In another age, I might have been more shocked by this:
The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you’re thinking.
[…]
The idea — to grossly over-simplify — is 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 a person’s getting too much visual information, send him a text alert. If that person is reading too much at once, present some of the data visually — in a chart or map.
This research is being conducted under the guise of improving troop performance:
So much of what’s done today in the military involves staring at a computer screen — parsing an intelligence report, keeping track of fellow soldiers, flying a drone airplane — that it can quickly lead to information overload…
[…]
“With technology, we’re constantly interrupting people, burdening people,” Schmorrow explains. “My phone is ringing, my Blackberry is buzzing, I’ve gotten 20 e-mails since we started talking. We just want people to be able to focus. Give them a bit of peace.”
[…]
“We began with the idea that there was too much information out there these days for anyone to comprehend,” says Schmorrow. “So how can we present it in a way that people will remember? Proffitt tells me, ‘And wouldn’t it be even better if we could figure out what people were doing, what they were thinking, so we could present them with the right things?’”
Figuring out the military value of this technology is easy. Can you think of any commercial applications?
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Marketing! Marketing! Marketing!
Scarily enough, I can also believe that there will probably be some researchers who propose educational uses as well.
There is a difference in a computer that your mind can control and one that can control your mind….isn’t there?
*ponders*
Seriously, the military has been messing with a mind controlled air interceptor missile interface for some time, with limited results.
There of course could be a civil application of you using you mind to control your computer. But if the interface is two-way, that is scary.
Oh, hello, Videogames!
Yeah, my industry would be all over that. And there’s nothing that would stop us from monitoring the player’s mind and see if he’s receptive to advertising, either.
Feeling peckish? I’ll make sure the Butterfinger billboard pops over the next building you pass…
At the same time, Moms are the biggest spenders in this category. We could definitely make a game that listened for receptivity and told you to do your chores, be nice to your sister, feed the dog, clear the table, put your goddamn socks in the goddamn hamper instead of leaving them in the goddamn hallway when we have company over, you’re just like your father, the bum!
I mean… yeah, videogames.
“The Manchurian Candidate is fiction, Kaitlyn.”
Maybe I’m being dense this morning, but why is this evil? The millitary’s been interested in this sort of thing since at least the 1980s, when they realized that at least one of their aircraft was close to unflyable unless portions of the HUD were switched off–the pilot simply couldn’t find the information they needed quickly enough.
Firefox. Not the browser or the panda.
I don’t see a problem with observing how folks interact with technology and making adjustments. It’s this bit that gives me pause:
Finer social control through media. If Americans consented to televisions and computer screens that could monitor their brains, then the media control which is already causing Americans to act like sheep would be even more powerful.
Video Games, sure. That’s how it would be sold to the public.
Forms of torture, perhaps?
There has been a lot of research on the mind and the ability to manipulate people based on it. Modern hypnosis and nueral linguistic programming have been practiced for over twenty-five years. Combined with the new brain scanning technology and ever faster computing power, this technology of the mind is going to be used to manipulate the masses as imagined by dystopians. The huge capital complex has the resources and the desire to put these manipulative mind technologies into use. It is kind of scary.
the concept of the ‘internet’ was originally designed as a top secret way to communicate via underground based tight-beam transmission lines. this way, in the event of a nuclear bomb drop, basic communication among military assets could be maintained somewhat. however, electrical and electronic equipment can (and will be) be temporarily or permanently disabled by EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse).
the dispersed web network concept allows those with pre-positioned, safely prepared & designed electronics the ability to get back into near or full communication with command in short order.
it wouldn’t be a far guess to believe that your very keystrokes & mouse/cursor movements are being monitored from a distant location when you are using the web. after all, the military just admitted their interest towards improving our web based internet learning experience.
who better to use as test subjects in field application of new perceptions & manipulations tech than those of us in the ’spheres’?
i am sure only the best scientists are hard at work at improving our internet experience. soon, i envision ‘internet usage’ body relaxation/motivational FDA approved pharmaceuticals. this new approach to modern medicine & the internets can not be too far behind given the close proximity of today’s military industrial complex.
Any industry where people deal with oodles of data would be all over the initial versions of this. I expect stock traders will be the first to try it. (Or maybe advertising focus groups.)
As a tool, I think it’s pretty neutral — like training tutors or salespeople or whoever to recognize when someone’s eyes are glazing over or when something is making them tense. (And you probably don’t need brain scans to do most of it). What you do with that information can be anywhere from really helpful for people to really pernicious.
Seems largely neutral for me.
This could be a huge boon for dyslexics having to deal with a one-size-fits-most interface systems that we have to deal with regularly. Militarily their stated purpose makes a lot of sense: the last thing you want in a combat situation with a person interacting with complex data is to miss a warning.
At the same time, this could also lead to much more sophisticated advertising systems, as others have mentioned.
More of the same, it seems.
Check out the CIA mind-control research program known as MK-ULTRA (which itself has roots in related military projects), begun in 1953. It went on in secret for years and the story didn’t become public until the 1970s. By that time, then-CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all CIA records of MK-ULTRA to be destroyed, so all we have is bits and pieces that somehow leaked out. Let’s just say the research played fast and loose with the appropriate standards on working with human subjects.
Okay, let me backtrack a bit. I shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this project necessarily lends itself to mind control or brainwashing. There is, however, a history of that kind of research.
My copy of Word knows when I’ve got a deadline. Then it crashes.
Hm. Sounds like there will come a time when wearing a tinfoil hat (or its government-mind-reading ray blocking equivalent) will be a prudent, if non-sanctioned, fashion choice.
I posted on this subject on my blog — see link, hehe — and at greater length than I’d feel comfortable cross-posting, here. It’s mostly futurism stuff. Here’s a bit of it:
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It will also have truly wide-ranging law enforcement and privacy concerns, as are already happening with brain fingerprinting. A machine that reads a person’s mind very obviously has tremendous potential for abuse, but also tremendous potential to stop abuse. No more lying on the stand, right? Hook someone into an augmented cognition device and power it up. It has the potential for effective and certain lie detection.
Hooked up to unwilling participants, it probably also has tremendous use as an interrogation tool – not only in the legitimate sense of catching murderers and the like, but in the illegitimate sense of tracking down enemies of the state or things that are “wrong� but not illegal (such as extra-marital affairs).
And:
Can you imagine what instant messaging would be with something like this? Where the system would try to express your real intentions to the person you’re messaging in an adaptive way that increases the depth of conversation? That, to some extent, the enhanced cognition will help them feel what you are feeling? And that the system will know when it has succeeded? Can you imagine a world of increasing certainty in conversation?
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More at my site. Which I hope isn’t too rude a plug. I would post here, but it is fairly lengthy.
Geez, this reminds me of The Men Who Stare At Goats.
Don’t be alarmed, this is pretty standard cognitive neuroscience research. Nobody is anywhere near any ideas on how to control your brain — it’s damned hard to make any sense of the physiological signals that can be obtained from your brain.
The simplest applications are for anybody in a high-vigilance, high-information throughput position. That’s the military, but it’s also commercial airplane pilots, air traffic controllers, public transit workers, or any position that requires constant monitoring of a lot of data.
Being able to detect a drop in vigilance, or attentiveness oriented to the wrong information and either adjust the display or simply give a warning to the person (or supervisor) could be extremely useful in avoiding errors.
I work in this area as my main area of research. We try to use non-invasive neurophysiological measurements to develop better ideas of how the brain works. Based on that, I can tell you:
Mind control — nowhere near possible with anything like current technology
Mind reading — imaginable, but unbelieveably hard and possibly impossible
Assessing overall physiological activity in certain neural systems — doable, but not with easy or portable technology just now. Will be cool in limited circumstances when it’s easier.
P.S. Yeah, the marketing guys like the possibilities too. Many of us don’t think our techniques are very likely to be useful to them, but sometimes we are tempted by the possibility of getting additional funding from that type of application. Unsurprisingly, basic science funding through NIH has not done well under Bush.
being a supeannuated /. reader, I just had to RTFA in this particular case.
This line of research and the funding history that kept it going are highly typical of the kid-in-a-candy-store-with-his-sisters-piggybank nature of research projects for military purposes. What are the hallmarks, the typifying features:
probability of success so low that no VC money was ever found in the real world to try these ideas
sloppy requirments writing and success metrics that permit a portion of the “tests” to appear successful so funding will continue
Total absence of moral weighing for possible abuses, just happytalkin’ about the even remoter possible uses
Great sales hook: in this case “make your common warfighter work like Luke Skywalker no matter how badly we have designed the UI”
I don’t feel comfortable describing the procurement process that brings you these turkeys and takes away so much of your tax money, not while I am at my desk.
Come back tomorrow morning and I will either comment here or link a post of a primer on the purchas cycle for these things. Meanwhile, since this is afterall a post on Pandagon, consider how, even if it really works, this project is serious indictment of our national priorities:
Those of you who read the Wired art. right to the bottom might have noticed that the one area where substantial improvement on human performance occured was in analyzing blurry imagery for critical features of interest. The only use mentioned was satellite reconnaissance. Wouldn’t interpretations of mamograms be a greater need and have a greater payback? There is an epidemic of breast cancer generating mamogram imagery so copiously that we are faxing the pictures to India for help in analyzing them…and the error rates are hardly zero.
Okay, as a student of cognitive neuroscience and adaptive intelligent technologies, I feel the need to come in with a bit of devil’s advocate.
PREFACE/DISCLAIMER: there is nothing inherently wrong with living a neo-Luddite life and furthermore, such a lifestyle has its merits without comparison to a tech-dependent existence.
Continuing on…functional neuroimaging, such as fMRI and PET, are lacking in both spatial and temporal resolution, meaning that we can’t really tell WHEN or WHERE a certain activity is occurring in the brain in response to a specific stimulus. For example, if you read a study that says “we found prefrontal cortical activation in areas 1, 2 and 3 when exposed to stimulus A” and then a follow up “areas 1, 2, and 3 are known to be associated with cognitive processes Y and Z”, it’s not exactly valid to assume that processing of stimulus A follows the same biomechanical procedures that the processes Y and Z do. In fact, it’s fallacious, mainly because we can’t really specifically state that activation has ANYTHING to do with the cognitive processes Y and Z. We can only state that there is activation in that area given exposure to this stimulus A, due to the lack of resolution.
What does this mean? In the fields of cognitive adaptive technologies (i.e. computational intelligence such as this technology currently being discussed), it’s not really accurate to say “ZOMG this technology can READ MY MIND and CHANGE IT!!!1″ The technology is adapting to BRAIN ACTIVITY that may or may not be directly linked to your MIND. This is a fundamental assumption in cognitive neuroscience, whether specific neural states are directly indicative of a particular MENTAL state. We can really only prove that a neural state is roughly CORRELATIONAL to a particular mental state. Remember the first real rule of science: correlation is NOT causation. Furthermore, our images of those neural states are pretty shady and amorphous. You *MUST* remember that these are scientists who approach the mind as a kind of computational process. There is as much evidence for this approach as there is against it.
I would view this kind of technology more along the lines of the creation of increasingly more transparent technology. In other words, making things more INTUITIVE to use. As a generation, we have been heavily exposed to 1984 and Player Piano, things that cause us to decry adaptive technologies as being inherently evil. Without a doubt, this technology could be used for particularly distasteful activities (better “mind control”, so on and so forth). However, it can also be used to make the VCR more useful for Grandma.
If you managed to read this far into this, I commend you. If you actually UNDERSTAND what I’ve written, you’re much smarter than I; it took me years to understand the controversy of cognitive neuroscience.
I admit to getting a little weirded out when people who make claims to be scientists (tho’ student of cognitive neuroscience and adaptive intelligent technologies might mean something else, the odds are it means “scientist”).
What else would the mind be if not the brain and it’s activity?
Echo4Mike, The technology is already present to put ads in video games, few companies seem to be able to grasp just how to go about it. I’m actually not opposed to passive advertising in video games as long as it helps defray the cost. For example, I’d much rather play City of Heroes for $5 a month and have all the billboards and posters be ads for real world items. I’d be interested in whether or not the company that made COH ever thought of this option. It would certianly help them win market share from World of Warcraft since many people make a choice between the two due to cost.
I’m not saying I like ads, and I certianly wouldn’t want distracting pop-up ads or quests based on ads, but flying past a billboard for Pizza Hut isn’t going to kill me.
Until I can spell it out in detail, lets just say, “Taxpayer-fuck is certain and mind-fuck is unlikely”.
Chris Bradley: Let me clarify. And sorry, this will be kind of long-winded. I’m not sure this will answer your question, but I’ll give it a shot.
1) There is a tendency to localize mental functioning to particular areas of the brain, in essence to compartmentalize cognition. This is simplistic for it tends to devalue the emergent properties of cognition, meaning the cognitive processes that arise through systemic-level interaction between say, the intelligent agent (comprising of the brain + body, so embodied cognition, which is ALSO ignored but that’s an entirely different thing) and its environment. It’s entirely possible, for example, that higher-order cognitive processing cannot be adequately measured without also quantifying the environment that is being perceived. But I often don’t see this in neuroscience, we tend to just say “exposure to this stimulus in a controlled setting”. We tend to *only* look at the brain in isolation, or only with relation to a specific stimulus in a laboratory. Some scientists would call this kind of work ecologically invalid because a laboratory setting simply isn’t real life, but that’s a different issue.
It’s important to recognize that mental state = entirely subjective and hard to quantifiably measure. Brain state, on the other hand, is ENTIRELY quantifiable. This starts to get very close to philosophical arguments about qualia and other sorts of mumbo jumbo (i.e. consciousness) which I have been conditioned to avoid because it’s painful, tends to devolve into illogical arguments, and satisfies no one except those who are the most close-minded. Anyway, I’ll return to this statement in a bit, so continuing on…
2) Let’s go back to that embodied cognition thing. This is an idea that has been bounced around psychological research for awhile but has been gaining steam due to the results generated from intelligent robotics. The idea is as follows: in an Agent (capitalized to indicate importance) cognition does not occur without some body. Some of the computational complexity can be statistically reduced by offloading some of the cognitive processing to the constaints produced by the BODY rather than the CONTROLLER (i.e, the brain). This is a kind of clumsy way to define this theory, but it’s a good way to approach the gist of it; given this concept, it should be clear to see that cognitive processing might not be just the brain. The brain becomes less central to the definition of the mind so much as the whole package of the brain, the body and the environment.
Now, if your definition of the mind is a spiritual one, then these considerations don’t come into play and we probably can’t have a conversation about this anyway. But let’s just work with the idea of the mind being the unique identity of an Agent, where there seems to be some kind of awareness which comes into play during decision-making, observation of surroundings-whatever. That part isn’t as important as recognizing that the mind is entirely internal. The brain is not. It is just like any other part of the universe in the sense that presumably at some point in the future, we will have the technology to measure exactly what happens to the energy that we put into it and what kind of energy it puts out (i.e. neural impulses, consumption of glucose, whatever). But we have no real way of proving that the activity of the brain CAUSES a particular mental activity-yet. I mean, we can’t take some person and arrange their neurons in such a way that we can prove that NEURAL STATE X = MENTAL STATE Y. Furthermore, the very act of communicating a mental state might not be reliable. What if we were actually viewing the process responsible for communicating a mental state and not the mental state itself? On the outside, we’d never be able to tell.
Basically, we have no real proof that the brain IS the mind. We simply can’t prove it and as a true skeptic, I refuse to just assume that is the case just because it seems logical when we don’t even have a reliable data set. What we CAN prove is that there are certain levels of cognitive behavior that seem to be highly correlational to neural states. And granted, it’s theoretically possible that those cognitive behaviors can be controlled via technological discoveries, but I suspect that the kind of behavior we’re all really interested in (prediction of decision-making, etc) isn’t really able to be modeled computationally-as previously mentioned by another poster, it’s possibly impossible. Or at least, not if we only computationally model brain function.
In conclusion, I should probably mention that obviously, this my opinion as well as the theoretical approach from the particular brand of neuroscience espoused from my school (which is heavily influenced by systems theory and cybernetics). This is NOT the standard view of the brain/mind issue, but a rather controversial position. There is a rather famous philosophical debate on the brain = mind issue by a man named Hilary Putnam called Brain in a Vat. I recommend you read it.
Well, sure, your though processes manifest as brain activity. But so do a hell of a lot of other things.
“Okay, did we see that flash of activity near the hypothalamus because the subject was watching the pattern of colored lights, or because the subject was daydreaming and not paying attention?”
Good luck ironing that one out.
I meant to say “hippocampus”, not “hypothalamus”. Dratted head cold making my brain all fuzzy.
Skeptic,
Heard it all before.
I should have been more forthright, I guess, and simply asked what you meant. For that, I’m sorry. I should have said, “What do you mean when the mind isn’t the brain.” In a couple of places, what you said — and I have heard it before, upon a time epistemology was my field but my brain has rotted since then — veers close to dualism (positively Kantian!) but I catch the gist of it.
I’m not particularly fond of the mind being defined as the brain/body+environment. That strikes me as an unneded multiplication of terms. I believe it arises because studying the brain, directly, is such a pain in the ass (due to it’s complexity and delicacy — taking it apart to study it destroys what you’d try to study about it, f’rex). Still, if I was worried it is because you seemed to be saying that the mind was disjoined from the brain in a spiritual fashion. When most people say that the mind and the brain aren’t the same thing, that’s what they mean, IME. While I might disagree about the body/brain+environment equalling the mind, I understand why that study has arisen and I understand that it’s a purely material definition. (Tho’I will point out it is very odd in science to define a theoretical object as being only existent in context like that. Photons are routinely said to exist as theoretical entities removed from the embeddedness in reality — the same, too, can be said of the mind as existing in (largely) the brain.)
To the extent I have an objection with what you said, it’s here: But we have no real way of proving that the activity of the brain CAUSES a particular mental activity-yet.
That’s an extremely high bar of proof! It is both admirably high (because it is very strict and demanding) and alarming (because it allows god-of-the-gaps types to insinuate that there is not scientific proof linking the brain to purely physical processes). It is also not normal for science.
In the study of genetics, for instance, genes were talked about as physically existing long before DNA was discovered and the physical mechanisms of genetics were puzzled out. Like with genetics, I think that there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that consciousness resides entirely in matter, even though we have yet to puzzle out some of the specifics of it (just like Mendel was ignorant of DNA, yet meaningfully discussed genes).
Thank you for your detailed answer!
Flewellyn,
I’m pretty sure things have been ironed out, but I’ll still respond to you. My wife isn’t home from work, yet.
No problem.
Just because I think that the mind is largely in the brain doesn’t mean that the brain is solely for consciousness. The brain obviously does a lot more than just think thoughts. This doesn’t prevent it, however, from being the almost sole cause of mind.
Er, done!
what i have been waiting for is a viewer monitor that scans eye movements of a subject while being exposed to different designs & stimuli. i saw a movie with something like that back in the 80s. it was cool & had actors playing stoic robots.
the only way to really delve into the mind/body interaction process is to test the nodes, so to speak. but monitoring everything and putting together functional mapping & valuation on the gathered data is one of the biggest hurdles i have noticed in all of the books in the cognitive & brain science category.
the other major dilemma is the extent to which humans can stand stimuli testing before becoming too aware of the test itself, another observation issue with regard to brain study. test subjects sometimes like the attention given during tinfoil hat & MRI styled brain study, and i am quite sure this always disrupts even the best planned studies into human awareness & the an individual brain organism’s actuation at a chemical or electro magnetic level.
it should come as no surprise that the military structure & culture presents the perfect playground for cognition interface research, so long as it doesn’t get too weird and become some twisted MK-Ultra-acid blotter rorschach study. i remember an older veteran from the 50s describing his experience being exposed to nuclear fallout & large dirty bomb made radiation back in the day… he served in the military for over 30 years before finally retiring. he’s got some of the best stories i have EVER heard, and i am mostly sure that they are all mostly true.
once the big major defense contractors get involved at a contractual level, there’s no doubt the sales departments can come up with clever ways to get into a defense budget’s black book. after that, it’s off to the factories and distribution. then, consumer get a piece of the new tech. anyone remember the $5,000US compact disc players there were initially released in low numbers back in the 80s? how about the $1,200US DVD player sold over a decade ago? what’s next? a $30k wall mounted flat screen TV? i’ll buy that.
Event he way it’s described here bothers me. If you are reading text too fast, it pops up with a visual; if you’re taking in images, it pops up text?
This sounds counterproductive to me. If I am reading a novel and a page is illustrated, I may very well ignore the illustration for several pages, then page back to see what it was. The change in information to process seems to me likely to be disruptive to concentration for many people. Likewise, if I’m focussing on pictures, I may or may not read the captions/key/whatever, depending on what I am looking for.
Not everyone processes information the same way. Will this really know whether you are ‘overloaded’, or focussed?
If I am reading a novel and a page is illustrated, I may very well ignore the illustration for several pages, then page back to see what it was. - Samantha Vimes
I disagree, but I know what you mean.
When I bought my copy of the Stand (paperback, so thick and so short, very funny), I ripped out each illustration since they did nothing but distract and creep me out. The copy I had had illustrated pages with no writing on the back, so I lost nothing. I also tried to cover up King’s face with a Sharpie, but it didn’t stick.
However, I do flip back and forth through my MAD magazines and other comic books, wanting to check this or that.
Besides non-fiction, I don’t think I have many illustrated books. Oh, another type of book where the pictures get in the way and must be passed over - movie-to-book adaptations. They always include glossy pages in the center with pics from the movie and quotes. I ignore them until the next chapter.
I’m just glad we don’t have ads in our dreams (yet).
I’m just glad we don’t have ads in our dreams (yet).
Yeah, my dreams are weird enough, thanks.
And I agree - popping up with an image when I’m concentrating on text? Not a good thing. I think in text. I dream in it. (No joke - even looking at things, there’s a kind of text underlay in my head describing what I’m seeing. It’s weird.) Want to get my attention and have me remember something? Give it to me in text - even if I’m in the middle of reading something else. Try to talk to me or show me a picture? You’ll get either ignored or punched.
As for the potential applications of this, I’ll wait and see. People always surprise me.
Alix, during the first week of school, some of my teachers used to do personality tests or something fun and not related to the subject at hand (class I’m thinking of is Trig), so if our schedules were messed up and had to be changed (not my junior year, but my sophomore and senior year) we wouldn’t be behind.
School started August 5, but you can’t start learning until the 12th because they mess up schedules (6 study halls).
In trig, we took a test to see how we learned.
I learn best in a visual manner, like you said, text.
I never watch the daily news, unless I need to know if the tornado is here or over there. I watch the Daily Show and sometimes BBC news, but I get more out of a written or, more often, typed version of the same thing.
I’ve never dreamt in text, though. That’s a new one.