Original Blog Entry: "Defense Spooks: Let's Control Enemy Minds

konane — Sat, 16 May 2009 17:06:30 GMT

Two very interesting articles about mind control. Live links for reference.

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Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push

By Katie Drummond May 14, 2009 10:46 am

Source Wired.com

Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they ll read each other s minds.

At least, that s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon s mad-science division Darpa. The agency s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals. That s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of pre-speech, analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It s a technique they re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.

The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable if everyone has similar patterns. Last, construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.

The military has been funding a handful of mind-tapping technology recently, and already have monkeys capable of telepathic limb control. Telepathy may also have advantages beyond covert battlefield chatter. Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to make the enemy obey our commands. The first step, though, may be getting a grunt to obey his officer s remotely-transmitted thoughts.

Katie Drummond and Noah Shachtman

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push/

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Defense Spooks: Let s Control Enemy Minds By Nick Thompson

August 16, 2008 7:03 am

Source Wired.com

Forget performance-enhancing drugs for soldiers, the next frontier is performance-degrading drugs for our enemies. Rick Weiss at the Science Progress blog has just written a nice post about a just-released 150-page report from the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency that argues that the military needs to do a better job keeping up with neuroscience: in part so it can learn how to make our enemies stupider.

Although conflict has many aspects, one that warfighters and policy makers often talk about is the motivation to fight, which undoubtedly has its origins in the brain and is reflected in peripheral neurophysiological processes, quotes Weiss from the report. So one question would be, How can we disrupt the enemy s motivation to fight? Other questions raised by controlling the mind: How can we make people trust us more? What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands? As cognitive neuroscience and related technologies become more pervasive, using technology for nefarious purposes becomes easier.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/08/the-dia-looks-i/

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