced.