Future neuro-cognitive warfare

[Jan Klimkowski]

My emphasis in bold:

For the study, 10 volunteers were shown three short film clips, lasting seven seconds each. They showed different actresses performing three tasks – posting a letter, throwing a coffee cup in a bin, and getting on a bike. The volunteers were then placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and asked to recall each clip in turn. This was repeated many times and the scans were analysed to detect patterns in the brain activity associated with each clip. In the final stage of the experiment the volunteers were returned to the scanner and asked to recall the clips at random. The researchers found they were able to tell which clip they were thinking about from the pattern of their brain activity.
Although patterns in individual volunteers’ brains varied from one another, they showed remarkable similarities in the parts of the hippocampus that were active. The findings are published in Current Biology. “We have documented for the first time that traces of individual rich episodic memories are detectable and distinguishable in the hippocampus. Now that we have shown it is possible to directly access information about individual episodic memories in vivo and noninvasively, this offers new opportunities to examine important properties of episodic memory,” the researchers conclude.

This is the most basic of basic science. In terms of creating an alphabet of brain function, this is the little 'a' of that alphabet, not even the capital 'A'.

Fifteen years ago, I helped make a BBC Science documentary on synaesthesia. A typical synaesthete might see musical notes as colours, as well as hearing them, with each note having its own unique colour shade.

The poet Rimbaud, the painter Kandinsky, and the writers Vladimir and Dmitri Nabokov were all synaesthetes.

Anyway, fifteen years ago, we filmed an experiment where synaesthetes were examined in an fMRI scanner whilst music was played. Areas of both auditory cortex and the colour part (V4) of visual cortex lit up in synaesthetes, whilst V4 did not light up in control non-synaesthetes. This strongly suggests that synaesthetes genuinely see music in colour. It is not delusion or hallucination. Seeing the colour is as real an experience for a synaesthete as hearing the sound would be for all but the deaf.

It is clear, though, that the neural pathways of each synaesthete are as individual as the colours they see. Middle C may be blue for one synaesthete and red for another. However, Middle C will always be the same colour for each synaesthete.

This is all intriguing.

However, at the medical level, this most basic understanding of broad brain function (ie both auditory and V4 visual cortex light up in an fMRI scanner for a synaesthete exposed to certain sounds) does not enable synaesthesia to be programmed by a mad scientist.

Indeed, if a scientiist was allowed uncontrolled access to a dozen children, with no ethical barriers, with the aim of creating synaesthetes, I suspect that scientist would have great difficulty, and any success would be non-repeatable in terms of result.

Medical knowledge of the brain, at the physical, neuronal level, is still incredibly basic.