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US Army To Develop "Thought Helmets"
Hugh Pickens writes "Time Magazine reports on a $4 million US Army contract to begin developing 'thought helmets' to harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops that the Army hopes will 'lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.' The Army's initial goal is to capture brain waves with software that translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. 'It'd be radio without a microphone,' says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. 'Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.' The key challenge will be to develop software able to pinpoint speech-related brain waves and pick them up with a 128-sensor array that ultimately will be buried inside a helmet. Scientists deny charges that they're messing with soldiers' minds. 'A lot of people interpret wires coming out of the head as some sort of mind reading,' says Dr. Mike D'Zmura. 'But there's no way you can get there from here.' One potential civilian spin-off: a Bluetooth Helmet so people nearby can't hear you when you talk on your cell phone."
US Army Chief of Staff To Develop "Thought"
One problem with this is any electrical activity on the brain detected is then amplified. This makes TEMPEST attacks on the thoughts of the soldier much easier as the attacker already has an amplifier attached to the soldier. Solution? Every US Army soldier needs to wear a tin foil hat!
Wouldn't this take stuff before people have the ability to filter what they say and speak it out loud?
(All thought, of course)
"Private Jenkins, Cover me!"
"Sir, Yes, Sir!....man, sarge is so cool and he has such a great ass! He can cov-er-me-an-e-time-he-likes, tee-hee!"
"Uhh...private Jenkins?!"
"Uhh uhh yes, sarge?"
"...I think I love you, too"
And then they'd get shot or something. Anyway, the moral of the story is...well...I forget, what were we thinking about, again?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
They should really look into other ways to deploy something like this. Maybe something that could be injected into a person. Perhaps nanotechnology?
'Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.'
Am I the only one who's thinking "danger!danger!" here?
talking is one thing, changing the way you think is more like... brainwashing?
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
... I wonder what the voice would sound like. I mean, the vocal cords and stuff determine what your voice sounds like, so if they read your mind and pipe that through a system it'd probably sound like a robot.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
For "silent" communication I can see morse being communicated that way, but reading words from the brain ? Maybe one can train people to concentrate and clearly form a few specific patterns which can then be recognized afterward and translated to words, but i doubt you could learn and differentiate so many patterns as to have a wordly communication. Furthermore in the midst of fire exchange, I doubt this would be easier to use than a radio.
I don't think adults can easily learn to use their brains in an entirely new way like this. Maybe if you gave a really young child one of these with some kind of visual feedback for them they could develop a more sophisticated way of communicating with it.
Or better yet, maybe deaf kids could use this to talk amongst themselves. It would have to be started very young though, so the brain could develop and strengthen the areas needed. Actually this is now sounding a bit like the plot from The Midwitch Cuckoos.
Nobody was trying to call it military wisdom or anything. War is one of the best funded "industries" around the world, and it's organizers are dedicated strategists. There's nothing unintelligent about them, regardless of your opinions on whether or not they're misguided.
I believe that the exact wording was a "contract to begin developing". No helmets, just the groundwork. I guess that could be $4M. As for soldiers panicking, the helmet would probably pick it up, and show a busy sign or something. Come to think of it, showing when a soldier is in a state of panic (or rage) could be more useful then the communication component.
Done.
Thought : "Roger, Air Force One. Approach terminal Whisky-one"
Transmit (to Roger) : "Terminate Air Force with Whiskey"
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I already have a thought helmet. I made it out of tin foil.
Unless there's one time pad data in the helmet, the war might come to a tragic halt for the USA when the enemy fills up our heads with porn.
This wired up army is a dumb idea. It's better to give troops the flexibility to matters into their own hands on the battlefield. If you want to have a better US Army, maybe instead of blowing billions on trying to turn platoons into borg, maybe pay sergeants more and jack up their retention rate. Sergeants are the backbone of any army and always will be more, more so than any communications gizmo.
This is my sig.
Ugh. I pay taxes every year in the US. They haven't fixed a big pothole outside my house on the road in years, and yet every year we allocate more and more money for military spending. It's a old argument, i know, i know. But honestly now.....i have just all the more incentive to cheat on my taxes.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Put all objections and concerns aside for a second.
Honestly, isn't stuff like this why we all went into computer science and engineering in the first place? Crazy sci-fi ideas that have little to no practical value in the short (and often long) term.
Don't stop chasing the dream!
let's set so double the killer select all.
...one of the soldiers gets a tune stuck in his head?
All the rest of the soldiers will hear his mental rendition of "Never gonna give you up" by Rick Astley.
Not a pretty sight. Do we really want to live in a world where you can be MENTALLY Rick-rolled?
I don't think so.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
My late father in law (2004) could have used something like this for speech, ALS effectively cut him off completely for the last month or two of his life.
meh
Use a lucid moment to commit suicide and deprive the masters of your services. Better death than slavery.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
For "silent" communication I can see morse being communicated that way, but reading words from the brain ? Maybe one can train people to concentrate and clearly form a few specific patterns which can then be recognized afterward and translated to words
Yes indeed, if you read the summary, they don't intend to pick up whole speeches from within the brain, only small precise commands. From the summary :
Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.
In terms of though-reading this is as close to "reading speech", .bind F12 'Heal,plz!'; " is close to a long IRC chat between non-lolspeak-challenged people in terms of internet textual communication.
- as trained keyword recognition (teach your handsfree to recognise "reject call" command) is close to untrained free-form dictation in the field of voice recognition.
- or as "
It is all based on the fact that soldiers during combat tend to use a small subset of well defined mil-speak keywords (makes sense because a small set of keywords that everyone knows is really handy in a situation where taking the time to say "Sorry, I'm afraid I didn't exactly get what you were saying, could you please clarify your last sentence ?" isn't exactly an option)*.
Given that, teaching them to use a small subset of though-helmet-compatible mental commands won't seem far fetch.
An activation and/or confirmation button (Grendizer-style :-P ), to avoid false positive could help too.
So in fact its not very far from your idea of using a "morse-code like" coded mental command set.
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For the record full speech won't be that much difficult either, as long as we don't try to pick it up from the brain.
Unlike the psychology and neurology of sentence formation witch is awfully complex, the biomechanics of speech are well understood.
For example, its well used for both speech synthesis software, and speech-specialized low bandwidth codec - in both of these situation speech isn't considered as a generic sound wave, but as a combination of the various resonance mode that a human larynx can generate.
One possible way to get silent speech transmission would be to pick up the motor commands of someone whispering or even voiceless articulating and infere what it would sound like if it was voiced.
The only problem are mainly practical (picking brain signals from the helmet is easier that having to make a complex rig over the soldier's neck and face muscles) and correct recognition (there are a lot of sounds which are articulated the same way but sound different depending on how the speaker voices them - voiced/unvoiced consonants and such. If the silent speak is silent indeed, the voicing information will be missing)
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*: And here in Switzerland it's even worse as there are 4 official spoken language, of which the main one (German) is actually a grouped bunch of not exactly mutually intelligible dialects. Just imagine the mess. Thankfully, we never had to go to war for more than a century.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Training soldiers to think in short thoughts will invariably cross-over into actual thought patterns that will reduce soldiers' creativity, adjustability and preparation for future events.
Invariably? You obviously missed the entire premise of this device and went off into some bizarre Firefox fantasy-land. This device is essentially intended to pick up sub-vocalized speech neurologically. It has fuck-all to do with "thinking". In combat we already speak in short, terse language. That hasn't stunted our "creativity" in the slightest.
You can see the effects, now, of how the Army trains vs. how young soldiers actually think when they come out of Basic and AI training - the world is all black and white.
You think a nug fresh out of basic/AIT is representative of a fully trained soldier? You've clearly never been in the army. That shit's just to put you in the proper frame of mind to learn how to be an effective soldier. A PV2 out of AIT is just beginning.
From my family's experience, Reserve units are often more flexible in the field and do better at war games because they can think on their feet.
In my own personal experience, reserve units are frequently fatter, slower, whinier, and can't remember how to call for artillery support. Who is your "family", anyway? A bunch of reservists? Not much bias there! There's no military advantage to working in an office 50 weeks a year. I know. I was regular from 1987 to 1993, then reserve from 1993 to 2001. When I went regular again and deployed to Afghanistan in '02, I had a long way to go to catch up with the other regulars. I have seen reservist beat regulars in exercises, but only when the "weekenders" were [Rangers|SF|etc] and/or the regulars were a bunch of fuckups. Keeping a uniform in your closet does not make you a better soldier than a guy who wears one every day. "Creativity" simply cannot replace long hours of practice at warfighting.
Robotizing our forces' thinking, even unintentionally, is a serious step that they ought to fully consider.
Yeah, they obviously haven't considered the ramifications! We should hire an expert like you to vet all ideas first. Heck, we'll make you the R&D Czar!
How about some sensor in a glove or on the weapons' grips that would pick up finger pressures and send those out as hand-signals instead? With an on/off momentary switch of some kind, signals would be sent when the soldier wanted them to be, and not when he was merely gripping differently.
Yeah, because chord-keyboarding is so much easier to learn than sub-vocalized speech, particularly when done on a pistol grip or virtually through a dang glove. Let's hear it for our new R&D Czar!
Honestly, I don't know what it is about Slashdot readers that they think that by virtue of being mildly intelligent and having (partially) read a vague and misleading blurb, they suddenly think they know more about military R&D than the people who do it every freakin' day.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
'Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.'
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
It's been a long time since I had as good a laugh as when I read that statement.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.