The US Army has successfully completed tests on one of the newest additions to its arsenal. However, it is not some flashy new jet or state-of-the-art missiles. The Army's "MIND Lab" is focused on developing mind reading technology.
The MIND Lab is located in the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. Anthony Ries, a cognitive neuroscientist, was able to decode the brain signals of a soldier when hooked up to an electroencephalogram, a device that reads brain waves.
Fox News reported that the computer flashed images at a rate of one image per second. The images were classified under five categories: boats, pandas, strawberries, butterflies, and chandeliers. The soldier was tasked with picking one category but must keep his choice to himself.
The soldier did not need to interact with the computer but needed to count the images that fit into each category. "When the experiment was over, after about two minutes, the computer revealed that the soldier had chosen to focus on the 'boat' category," according to the Army report.
It added, "When a picture of a boat had been flashed on the screen, the soldier's brain waves appeared different from when a picture of a strawberry, a butterfly, a chandelier or a panda appeared on the screen."
The mind-reading tech will be best applied to intelligence services. The software will aid in sifting through vast amounts of intelligence imagery. Using the same ways the soldier classified images, persons of interest can immediately be identified by intelligence personnel.
The Daily Mail noted that the human brain can beat any computer's image processor. An analyst will cut up an image into "chips" and these chips would be flashed in the same manner as the soldier in Ries' test. He says, "The analyst sits in front of the monitor, with the electroencephalogram on measuring his brain waves." He added, "All the little chips are presented really fast. They are able to view this whole map in a fraction of the time it would take to do it manually."
"Whenever the soldier or analyst detects something they deem important, it triggers this recognition response," Ries said. He mentioned that as many as five images per second could be flashed on the screen.
"Only those chips that contain a feature that is relevant to the soldier at the time - a vehicle, or something out of the ordinary, somebody digging by the side of the road, those sorts of things - trigger this response of recognizing something important."
