Northrop Grumman To Develop Brain-Wave Binoculars

An anonymous reader writes "An AP wire reports that DARPA has granted a $6.7 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop 'brainwave binoculars'. The binoculars will be built into a helmet, which will include EEG electrodes that will monitor the wearer's brain activity for patterns consistent with object identification/recognition. From what I can gather, the idea is that when you look at a far-off or partially obscured object without noticing it, your subconscious probably did notice it and tried, unsuccessfully, to identify it. The EEG in these binoculars would pick up on that kind of subconscious activity and draw the wearer's attention to the object in question. The goal is that these binoculars would be able to pick up on any object anywhere in the wearer's field of view, where a person can only pick up on things that he focuses both his eyes and his attention on. This delves into some very interesting territory: it would be an electronic device that uses human eyes to collect data, and even uses a human brain to partially process the data. Since it also passes its results back to the human providing the data and initial processing, it essentially adds a second processing loop in parallel to the wearer's visual system."

Comments

waste of taxpayer dollars

[wiggles]

If this makes it past vaporware, I'll dance a jig.

Re:waste of taxpayer dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

waste of taxpayer dollars (Score:2)

If this makes it past vaporware, I'll dance a jig.

Probably said at the onset of most of the DARPA projects, most breakthrough technologies in all fields of science really, that's kind of the point.

Re:waste of taxpayer dollars

[4solarisinfo]

If this makes it past vaporware, I'll dance a jig.

This is probably said at the origins of almost all DARPA projects. That's their point.

Oh Wow, Man... the Images

[Stanistani]

From reading the short article, it looks like a method to take images the brain filters out as unimportant, and bring them up to the conscious level.

Problem: if you do this, wouldn't this clutter your view with unimportant images, or alternatively cause cognitive confusion? A person with this device attached literally couldn't trust their eyes anymore.

Sounds like Mescaline.

Re:Recursion issues abound

[Entropius]

Profit

The issue is that with the current state of DARPA and US military "research", you can put pretty much anything in front of this line (including as many lines of ??? as you want) and it'll still happen.

Re:false positives?

[SydShamino]

Since this device just takes existing data from the brain and feeds it back in, it's hard to believe it would be of any help, or we would have evolved the same thing. The system we evolved was "good enough" to get us to age 30 or so and pass on our genes. It's not necessarily good enough to recognize someone on the horizon with a shoulder-mounted RPG launcher pointed at you. Sure, we can be trained to recognize the shapes and shadows which indicate that, but then we have to look at it and focus for a second to consciously realize what we're seeing.

Our brains are incredibly good at parallel pattern matching. We can see patterns - real or spurious - in almost anything. But those thousands of parallel pattern matching units have to be funneled through a single consciousness to be useful. If a computer can sort through the synapses, find the ones that are looking to match "man with RPG in the distance", and figure out when they fire, it can perhaps bring something up on the display faster than the person can. Computers, after all, can process a small number of things faster than we can. They just can't process as many complex things in parallel.