Light + Sound = New Weapon

[sunny]

Light + Sound = New Weapon

By Sharon Weinberger
December 12, 2007

Military funded researchers are preparing to test a nonlethal weapon that combines light and sound. Nicholas C. Nicholas, chief scientist of Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory, told an audience yesterday at a nonlethal weapons conference that in the first half of next year, the lab plans to test DSLAD, the Distributed Sound and Light Array Debilitator. It’ll use essentially off the shelf technology to see if combining aversive noises with light produce some special debiliating effects. Anecdotal effects include dizziness and loss of balance, and of course, nausea. In other words, DSLAD could be another potential "puke ray."

As I wrote yesterday, the Applied Research Lab, which receives funding from the Pentagon’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, is also hoping to test the behavioral effects of sound at higher decibels, which could lead to a sonic blaster.

Last year, there was a lot of excitement about the Sheriff, a system that would combine a number of nonlethal technologies, such as a dazzling laser, sound beam and the pain ray. But what makes this new work significant is that there isn’t a lot of hard data on sound weapons, let alone weapons that combine sound and light.

Pentagon’s PCs Bend to Your Brain

By Noah Shachtman
March 21, 2007



Pushing through extremes of heat and cold, surviving massive blood loss, and supercharging the body’s metabolism — that was just the start. The military isn’t only looking to radically boost the physical performance of American troops. Its trying to improve mental abilities, as well. The first step: computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you’re thinking.

Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what’s occupying their operators’ attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions.

"Computers today, you have to learn how they work," says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa’s first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. "We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you."

My article in today’s Wired News has more on "AugCog" and Darpa’s "Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts."

[sunny]

Air Force Wants Neuroweapons to Overwhelm Enemy Minds

By Noah Shachtman
November 2, 2010




It sounds like something a wild-eyed basement-dweller would come up with, after he complained about the fit of his tinfoil hat. But military bureaucrats really are asking scientists to help them “degrade enemy performance” by attacking the brain’s “chemical pathway[s].” Let the conspiracy theories begin.

Late last month, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing revamped a call for research proposals examining “Advances in Bioscience for Airmen Performance.” It’s a six-year, $49 million effort to deploy extreme neuroscience and biotechnology in the service of warfare.

One suggested research thrust is to use “external stimulant technology to enable the airman to maintain focus on aerospace tasks and to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.” (Something other than modafinil, I guess.) Another asks scientists to look into “fus[ing] multiple human sensing modalities” to develop the “capability for Special Operations Forces to rapidly identify human-borne threats.” No, this is not a page from The Men Who Stare at Goats.

But perhaps the oddest, and most disturbing, of the program’s many suggested directions is the one that notes: “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” That’s right: the Air Force wants a way to fry foes’ minds — or at least make ‘em a little dumber.

It’s the kind of official statement that’s seized on by anyone who is sure that the CIA planted a microchip in his head, or thinks that the Air Force is controlling minds with an antenna array in Alaska. The same could be said about the 711th’s call to “develo[p] technologies to anticipate, find, fix, track, identify, characterize human intent and physiological status anywhere and at anytime.”

The ideas may sound wild. They are wild. But the notions aren’t completely out of the military-industrial mainstream. For years, armed forces and intelligence community researchers have toyed with ways of manipulating minds. During the Cold War, the CIA and the military allegedly plied the unwitting with dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of zany (and sometimes dangerous) mind-control experiments. More recently, the Pentagon’s most revered scientific advisory board warned in 2008 that adversaries could develop enhancements to their “cognitive capabilities … and thus create a threat to national security.” The National Research Council and Defense Intelligence Agency followed suit, pushing for pharma-based tactics to weaken enemy forces. In recent months, the Pentagon has funded projects to optimize troop’s minds, prevent injuries, preemptively assess vulnerability to traumatic stress, and even conduct “remote control of brain activity using ultrasound.”

The Air Force is warning potential researchers that this project “may require top secret clearance.” They’ll also need a high tolerance for seemingly loony theories — sparked by the military itself.

[sunny]

Report: Nonlethal Weapons Could Target Brain, Mimic Schizophrenia

By Sharon Weinberger
February 18, 2008

Of all the crazy, bizarre less-lethal weapons that have been proposed, the use of microwaves to target the human mind remains the most disturbing. The question has always been: is this anything more than urban myth? We may not have the final answer to this question, but a newly declassified Pentagon report, Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons , obtained by a private citizen under the Freedom of Information Act, provides some fascinating tidbits on a variety of exotic weapons ideas.

Among those discussed are weapons that could disrupt the brain, as well as my longtime obsession, the "Voice of God" device, which creates voices in people’s heads. As the report notes, "Application of the microwave hearing technology could facilitate a private message transmission. It may be useful to provide a disruptive condition to a person not aware of the technology. Not only might it be disruptive to the sense of hearing, it could be psychologically devastating if one suddenly heard ‘voices within one’s head.’"

Voices in your head disturbing? Heck, yeah, considering it’s something most people associate with schizophrenia. The age-old question is whether such a weapon is possible. According to the report, it’s not only possible, it’s already been demonstrated in crude form:

Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except hat it could only be heard within a person’s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using "speech modulated" microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up the sound. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities.

….

This technology requires no extrapolation to estimate its usefulness. Microwave energy can be applied at a distance, and the appropriate technology can be adapted from existing radar units. Aiming devices likewise are available but for special circumstances which require extreme specificity, there may be a need for additional development. Extreme directional specificity would be required to transmit a message to a single hostage surrounded by his captors. Signals can be transmitted long distances (hundreds of meters) using current technology. Longer distances and more sophisticated signal types will require more bulky equipment, but it seems possible to transmit some of the signals at closer ranges using man-portable equipment.

If voices in your head aren’t disturbing enough, the report also goes on to theorize about a microwave weapon that could use electromagnetic pulses to disrupt the brain’s functioning. It would work through "a rhythmic-activity synchronization of brain neurons that disrupts normal cortical control of the corticospinal and corticobulbar pathways that disrupts normal functioning of the spinal motor neurons which control muscle and body movements."

This concept is still very theoretical, the report notes:

Application of electromagnetic pulses is also a conceptual nonlethal technology that uses electromagnetic energy to induce neural synchrony and disruption of voluntary muscle control. The effectiveness of this concept has not been demonstrated. However, from past work in evaluating the potential for electromagnetic pulse generator to affect humans, it is estimated that sufficiently strong internal fields can be generated within the brain to trigger neurons.

Sadly, there’s little context for the report, which is dated 1998, and no specific references to current programs or research, if any, about such weapons.

Pentagon’s Mind-Reading Computers Replicate

By Noah Shachtman
March 18, 2008



"Augmented Cognition," the Darpa program to build computer interfaces that adapt to their users’ brains, has officially run its course. But efforts to build mind-reading PCs continue throughout the military establishment.

Augmented Cognition relies on the idea that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer’s display to compensate. If people are getting too much visual information, send them a text alert. If they reading too much at once, present some of the data visually — in a chart or map.

The Air Force has tapped Design Interactive, Inc. to
build a battlefield command-and-control system that works along these lines. It’s supposed to use EEG and eye-tracking monitors to "assess the operator’s actual cognitive state." That way, the system can play around with its "information display" to "avoid cognitive bottlenecks before they occur." And that’s just the start. Eventually, the company wants the program to "anticipate future mission state and operator functional state ahead of time," too.

This Air Force has also handed out a contract to Quantum Applied Science and Research, Inc. — that’s right, QUASAR for short — to perfect a mind-reading interface for squads of killer drones. Supervising all those armed, flying robots might be doable when things are relatively calm. But, in the heat of battle, it might be too much for one puny human mind to handle unassisted.

Darpa isn’t done with these technologies, either. The agency plans to spend $12 million next year on brain-science programs like Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts. It’s an AugCog-inspired effort to tap the firings of the subconscious mind to sort through satellite pictures quickly. Early tests have shown as much as a six-fold increase in the analysts’ efficiency, when the computer and the brain work together.

[sunny]

Defense Spooks: Let’s Control Enemy Minds

By Nicholas Thompson
August 16, 2008

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.”

[sunny]

Pentagon: Boost Training With Computer-Troop Mind Meld

By Katie Drummond
April 27, 2010



The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops — by scanning their minds as they play video games.

Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition.

The Air Force also took up the idea, by trying to use EEGs to “assess the operator’s actual cognitive state” and “avoid cognitive bottlenecks before they occur.”

Zeroing in on brainpower is a strategy that reflects the changing tactics of fighting wars: today’s troop needs to be as cognitively ready as they are physically — if not more. They’ve also got to spend more time on the ground in urban settings, interacting with locals and canvassing for information. That’s where virtual cultural trainers often come in handy. Troops are prepped in language, social norms and cultural sensitivity, before they even leave their base.

The trainers are quickly becoming more sophisticated. As Danger Room pal Peter Singer notes, the Pentagon is already using “three-dimensional experiences that hit multiple senses,” including, in one case, a wearable collar that emits key odors.

Now, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is soliciting small business proposals for an even more immersive trainer, one that includes voice-recognition technology, and picks up on vocal tone and facial gestures. The game would then react and adapt to a war-fighter’s every action. For example, if a player’s gesture “insults the local tribal leader,” the trainee would “find that future interactions with the population are more difficult and more hostile.”

And, most importantly, the new programs would react to the warrior’s own physiological and neurological cues. They’d be monitored using an EEG, eye tracking, heart and respiration rate, and other physiological markers. Based on the metrics, the game would adapt in difficulty and “keep trainees in an optimal state of learning.”

The OSD isn’t ready to use neuro-based systems in the war zone, but the agency does want to capitalize on advances in neuroscience that have assigned meaningful value to intuitive decision-making. As the OSD solicitation points out, troops often need to make fast-paced decisions in high-stress environments, with limited information and context. Well-reasoned, analytic decisions are rarely possible — which would make intuition, if it were reliable, an ideal tool to give American troops the upper hand.

That’s where neuroscience comes in. OSD wants simulated games that use EEGs to monitor the cognitive patterns of trainees, particularly at what’s thought to be the locus of neurally based, intuitive decision-making — the basal ganglia. In his seminal paper on the neuroscience of intuition, Harvard’s Matthew Lieberman notes that the ganglia can “learn temporal patterns that are predictive of events of significance, regardless of conscious intent … as long as exposure is repeatedly instantiated.”

By using neural monitoring to supervise a trainee’s progress in their simulated world, the military could bolster the odds that snap decisions in the real-world will be based on more than just a gut feeling.

Military Wants to Super-Charge Troop Smarts

By Katie Drummond
April 29, 2010



The Pentagon’s been trying to get ahead of the curve on neuroscience for years, toying with ideas like mind-reading whether people are lying and performance-degrading drugs for enemy combatants. Now, it’s launching a major effort to harness neuroscience in a way that might better prepare soldiers for the mental rigors of modern warfare.

In a series of small business solicitations released last week, the Office of the Secretary of Defense outlined plans for a new “Cognitive Readiness Technology” program with the aim of “making our warfighters as cognitively strong as they are physically strong.”

Neuroscience is at the locus of the program. Before they can super-charge cognition, Pentagon scientists need to understand exactly how it works. So they’re launching “Neuromorphic Models of Human Social Cultural Behavior” (HSCB) to accurately model human cognition, including how we perceive, learn and retain information. HSCB models already exist, and are used by troops and decision-makers to predict the outcome of a choices during a mission. But the models “are only as good as the fidelity of the human behavior representations (HBR) that form them.” Right now, those representations are based entirely on empirical observation, which the military wants to swap out for a model that can tap into “the functions of the brain that give rise to actual human cognition.”

It’s not the first time the Pentagon has tried to map the human mind. Last year, research agency Darpa requested proposals for systems that would synchronize neural brain waves to optimize the mind’s storage capacity and memory recall. The agency has also tried to create synthetic versions of living brains, complete with “neuroscience-inspired architecture.”

The military wants cognitive mapping to help assess troop readiness in a war-zone. Their small-business solicitations include a request for embeddable body sensors that could automatically determine mental preparedness, which can be influenced by factors like fatigue, cognitive overload or stress, based on physiological and neural data. The sensors would do more than just analyze the cognitive status of their wearer — they’d be combined with the data from other team members, to instantly identify just how performance-ready a given unit actually is.

But no matter how cognitively capable troops become, they’ll still rely on computers to handle much of their workload. Humans, the solicitation notes, “are quick to arrive at initial decisions,” but computers can more quickly calculate pros and cons of different tactics. That’s why the military also wants neuroscience to “bridge the human-machine systems gap” and turn troops and computers into collaborative units. Their “neuro-cognitive control of human machine systems,” would tap into the neural signals that indicate desired actions, then transmit them to a computer to determine the optimal approach and carry it out.

And a training program that emphasizes brawny brains over bodies reflects a trend across Pentagon departments: Just last month, the Army announced a redesign of their physical-fitness program to accommodate troops spending more time behind computer screens than they do on their feet.

[sunny]

Darpa Wants Remote Controls to Master Troop Minds

By Katie Drummond
September 9, 2010



The Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm wants to trick out troops’ brains, from the areas that regulate alertness and cognition to pain treatment and psychiatric well-being. And the scientists want to do it all from the outside in — with a gadget installed inside the troops’ helmets. “Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound,” the Defense Department’s Armed with Science blog promises.

It’s the latest out-there project in the military’s growing arsenal of brain-based research. In recent months alone, the Pentagon’s funded projects to optimize troop’s minds, prevent injuries and even preemptively assess cognitive ability and vulnerability to traumatic stress. Now, Darpa’s funding one lab that’s trying to do it all — from boosting troop smarts to preventing traumatic brain injuries.

Arizona State University neuroscientist William Tyler has been working with funding from the Army Research Laboratory for years. That neurotechnology work has now caught the eye of Darpa, which awarded his lab a Young Faculty Award to improve upon non-invasive approaches to brain stimulation.

“When people ask what this kind of device could do, I ask them what their brain does for them,” Tyler tells Danger Room. “The brain serves all the functions of your body, and if you knew the neuroanatomy, then you can start to regulate each one of those functions.”

Already, scientists have devised cutting-edge brain stimulation methods to treat medical disorders, like Parkinson’s disease or severe depression. But current deep-brain approaches require invasive surgery to implant electrodes and batteries, and external ultrasound stimulation can’t penetrate “the deep brain circuits where many diseased circuits reside,” Tyler writes at Armed With Science.

Now, Tyler and his research team have created a “transcranial pulsed ultrasound” that’s able to stimulate a myriad of brain circuits from the outside in. The device has already proven capable of targeting deep brain regions, unlike existing methods. And it’s capable of zeroing in on extremely specific brain zones, as small as two or three millimeters. Plus, prototype devices are small enough to be fitted inside a typical helmet.

“Going deep beneath the skull and having extremely specific spatial resolution are two huge advantages over existing approaches,” Tyler says. “Depth and specificity are what allow the ultrasound to do what other methods can’t.”

With Darpa’s funding, Tyler plans to expand the uses of the ultrasound and improve the device’s spacial resolution even more, making it a veritable all-in-one brain stimulation device. Using a microcontroller device, the ultrasound would stimulate different brain regions to boost troop alertness and cognition, relieve stress and pain, and protect them against traumatic brain injuries.

“The really damaging part of a TBI isn’t the initial injury,” Tyler says. “It’s the metabolic damage, the free radicals and the swelling that are happening in the hours afterward. If you can flick your remote and trigger an immediate intervention, you’d be curbing what might otherwise be lifelong brain damage.”

[sunny]

Air Force Looks for ‘Core Algorithms’ of Human Thought

May 26, 2009

The Defense Department is continuing its push to reduce human thought and human action to a few lines of code. The latest effort comes from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is looking to build “mathematical or computational models of human attention, memory, categorization, reasoning, problem solving, learning and motivation, and decision making.” The ultimate goal, according to a recent request for research proposals, is to “elucidate core computational algorithms of the mind and brain.” Good luck with that, guys.

It’s one in a heap of different Office projects to try to teach machines to act more like living things. “Nature has used evolution to build materials and sensors that outperform current sensors (for example, a spider’s haircells can detect air flow at low levels even in a noisy background),” the Office writes. So it’s got a second program, to not only “mimic existing natural sensory systems, but also add existing capabilities to these organisms” so they can more “precise[ly] control” their God-given gifts.

For example, maybe the military can develop better “active and passive camouflage” by learning from creatures who are able to change color, to hide from their predators. Maybe the armed forces can improve on eznymes which would eat away at an enemy’s gear. Maybe the military can bioengineer the organisms living in extreme heat, or extreme acidity, to make our equipment stronger.

The Office also wants to know what makes collections of living creatures tick. So the Office is looking to assemble a “fundamental understanding of the interactions between demographic groups… to explain and predict outcomes between competing factions within geographic regions.” It wants to “identify and quantify cultural variability” to model the effects of an “info warfare campaign” online.

Once that’s done, it’s back to digitizing brainwork. “New computational and mathematical principles of cognition are needed to form a symbiosis between human and machine systems,” the Office says.

[Photo: Lawrence Berkeley Lab]

[MI-6]

radioactive produced from pc may harm your eyes, especially for woman eyes.

[sunny]

radioactive produced from pc may harm your eyes, especially for woman eyes.

hohoh ^_^'

[sunny]

"A light and sound machine is a brainwave weapon tool. The method by which this weapon occurs is known as the Frequency Following Response (FFR). Through the use of audio & visual stimulation, listeners are gently guided into specific brainwave states. Each audio beat and pulse is a specific frequency.

Our minds "think" in terms of frequency. Brainwaves change frequencies based on neural activity within the brain, be it by hearing, touch, smell, vision and/or taste. These senses respond to activity from the environment and transmits that information to the brain via electrical signals.

Hearing + vision are considered the favorable senses for affecting brainwaves. By presenting these beats & pulses to the brain, within a few minutes, the brain begins to mimic or follow the same frequencies as the stimuli.

In essence, these instruments speak to the mind in it's own language - the language of frequency". - Sunny, nonlaw's webboard.