Future neuro-cognitive warfare

[Ed Jewett]

My emphasis in bold:

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

I agree entirely, though some advances are being made and some "centers" are getting themselves more organized in their pursuit. I try to scan and survey the world to glean these things. I watch at least three or four web sites. I have recently purchased a raft of books on multiple intelligences and their development in children, one on parapsychology and spirituality by a well-known 9/11 researcher, two relatively new ones by Howard Gardner, Ellen Langer's new book "Conterclockwise", and three on psychosomatics and movement. "Our" task is not only to survey and watch what is being said, done, developed and used by the unspeakable gang, but to make every effort in our limited circumstances to understand and develop the antidotes and inject them into the culture.

Of particular note are Howard Gardner's books "Changing Minds" and "Five Minds for the Future".

Further leads from "Mind Hacks", a UK-based pyschiatry blog:

The Culture and Cognition blog covers the territory where culture and psychology meet, and they've just released their 'reader' which has a list of essential books and papers to cover the interface between anthropology and the cognitive sciences.

Many of the articles are available in full online and the list is a fantastic guide to the area.

It includes both popular and academic texts but the list works best as a reference, so bookmark it as I'm sure you'll be returning to it time and again if you're like me and interested in the cross over between culture and psychology.

Link to Cognition and Culture Reader:
http://cognitionandculture.net/index.php...&Itemid=78

Link to to Cognition and Culture home page:
http://cognitionandculture.net/index.php...e&Itemid=1


Sample:

Does power increase hypocrisy?

News - Publications
09 January 2010

An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and available here illustrates how insights into 'power', a notion central in the standard social sciences, can be gained through a cognitive and experimental approach. Abstract under the fold. Read more...



The International Cognition and Culture Institute (Institut Jean Nicod and LSE) and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program at the University of Pennsylvania organize a virtual seminar Decision Making for a Social World.

Decision Making for a Social World[/FONT]

The aim of this seminar is to bring together threads of research in decision making and related areas of psychology that show how deeply our decisions are influenced by our social context. Some of this research even takes the stronger stance that some of the mechanisms that are typically thought of as being within the purview of individual cognition actually have a social function.

It will begin in February 2011. Every two weeks a new paper will be posted and a moderated discussion will take place online among invited discussants and the public one the one hand, and the author on the other hand.


See also:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/03/go...ide_t.html

[David Guyatt]

"Our" task is not only to survey and watch what is being said, done, developed and used by the unspeakable gang, but to make every effort in our limited circumstances to understand and develop the antidotes and inject them into the culture.

Amen to that Ed.

[Ed Jewett]

Darpa Wants Self-Guiding, Storytelling Cameras

• By Katie Drummond
  
• March 17, 2010 |
  
• 12:57 pm |
  
• Categories: DarpaWatch
  

The Pentagon’s risk-taking research agency is kicking off a new program to turn everyday cameras into autonomous ‘bots with problem-solving smarts.
Darpa is already after all kinds of highly intelligent robo-critters. In the past few months, they’ve launched projects to create a real-life C3PO and a surveillance system to pinpoint threats in heaps of visual data. Now, the agency wants artificial intelligence-powered cameras that can recognize objects — and then tell a story about them.
Next month, Darpa will host a one-day conference to launch the project, which has been given a slightly Orwellian title: “The Mind’s Eye.” (.pdf) The idea is to create machines that are endowed with what remains an exclusively human ability: visual intelligence.
We’ve got the ability to take in our surrounding, interpret them and learn concepts that apply to them. We’re also masters of manipulation, courtesy of a little thing called imagination: toying around with made up scenes to solve problems or make decisions.
But, of course, our intellect and decision-making skills are often marred by emotion, fatigue or bias. Enter machines. Darpa wants cameras that can capture their surroundings, and then employ robust intellect and imagination to “reason over these learned interpretations.”

State-of-the-art cameras can already recognize objects — the “nouns” of cognition. What Darpa wants is the verb: “To add the perceptual and cognitive underpinnings for recognizing and reasoning … enabling a more complete narrative of action in the visual experience.”
Darpa’s end goal is a “smart camera” that can report back on war-zone activity with the same detail a trained human operative could offer. Or, perhaps, replace those troublesome reporters?
Photo: U.S military


Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/03/...z0iZPSYx6y

[Ed Jewett]

Next up in the DARPA bag of tricks...

Propaganda that writes itself and then seeks placement in media and the voices of politicians ...

artificially-intelligent computer keyboards that transform dissidence into abject concurrence...

external human gene manipulation that automatically enlists the individual in the Marines at age 18 ...

[David Guyatt]

Propaganda that writes itself and then seeks placement in media and the voices of politicians ...

Here in the UK we already have that. It's scientific name is Peter "Mandy" Mandelson, but is known by those who work with it as the "Prince of Darkness".

[Ed Jewett]

Neuroscientists Don’t Believe in Souls—But That Doesn’t Mean They Can’t Sell Theirs (to the Pentagon)

March 28th, 2010 Via: Scientific American:
It is because I have such high hopes for neuroscience that I’m so upset by two trends in financing of the field. One involves neuroscience’s growing dependence on the Pentagon, which is seeking new ways to help our soldiers and harm our enemies. For a still-timely overview of neuroweapons research, check out the 2006 book Mind Wars by bioethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania. (PR disclosure: I brought Moreno to my school to give a talk on March 10.) Potential neuroweapons include drugs, transcranial magnetic stimulators and implanted brain chips that soup up the sensory capacities and memories of soldiers, as well as brain-scanners and electromagnetic beams that read, control or scramble the thoughts of bad guys.
When Moreno was writing his book, neuroscientists were reluctant to talk about their affair with the Pentagon and seemed embarrassed by it. No longer. Last year the National Academy of Sciences published a 136-page report, Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications, that makes an unabashed pitch for militarizing brain research. The authors include the neuroluminaries Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and editor-in-chief of Science; and Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Both are members of the U.S. Council on Bioethics.
Here are some ethical questions: Will the militarization of neuroscience really make the world safer, or just trigger a new arms race? Have researchers considered how non-Americans are likely to perceive our neuroweapons program? Some neuroscientists dismiss bionic warriors as a sci-fi fantasy unlikely to be realized soon, if ever. But then should researchers exploit the U.S. military’s gullibility?

[Ed Jewett]

Neuroscientists Influence People’s Moral Judgments by Disrupting Specific Brain Region

March 30th, 2010 Via: Science Daily:
MIT neuroscientists have shown they can influence people’s moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.
To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions — an ability known as “theory of mind.” For example, if a hunter shoots his friend while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the hunter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his friend for a duck?
Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In the new study, the researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.
The researchers, led by Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, report their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study offers “striking evidence” that the right TPJ, located at the brain’s surface above and behind the right ear, is critical for making moral judgments, says Liane Young, lead author of the paper. It’s also startling, since under normal circumstances people are very confident and consistent in these kinds of moral judgments, says Young, a postdoctoral associate in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
“You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,” she says. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”
How they did it: The researchers used a non-invasive technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to selectively interfere with brain activity in the right TPJ. A magnetic field applied to a small area of the skull creates weak electric currents that impede nearby brain cells’ ability to fire normally, but the effect is only temporary.
In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of 1 (absolutely forbidden) to 7 (absolutely permissible).
In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for someone to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.
In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, the researchers believe that TMS interfered with subjects’ ability to interpret others’ intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcome information to make their judgments.
Next steps: Young is now doing a study on the role of the right TPJ in judgments of people who are morally lucky or unlucky. For example, a drunk driver who hits and kills a pedestrian is unlucky, compared to an equally drunk driver who makes it home safely, but the unlucky homicidal driver tends to be judged more morally blameworthy.
Posted in Mind Control | Top Of Page

3 Responses to “Neuroscientists Influence People’s Moral Judgments by Disrupting Specific Brain Region”

1. PeterofLoneTree Says:
   March 30th, 2010 at 4:51 pm There is a rather lengthy work detailing right-brain and left-brain functions contained in “Chapter XXIV Lucifer and the Pot of Gold or The Quest for the Holy Grail of No Anticipation!” at
   http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/wave12a.htm
   It’s part of a larger work: “The Wave Series by Laura Knight-Jadczyk”
   
2. oelsen Says:
   March 30th, 2010 at 5:35 pm http://unibas.ch/index.cfm?uui.....how_long=1
   This was an international study, just in case someone is interested. (I hope its the same paper/sorry, only german afaik).
   
3. Zenc Says:
   March 30th, 2010 at 11:30 pm “Gee Sarge, why does my compass always point to my new helmet?”
   

[Jan Klimkowski]

To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions — an ability known as “theory of mind.” For example, if a hunter shoots his friend while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the hunter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his friend for a duck?

Was Lil' Dick Cheney the control subject for this MIT, um, moral experiment? :help:

If a hunter shoots his friend was he secretly jealous, did he mistake his friend for a duck, or is he a Strangelovian megalomaniac?

Surreal. :alberteinstein:

[Ed Jewett]

Neuroscientists use magnetism to fool our moral compass

March 31, 2010 | 10:51 am
Neuroscientists have marched forward by many means in their understanding of how the brain and its component parts work. They have long studied people with injuries to certain parts of their brains and, by seeing how the behavior of those individuals changes, have inferred the role that the damaged part of the brain plays. In more recent years, functional magnetic resonance imaging and electro-encephalograms (those electrical wires you see attached to babies' bald pates in pictures) have helped researchers divine the roles of certain brain regions by "seeing" blood flow or metabolic activity in those regions during certain tasks.
But there's also a little known and somewhat low-tech gadget that can have surprising powers of revelation. It's called transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which a small device that emits a powerful but narrow-spectrum magnetic charge is passed over a region of the brain. It won't penetrate very far, but the result is that the cells in that region of the brain are briefly scrambled: For a few minutes, they go silent or misfire. (Neuroscientists have been known to have a bit of fun with this gadget.)
In the neuroscience lab of MIT researcher Rebecca Saxe, the role of the right temporoparietal junction -- an area toward the back of your head, a couple of inches above your right ear -- is an area of particular interest. This area has long been thought to play a role in how we interpret the actions and motives of the people around us -- a largely-human talent called "theory of mind."
In a recent study using transcranial magnetic stimulation, researchers in Saxe's lab have found that the right temporoparietal junction -- and our ability to infer other people's thoughts and motives -- may be important in how we make and act on moral and ethical judgments.
In a pair of experiments published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT researchers passed a transcranial magnetic stimulator over the right temporoparietal junction, in one case for 25 minutes while the study participants read a series of scenarios and decided how they should behave, and in the second experiment, briefly, while participants were asked to make a complex moral judgment. In both experiments, researchers set up the moral conundrums so that the participants could make a dangerous or immoral decision (such as driving drunk) but not have any moral consequences (such as an accident ensuing).
With their right temporoparietal junctions scrambled, participants seemed unable to recognize an action as wrong unless it led to harm -- a moral judgment that virtually all could make easily when their brains were not being magnetically scrambled. It seems that when unable to infer the motives and actions of another, they had to rely only on outcomes to tell them if their own actions were ethical.
The implications for human behavior are potentially far-reaching: Unless we can understand what's on other people's minds, we may be hampered in understanding how best to live cooperatively (and ethically) with others. And then there's a take-home message for each of us: If someone you know seems to behave without moral bearings, you might try looking for a transcranial magnetic stimulator hidden with the remote control in the folds of his or her couch. Or you might infer that his or her powers of "theory of mind" need a bit of exercise.
-- Melissa Healy


More in: behavior, cognition, psychology

[David Guyatt]

Don't laugh, but in view of the foregoing I'm going to start wearing tinfoil hats.