Neuroscience
The US Army is testing mind reading technology on soldiers at their MIND Lab facility. The intent is to speed up image analysis, for now.
At the US Army Research Laboratory facility called "The MIND Lab," a computer system was able to accurately determine what target image a soldier was thinking about.
MIND, which stands for "Mission Impact Through Neurotechnology Design," has been developed by Dr. Anthony Ries.
Ries is a cognitive neuroscientist studying visual perception and target recognition. He connected a test soldier to an electroencephalogram and then had him sit in front of a computer to look at a series of images that would flash on the screen.
The soldier was asked to choose one of five categories of images: five categories of images: boats, pandas, strawberries, butterflies and chandeliers, but keep the choice to himself. Then images flashed on the screen at a rate of about one per second. Each image fell into one of the five categories. The Soldier didn't have to say anything, or click anything. He had only to count, in his head, how many images he saw that fell into the category he had chosen.
When the experiment was over, the computer revealed that the subject had chosen to focus on the "boat" category. The computer accomplished that feat by analyzing brainwaves from the soldier. 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.
"Our ability to collect and store imagery data has been surpassed by our ability to analyze it."
Ries said that a big problem he sees for the intelligence community is the vast amount of image information coming in to be analyzed - imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles or satellites or surveillance aircraft, for instance. Everything must be looked at and evaluated.Related articles
"Our ability to collect and store imagery data has been surpassed by our ability to analyze it," Ries said.Ries thinks that one day the intelligence community might use computers and brainwaves, or "neural signals," to more rapidly identify targets of interest in intelligence imagery, in much the same way the computer in his lab was able to identify pictures of "boats" as targets of interest for the soldier who had chosen to focus on the "boats" category.
"What we are doing is basically leveraging the neural responses of the visual system," he said. "Our brain is a much faster image processor than any computer is. And it's better at detecting subtle differences in an image."
The automated system could greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to process an image, and that means that a larger number of images - more of that gathered intelligence data - can be processed sooner.
Ries' particular research is finding out how other things an analyst might be doing as he does image analysis might affect the neural signal his brain generates.
SOURCE U.S. Army
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