Pentagon funds study of synthetic telepathy.

[SirNitram]

Link

The research could lead to a communication system that would benefit soldiers on the battlefield and paralysis and stroke patients, according to lead researcher Michael D’Zmura, chair of the UCI Department of Cognitive Sciences.

“Thanks to this generous grant we can work with experts in automatic speech recognition and in brain imaging at other universities to research a brain-computer interface with applications in military, medical and commercial settings,” D’Zmura says.

The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.

“Such a system would require extensive training for anyone using it to send and receive messages,” D’Zmura says. “Initially, communication would be based on a limited set of words or phrases that are recognized by the system; it would involve more complex language and speech as the technology is developed further.”

D’Zmura will collaborate with UCI cognitive science professors Ramesh Srinivasan, Gregory Hickok and Kourosh Saberi. Joining the team are researchers Richard Stern and Vijayakumar Bhagavatula from Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and David Poeppel from the University of Maryland’s Department of Linguistics.

The grant comes from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program, which supports research involving more than one science and engineering discipline. Its goal is to develop applications for military and commercial uses.

Looks far more sensible than teleporting cruise missiles.

[Mr Bean]

Three Issues

1. Big Helmet
2. Brainwaves are faint, you need amplifiers which are still non-mobile at this point
3. Reading brainwaves is both processor and energy intensive.

Don't expect infantry, tanks and IFV's possibly, ships and airplanes most likely.

However calling it telepathy is misleading, your simply using nonverbal communication, you could be using frigging morse code with your eyebrows if you wish, it would not make it telepathy since we are not yet at the point we you can "think" blue and make the color blue appear.

OAN:Why do they always say Soldier? It's never a "soldier" it never will be.

[chitoryu12]

OAN:Why do they always say Soldier? It's never a "soldier" it never will be.

Probably to keep it simple. When people see "soldier", they automatically think "military". That, or just ignorance on those three points mentioned.

[Pelranius]

Hopefully this is a cover for a black ops project, like Stuart has suggested in the past. I wouldn't be too optimistic though.

[Ethereal41]

Three Issues

1. Big Helmet
2. Brainwaves are faint, you need amplifiers which are still non-mobile at this point
3. Reading brainwaves is both processor and energy intensive.

Don't expect infantry, tanks and IFV's possibly, ships and airplanes most likely.

However calling it telepathy is misleading, your simply using nonverbal communication, you could be using frigging morse code with your eyebrows if you wish, it would not make it telepathy since we are not yet at the point we you can "think" blue and make the color blue appear.

Exactly. I think this technology might be better applied in an attempt to close the man/machine lag and improve reaction times.

Looks pretty far off at any rate.

[salm]

Three Issues

1. Big Helmet
2. Brainwaves are faint, you need amplifiers which are still non-mobile at this point
3. Reading brainwaves is both processor and energy intensive.

Hmmm... i don't know. There is a video game comming out at the end of the year by emotiv systems that is supposed to do this brainwaves enhancing stuff. It's clearly not nearly as complex as something that a language generator would require but it is also in the consumer price range, that is, 300 dollars. (Of course i'm still very sceptical about how good this emotiv systems thing is going to work.

[Winston Blake]

This kind of technology has been researched for paralysed patients for years - maybe they're plugging the telepathy angle to catch military funding. Existing subvocalisation projects can already achieve this project's aims - for unparalysed people.

[Mr Bean]

Hmmm... i don't know. There is a video game comming out at the end of the year by emotiv systems that is supposed to do this brainwaves enhancing stuff. It's clearly not nearly as complex as something that a language generator would require but it is also in the consumer price range, that is, 300 dollars. (Of course i'm still very sceptical about how good this emotiv systems thing is going to work.

Source? Quote? Link?
It would be odd that a video game company managed to beat the folks over at MIT and Columbia who both have multi-million dollar grants to do nothing but study this and develop a device to let the disabled control computers. There was a device that claimed to be mind reading from

If it's the Emotiv, it's not in fact mind reading, and it's in fact more of an off-shoot of lie detecting hardware. It looks for physical changes, eyebrow raises, eye movement, crinkling of the brow and the like.

[salm]

Source? Quote? Link?
It would be odd that a video game company managed to beat the folks over at MIT and Columbia who both have multi-million dollar grants to do nothing but study this and develop a device to let the disabled control computers. There was a device that claimed to be mind reading from

If it's the Emotiv, it's not in fact mind reading, and it's in fact more of an off-shoot of lie detecting hardware. It looks for physical changes, eyebrow raises, eye movement, crinkling of the brow and the like.

Here´s a link to the company:

Here's the wikipedia article

Conscious thoughts (Cognitiv suite): Imagining 12 kinds of movement (6 directions and 6 rotations), plus 1 other visualization ("disappear"), can be detected.

And here's a video to this years GDC:

link

[salm]

Actually these types of games have been around for a while only less complex. The first one i remember was a couple of years ago developed, i think, by some neurologist as an experiment. It was a stick figure standing on a rope. It would tip left or right and you had to think the direction in which it was not tipping in order to regain balance.

[Raj Ahten]

I heard on NPR that this research was mainly being aimed at medical research to help with soldiers suffering from brain damage.