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It has come to my recent attention that scientists have developed a machine that allows them to peer into the brain and pinpoint complex memories. I could use one of those things, because I can’t remember what I was going to write about today.

Oh yeah, I was going to write about this new machine they’ve come up with that allows nosy scientists to look into your head and read what you remember. Thank you, Miss Peggy, for reminding me. And how did you know?

Researchers at University College in London have come up with a device that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging — whatever that is — to identify thought patterns. They call it fMRI for short, though it’s hard for me to remember acronyms like that. I’m still trying to remember the difference between a 1040 and a 10W40, one of which goes to the IRS and one of which goes into my crankcase.

My first reaction is that my memories are my own private property and nobody has the right to go snooping through them, just as nobody has a right to go snooping through the files in my office, except Miss Peggy when I commission her to be my secretary or whenever she takes a good notion to go through them and tidy them up.

But I can see how it would be helpful to law enforcement to probe the memory cells of suspected criminals.

For instance, I can see Horatio on “CSI: Miami” peering from behind his dark glasses and telling a suspect, “You claim you were home watching ‘Jeopardy,’ Mr. Creep, but your memory tells us you were in the motel room with Miss Pulchritude two minutes before the gas explosion that took her life.”

Imagine how useful a memory machine would have been during the Watergate probe, assuming that the Supreme Court would have allowed it to be used on the president.

“Mr. President, we don’t need your tapes — not even the 18 minutes Rosemary Woods accidentally erased. We’ve tapped into the memory machine you secretly installed in the Oval Office.”

A memory-reading machine might also eliminate a favorite dodge of white-collar criminals trying to avoid telling the truth without perjuring themselves.

“You say you don’t remember whether you withdrew $10,000 from the company’s account for your own personal use? Your honor, I would like to enter into evidence this memory-machine printout that shows this witness recalls precisely when he took the money and what he did with it.”

There’s an inconvenient thing called the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects citizens against self-incrimination. Maybe the Supreme Court could rule that it’s the machine, not the self, that does the incriminating, and machines can’t violate the Constitution. Anyhow, the Fifth Amendment is a favorite hiding place for the guilty, and surely ought to be repealed.

If I had a memory-pinpointing machine, I would use it to tell me where I left my glasses or my hearing aids or my cell phone or any other of those small but essential items that I am constantly misplacing. I would prefer a machine that could be programmed to say “none of your business” when somebody tried to pry into a memory I wanted to keep secret. But then I probably would have trouble figuring out how to program it. I’m still not sure how to turn my cell phone off “speaker phone” when I’m in a situation in which I don’t want anybody to overhear Miss Peggy on the other end scolding me for leaving my dirty laundry on the bathroom floor.

It should be one short step from probing memory to probing thoughts, which is the next thing I fear from our runaway technology.

“Given a set of memories, we could tell just from the pattern of activity in the hippocampus which memory a person was recalling,” said Eleanor Maguire, who helped develop the memory-probing fMRI. And if you can figure out what memory a person is fooling around with, you can just about tell what the person is thinking. Which is downright scary.

What with cell phones and Twitter and all those high-tech devices that grab music from the skies and pipe it into our ears, we’re about to lose sight of what solitude is. We’re nurturing a generation of people who won’t know what it’s like to be alone with their thoughts.

A mind-reading machine could make it dangerous even to have thoughts. What if Big Brother were out there monitoring every momentary idea that flickered through your mind? Can any of us say we have never entertained thoughts that would make us blush with shame and humiliation if the outside world were to learn about them?

Most men have had the experience of walking down the street, casually noticing the cutie jiggling past them, thinking an improper thought or two, then being brought back to reality by a wife who says, “Her chest is out of proportion to her hips.”

And you say, innocently, “I totally agree with you, my dear.”

And your wife says, “But you didn’t notice her hips.”

Now how does she know that?

Which brings us to the moment of truth: Husbands already have a mind-reading machine.

It’s called a wife.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com