Defense Department funding brain-machine work
BY GARETH COOK
The Boston Globe
Even by Washington scandal standards, the "terrorism
futures" scandal was strange and dramatic.
It started when
two senators discovered an obscure military program designed to
gauge the chances of various geopolitical developments, including
terrorist attacks, by asking people to bet money on them. Within 48
hours -- or, more precisely, two news cycles -- the program was
canceled and the man behind it, John Poindexter of Iran-contra fame,
had tendered his resignation.
What most people don't know is
that the Department of Defense is already funding a research program
with far creepier implications.
The $24 million enterprise
called Brain Machine Interfaces is developing technology that
promises to directly read thoughts from a living brain -- and even
instill thoughts as well.
The research, some of which is
being done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is already
surprisingly advanced. Monkeys in a laboratory can control the
movement of a robotic arm using only their thoughts. And last year
scientists in New York announced they could control the skittering
motions of a rat by implanting electrodes in its brain, steering it
around the lab floor as if it were a radio-controlled toy
car.
It does not take much imagination to see in this the
makings of a "Matrix"-like cyberpunk dystopia: chips that impose
false memories, machines that scan for wayward thoughts, cognitively
augmented government security forces that impose a ruthless order on
a recalcitrant population.
It is one thing to propose a
tasteless market for gambling on terrorism. It is quite another to
set some of the nation's top neuroscientists to work on mind
control.
But though they differ in degree, the Brain Machine
Interface program and the terrorism futures market share many
features. They are shocking. They are bizarre. And they are far more
worthy of taxpayer money than at first they seem.
The
terrorism futures idea, the subject of near hysterical media
coverage, is rooted in well-established economic principles. The
Brain Machine Interface program, which may well be next in the
spotlight, could offer help to the paralyzed and is no more likely
to bring about a virtual police state than technologies that already
are available.
With Congress clamoring for much stricter
oversight of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
which funds both programs, the episode is less a drama of Poindexter
and a band of mad bureaucrats than it is a reminder of how important
it is for the government to spend some of its resources on the
outlandish. Money from DARPA and other small government agencies,
such as the Office of Naval Research, has produced profound
scientific advances, Nobel Prizes, and technologies -- such as the
Internet -- that have changed the world.
"It is important to
have horizons longer than three years and the chance to try out bold
ideas," said Tomaso Poggio, one of the MIT scientists involved in
Brain Machine Interfaces. More traditional funding agencies can be
so conservative, Poggio said, that "people sometimes joke that you
have to have done the experiment before you can write the proposal."
Like the futures market, the Brain Machine Interface program
grew out of DARPA's long involvement in information processing.
DARPA is the successor to ARPA, an office that was created in 1958,
in the wake of Sputnik, to push forward scientific research with
potential military applications. ARPA laid the foundation for what
is today the Internet, and also contributed to a wide variety of
computer applications currently in use.
DARPA's
brain-machine work, which is unclassified and eventually will be
published in scientific journals, attracts scientists because it
explores some of the central questions in neuroscience, such as the
nature of consciousness and memory, and the neural code the brain
uses to store and process information.
http://www.charleston.net/stories/080503/wor_05darpa.shtml
DARPA:
Brain Machine Interfaces
Brain Machine Interfaces
From
the DARPA Website
Original Link:
http://www.arpa.mil/dso/thrust/biosci/brainmi.htm
Program
Manager: Dr. Alan Rudolph
The Brain Machine Interfaces
Program represents a major DSO thrust area that will comprise a
multidisciplinary, multipronged approach with far reaching impact.
The program will create new technologies for augmenting human
performance through the ability to noninvasively access codes in the
brain in real time and integrate them into peripheral device or
system operations. Focus will be on the following areas:
1.
Extraction of neural and force dynamic codes related to patterns of
motor or sensory activity required for executing simple to complex
motor or sensory activity (e.g., reaching, grasping, manipulating,
running, walking, kicking, digging, hearing, seeing, tactile).
Accessing sensory activity directly could result in the ability to
monitor or transmit communications by the brain (visual, auditory,
or other). This will require the exploitation of new interfaces and
algorithms for providing useful nonlinear transformation, pattern
extraction techniques, and the ability to test these in appropriate
models or systems.
2. Determination of necessary force and
sensory feedback (positional, postural, visual, acoustic, or other)
from a peripheral device or interface that will provide critical
inputs required for closed loop control of a working device (robotic
appendage or other peripheral control device or system). Such
feedback could be received from peripheral systems or sent directly
into appropriate brain regions.
3. New methods, processes,
and instrumentation for accessing neural codes noninvasively at
appropriate spatiotemporal resolution to provide closed loop control
of a peripheral device. This could include both fundamental
interactions of neural cells, tissue, and brain with energy profiles
that could provide noninvasive access to codes (magnetics, light, or
other).
4. New materials and device design and fabrication
methods that embody compliance and elastic principles, and that
capture force dynamics that integrate with neural control commands.
These include the use of dynamic materials and designs into working
prototypes.
5. Demonstrations of plasticity from the neural
system and from an integrated working device or system that result
in real time control under relevant conditions of force perturbation
and cluttered sensory environments from which tasks must be
performed (e.g., recognizing and picking up a target and
manipulating it).
6. Biomimetic implementation of
controllers (with robotics or other devices and systems) that
integrate neural sensory or motor control integrated with force
dynamic and sensory feedback from a working device or system. The
first phase of the program may include dynamic control of simple and
complex motor or sensory activity directly using neural codes
integrated into a machine, device, or system. Simple actions
considered include using a robotic arm or leg to sense a target,
reach for it and manipulate it, throw or kick an object at a target,
or recognize a sensory input and responding to it (visual, acoustic)
directly through input/output brain integration. More complex
activity may include issues related to force or sensory perturbation
in more complex environments.
http://www.infowars.com/print/ps/brain_machine_darpa.htm