US military switched on to new mind-reading technology
UNITED STATES: The United States Army is trying to create a force of ‘‘telepathic troops’’ who can communicate silently in the din of battle by reading each other’s minds.
Wearing helmets fitted with electrodes that can read signals from the brain, they would be able to warn each other about an ambush or call in drones without saying a single word.
New brain-reading techniques designed to help quadriplegics transmit their thoughts to a computer screen are being adapted for use in future wars. Scientists call it ‘‘synthetic telepathy’’ and believe they may be able to make it a reality by 2017.
The Pentagon has given a £4m (NZ$7.7M) grant to neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine, south of Los Angeles, and research centres in Philadelphia and Maryland, with the aim of ‘‘retuning’’ the medical technology.
Breakthroughs of this kind are more usually generated by the military. At UC Irvine, scientists declined to talk about their work last week. A recent report in The Brain magazine suggested they were wary because rumours about their research prompted a blizzard of angry emails from Californians worried that the government was monitoring their thoughts. ‘‘Not yet,’’ an Irvine scientist said, joking.
The Irvine technology works like this: volunteers wear a cap studded with 128 gel-soaked electrodes and are asked to think of key words chosen by researchers who match them up with chemical flares they observe in the brain. The volunteers’ thoughts are effectively ‘‘read’’ and converted into computer code.
The key words include standard military commands which show up as symbols on a computer screen. These will eventually be used to create a dictionary of critical phrases, such as ‘‘enemy ahead’’ or ‘‘call in helicopters’’, that can be transmitted to comrades.
The telepathy helmets can identify and correctly transmit 45 per cent of commands, according to The Brain. The army needs a radical improvement in that rate. Aviation sources say that if the success rate improved sufficiently, the technology could eventually be built in to fighter pilots’ helmets to speed up response times to threats from incoming missiles.
The research raises several questions, including whether a mind-reading capability could be used in the interrogation of terrorist suspects, perhaps replacing methods such as waterboarding which are regarded by many as immoral and ineffective.
The Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency recently released a report calling on the armed forces to spend more on neuroscience research, up to and including ways of making ‘‘the enemy obey our commands’’.
American troops test the helmets.
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