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You are assuming that the military leadership will always continue to put a high value on innocent human life. You are also assuming that these will only be available to our military. Unfortunately, history has shown us that neither of those is necessarily a safe assumption. How long until these are being sold to Israel? Can we trust that they will use them responsibly? What happens when we get someone like our current President who began talking about Iraq literally the day after September 11th? If we didn't have to put our troops in harm's way, who is to say whether the commander-in-chief would have gone to war with Iraq way back them? And so on.

That said, I'm not literally suggesting that children will be fighting the wars of the future and think that they are playing video games. I'm suggesting that if everything about a war is almost indistinguishable from a simulation and the pilot is not put at risk, it dehumanizes the process. You can have all the rules you want to about liability if you screw up. We have rules about torture, too. That doesn't keep it from happening. It just ensures that someone gets held responsible afterwards. There is a big difference, particularly when you factor in the dehumanization caused by being physically isolated from your victims.

There's an branch of psychology that studies how much the actual interaction with a person dictates how you treat that person, and it turns out that for most people, it does make a difference. Psi Chi has a nice article, The Psychology of Evil, that describes a bit about such experiments. Another article by a therapist, A Collection of Psychological Experiments, goes into detail about Milgram's obedience experiment, and another article from Science Aid talks about some of the follow-ups Read that last article under "Defiance" for some very enlightening insight into dehumanization.

http://www.23nlpeople.com/media/~elephant_dead.mpg

Really though it's not that good, it only gets 4.2 stars at imdb.

-s

DC proponents used to fry small animals to prove that AC was unsafe

Small animals? Edison preferred electrocuting elephants to push his DC campaign (which may have been more about Tesla and Westinghouse than technology).

Actually he was a pretty firm supporter of AC where the electric chair was concerned.

The original example of FUD!

To prove his point he electrocuted some Elephants to show the people how dangerous A/C was.

Swell guy.

It's extremely likely we have specialised circuits for processing facial expressions since:
1. Our ancestors needed it to be able to perceive threat & attraction in peers.
2. If you see a photo with reversed eyes or mouth, it's recognisable but gives you a very weird feeling.

There's also a circuit that lets us know when we recognise faces, because the unfortunates without it have been diagnosed with Capgras' Syndrome.

First thing to realise is that we aren't getting rid of our emotions... unless you want a brain surgeon to hack out your amygdala but then you'd end up shagging pavements.

Anyone who uses a PDA knows that computers are already better at organising our lives than we are. As soon as somebody writes the software, they'll be better at making decisions for us too. Within 50 or so years, we'll be obsolete.

The only alternatives that I know of are neural implant and emotion-tuning technologies. The latter are already here, just not primetime yet.

By treatment, I mean helping them to be who they want to be, not drugging them, electrocuting them or institutionalising them. I hesitate to use the word cure, but as far as you and I are concerned, that is what happens in 60% of his cases.

He does not believe in the dopamine theory of schizophrenia - if that was accurate, a dopamine antagonist would turn schizophrenics into normal people - it doesn't. But he does understand schizophrenics, which is something no-one here (nor even of all the writers of Beautiful Mind) can claim.

He freely provides these understandings, backed by many prominent psychiatrists, on his website, which you'll find interesting in any case.

Chances of you reading this post are slim. But I hope you find it anyway and she may one day thank you for researching beyond the limited help the medical community provides.

It's not too surprising that the brain's short-term visual cache would be closer to the visual cortex.

The article says the spot is in the posterior parietal cortex, which isn't particularly close to the visual cortex.

What I would like to know is how closely the visual cache is related to intelligence.

This doesn't seem to be a visual cache, more of a photographic memory.

Does it need actual visual input, instead of just imagined, and if so... <facetious>do you become marginally dumber when you close your eyes?</facetious>

Pretty likely that external/imaginary visual information is processed similarly.

From reading Synaptic Self, the general cache and CPU area would seem to be the prefrontal cortex. It can activate memories to work on (the closer the current emotional state it was recorded in, the better), and hold a few things to work on.

One thing is for sure - we all use our brains differently. Prefrontal cortex will be involved with logic, whereas emotional processing will probably be in the limbic system.

Perhaps there are many more specializations yet to be uncovered, but I'm struck at the sheer relative size of brain required to actively think and plan a next move. Considering that even a worm brain can get its owner around, you'd think our capacity for juggling thoughts would be encyclopaedic.

That's a very specific kind of processing. A worm presumably can't read. It couldn't plan its long-term future.

We've yet to build robots that can do either of these tasks. But we have built robots that can move around.

So many small functional pieces of the brain; I'm struck by how independent the sections of the brain are, by and large.

Firstly, take a look at what the tests are doing - forcing the user into processing a simple task. Maybe someone could re-program other parts of their brain to help, but that might take days of practise.

Large-scale coordination has to go through a secondary 'chemical drip' system, from neuromodulators released by non-connecting nerves throughout the brain. It's that level of coordination required to put your brain to sleep or wake it up, amongst other things.

There are deep neural projections throughout the brain. This neurochemical system is a an artifact from the time we had reptilian brains.

I'm looking forward to more decoding of the brain's structures - narrowing down specific activities to a small area of the brain like they did is fantastic.

A lot has been done. Start here.

I'm also going to add that the conclusions are pretty ridiculous:

A large increase in the subject's brain activity on the four-dot test indicated that his or her memory capacity had not been pushed to its limit. No increase in electrical activity indicated that his or her working memory had topped out on the two-dot test. By graphing these responses, the team worked out the exact size of each subject's working memory.

More likely it means that 4 dots is no more challenging than 2 dots, in the same way that a CPU has no more difficulty adding 2 digit numbers instead of 1.

Well, the trick of PTSD is that, for most people, the daily struggle to not remember (and avoid things that remind them) is much more traumatic.

Struggle to not remember a purple caterpillar wearing sunglasses. Really try not to remember that caterpillar.

Imagine walking down a street, and a certain type of tree or smell in the air sets you off. Between having that and having one extremely painful session of emotion-dulling via reliving the experience, I'll take emotion dulling. At least it will bring a somewhat permanent conclusion.

Sensible - however, there are much better, faster, cheaper and painless treatments eg Fast Phobia Cure, EFT, EMDR.

Who is going to program the virtual reality machine for individual trauma reliving? What about rape cases? How are you going to program in that smell?

This is, of course, assuming that it actually WORKS. =)

How would you know if it did? Would you trust the same people who tell you frying your brain WORKS?

And don't remember that caterpillar OK?

Well, the trick of PTSD is that, for most people, the daily struggle to not remember (and avoid things that remind them) is much more traumatic.

Struggle to not remember a purple caterpillar wearing sunglasses. Really try not to remember that caterpillar.

Imagine walking down a street, and a certain type of tree or smell in the air sets you off. Between having that and having one extremely painful session of emotion-dulling via reliving the experience, I'll take emotion dulling. At least it will bring a somewhat permanent conclusion.

Sensible - however, there are much better, faster, cheaper and painless treatments eg Fast Phobia Cure, EFT, EMDR.

Who is going to program the virtual reality machine for individual trauma reliving? What about rape cases? How are you going to program in that smell?

This is, of course, assuming that it actually WORKS. =)

How would you know if it did? Would you trust the same people who tell you frying your brain WORKS?

And don't remember that caterpillar OK?

Yeah, and smoking isn't addictive. How far did we have to push the tobacco companies to admit that?

How do you explain that?

Pretty easily. 80% of so-called double-blind studies are transparent: the patients can tell whether they are on the drug or the placebo. This more than accounts for the 5-10% that any of these drugs outperforms the placebo.

I guess schizophrenia is just a matter of self discipline as well?

Your statement apparently demonstrates your ignorance. You know nothing about schizophrenia, and assume that no-one else does - just for the sake of an argument.

Schizophrenia has never been scientifically linked to a chemical imbalance. If you want to get the inside story from somebody who actually successfully treats schizophrenia start reading here.

Dave (clinical psychotherapist), http://www.deep-trance.com

There are two separate fields exploring this phenomenon. The synaesthesia described by Ramachandran and Cytowic (The Man Who Tasted Shapes) generally researches the kind that is both involuntary and consistent (eg the taste of mint always feels like cold glass columns). These synaesethesias are quite elementary: a particular pitch appears blue as opposed to some blue-winged fairy flying past. The taste of chicken feels spiky. Mint feels like glassas opposed to

One of the most famous synesthetes was S, a photographic memory expert.

The other field is part of Neuro-Linguistic Programming which already provides a lot of useful applications for the non-synesthete.

One example would be an automatic lie detector, based on the voice tone (and body language) someone used. In response you could automatically see the word LIE emblazoned across their forehead, or if you had a really good imagination, you could even see their nose growing...

Here is a website that seeks to bring the two fields together.