Future Soldiers Could Get Enhanced Minds Source: United Press International March 19, 2001
WASHINGTON, (UPI) -- Researchers hope to use advances in
computers, communications and neuroscience to medically enhance the
mental acuity of future soldiers, while connecting their body and
minds to smarter machines.
"Military planners are looking to science to find better
ways to exploit human perception and memory," said Dr. Dennis McBride,
a former naval officer and a professor in the department of psychology
and engineering at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
"Thanks in part to MRIs we can actually see mental
processes, or correlates of mental processes," McBride said. "That
will one day help us to find ways, for example, to help information in
the human brain move more quickly from short-term store to long-term
store."
McBride said scientists might be able to boost mental
awareness, regulate mood, control anxieties and more, using
custom-tailored medicines whose effect and dosage are based on genetic
information and delivered by novel methods made possible through
nanotechnology. Pharmaceutical companies are
leading the way in developing drugs to those ends, but the most
pressing challenge is avoiding side effects, he said.
One key to augmenting the thinking of tomorrow's
soldiers is learning more about how emotion affects decision-making,
specifically learning how emotional attachments and highly stressful
situations effect the brain's ability to retrieve information.
McBride said the Navy has sponsored a research program,
called tactical decision-making under stress, that has lead to an
important understanding of the co-relationship between emotion and
cognition. But real advances will occur when tomorrow's soldiers,
perhaps already biologically enhanced
through drugs, are seamlessly integrated with small, powerful
computers.
"It will likely be possible that the future soldier, for
instance, will wear eyewear that allows him to see a person and
instantaneously be presented with a complete dossier on who that
person is," McBride said.
He also described a video chip that might one day record
a soldier's sensory experiences and perceptions and download it for
access by other soldiers.
"We have developed drugs that have proven to enhance
mental acuity in animals, and we are very optimistic that they can be
tailored for human use," said Dr. Dan Alkon, formerly of the National
Institutes of Health and now scientific director of the Blanchette
Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute, co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore and West
Virginia University in Morgantown.
"We have extracted mathematical principles to find and
map neurological systems, then developed drugs that enhance those
systems. From the perspective of warfighting, this is a great wave of
the future."
But many social and ethical considerations exist, as
demonstrated by a publication entitled "Out of the Box and Into the
Future," released by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington, D.C.
The publication cites a paper that highlights these
worries: "Our understanding of all human social arrangements is based,
ultimately, on an understanding of human nature. If that nature
becomes subject to significant alteration through human artifice, then
all such arrangements are thrown
into doubt. Can humanity trust itself with such capabilities? Should
it? How can we know before the fact?"
Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
by Kelly Hearn
Technology Writer
http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=169532
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