*The U.S. Army wants to allow soldiers to communicate just by thinking. The
new science of synthetic telepathy could soon make that happen.*
*By Adam Piore / Source: **Discover Magazine<http://discovermagazine.com/20
11/apr/15-armys-bold-plan-turn-soldiers-into-telepaths/>
*
On a cold, blustery afternoon the week before Halloween, an assortment of
spiritual mediums, animal communicators, and astrologists have set up table
s
in the concourse beneath the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. The
cavernous hall of shops that connects the buildings in this 98-acre complex
is a popular venue for autumnal events: Oktoberfest, the Maple Harvest
Festival, and today's "Mystic Fair."
Traffic is heavy as bureaucrats with ID badges dangling from their necks
stroll by during their lunch breaks. Next to the Albany Paranormal Research
Society table, a middle-aged woman is solemnly explaining the workings of a
n
electromagnetic sensor that can, she asserts, detect the presence of ghosts
.
Nearby, a "clairvoyant" ushers a government worker in a suit into her canva
s
tent. A line has formed at the table of a popular tarot card reader.
Amid all the bustle and transparent hustles, few of the dabblers at the
Mystic Fair are aware that there is a genuine mind reader in the building,
sitting in an office several floors below the concourse. This mind reader i
s
not able to pluck a childhood memory or the name of a loved one out of your
head, at least not yet. But give him time. He is applying hard science to a
n
aspiration that was once relegated to clairvoyants, and unlike his
predecessors, he can point to some hard results.
The mind reader is Gerwin Schalk, a 39-year-old biomedical scientist and a
leading expert on brain-computer interfaces at the New York State Departmen
t
of Health's Wadsworth Center at Albany Medical College.
The Austrian-born Schalk, along with a handful of other researchers, is par
t
of a $6.3 million U.S. Army project to establish the basic science required
to build a thought helmet—a device that can detect and transmit the
unspoken
speech of soldiers, allowing them to communicate with one another silently.
As improbable as it sounds, synthetic telepathy, as the technology is
called, is getting closer to battlefield reality. Within a decade Special
Forces could creep into the caves of Tora Bora to snatch Al Qaeda
operatives, communicating and coordinating without hand signals or whispere
d
words. Or a platoon of infantrymen could telepathically call in a helicopte
r
to whisk away their wounded in the midst of a deafening firefight, where
intelligible speech would be impossible above the din of explosions.
For a look at the early stages of the technology, I pay a visit to a
different sort of cave, Schalk's bunkerlike office. Finding it is a workout
.
I hop in an elevator within shouting distance of the paranormal hubbub, the
n
pass through a long, linoleum-floored hallway guarded by a pair of
stern-faced sentries, and finally descend a cement stairwell to a
subterranean warren of laboratories and offices.
Schalk is sitting in front of an oversize computer screen, surrounded by
empty metal bookshelves and white cinder-block walls, bare except for a
single photograph of his young family and a poster of the human brain. The
fluorescent lighting flickers as he hunches over a desk to click on a
computer file. A volunteer from one of his recent mind-reading experiments
appears in a video facing a screen of her own. She is concentrating, Schalk
explains, silently thinking of one of two vowel sounds, aah or ooh.
The volunteer is clearly no ordinary research subject. She is draped in a
hospital gown and propped up in a motorized bed, her head swathed in a
plasterlike mold of bandages secured under the chin. Jumbles of wires
protrude from an opening at the top of her skull, snaking down to her left
shoulder in stringy black tangles. Those wires are connected to 64
electrodes that a neurosurgeon has placed directly on the surface of her
naked cortex after surgically removing the top of her skull. "This woman ha
s
epilepsy and probably has seizures several times a week," Schalk says,
revealing a slight Germanic accent.
The main goal of this technique, known as electrocorticography, or ECOG, is
to identify the exact area of the brain responsible for her seizures, so
surgeons can attempt to remove the damaged areas without affecting healthy
ones. But there is a huge added benefit: The seizure patients who volunteer
for Schalk's experiments prior to surgery have allowed him and his
collaborator, neurosurgeonEric C. Leuthardt of Washington University
School
of Medicine in St. Louis, to collect what they claim are among the most
detailed pictures ever recorded of what happens in the brain when we imagin
e
speaking words aloud.
?Those pictures are a central part of the project funded by the Army's
multi-university research grant and the latest twist on science's long-held
ambition to read what goes on inside the mind. Researchers have been
experimenting with ways to understand and harness signals in the areas of
the brain that control muscle movement since the early 2000s, and they have
developed methods to detect imagined muscle movement, vocalizations, and
even the speed with which a subject wants to move a limb.
At Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, researchers have
surgically implanted electrodes in the brains of monkeys and trained them t
o
move robotic arms at MIT, hundreds of miles away, just by thinking. At Brow
n
University, scientists are working on a similar implant they hope will allo
w
paralyzed human subjects to control artificial limbs. And workers at Neural
Signals Inc., outside Atlanta, have been able to extract vowels from the
motor cortex of a paralyzed patient who lost the ability to talk by sinking
electrodes into the area of his brain that controls his vocal cords.
*The full article is available at Discover Magazine<http://discovermagazine
.com/2011/apr/15-armys-bold-plan-turn-soldiers-into-telepaths/>*
Edited by: Lawyer Asad
No comments:
Post a Comment