What capabilities can brain imaging offer outside of the medical industry? The National Research Council of The National Academies (part of a private, nonprofit institution that provides science, technology and health policy advice to elected leaders, policy makers, and the public) suggests that a promising possibility is intelligence application. In an NRC report, "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies," several potential intelligence functions are posited.

A summary within the Report addressing functional neuroimaging states, "Real-time, continuous readouts of neuroimaging results will become increasingly important for the [Intelligence Community] and the Department of Defense (DOD), which will evaluate them for temporal sequences that indicate psychological or behavioral states. While predictions about future applications of technology are always speculative, emergent neurotechnology may well help to provide insight into intelligence from captured military combatants, to enhance our training techniques, to enhance cognition and memory of enemy soldiers and intelligence operatives, to screen terrorism suspects at checkpoints or ports of entry, and to improve the effectiveness human-machine interfaces in such applications as remotely piloted vehicles and prosthetics."

Christopher Green, Chair of the NRC's Committee on Military and Intelligence Methodology for Emergent Neurophysiological and Cognitive/Neural Science in the Next Two Decades, explained further to DOTmed the possible applications: "The very best example is the one that is also most likely: Imaging can be an important tool to learning if certain messages are being understood by the percipient. This is possible in being sure complicated messages (not lies, which are simple mis-statements) that have educational purposes, purposes to inform, are being understood in languages and contexts different than in the "first" language of the receiver. In other words, to help pass the language barrier where things are often misunderstood. Imaging offers the possibility to be certain that messages are understood."
The use of brain imaging technologies, Green says, would not be for propaganda, "which is too complicated since it is basically untrue representations or distorted reality." However, negotiation processes may benefit. "Negotiations, surely: of help in telling how a person is really feeling about the material being presented."

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