Mind Wars Brain Science and the Military Professor Jonathan D. Moreno l David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania; Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC.
[email protected]
This article is based on a public lecture hosted by the Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics in Melbourne, Australia on 11 April 2013. The lecture recording was transcribed by Vicky Ryan; and, the original transcript has been edited - for clarity and brevity - by Vicky Ryan, Michael Selgelid and Jonathan Moreno.
Introduction This paper is concerned with the history and sociology of science and the overlap between bioethics and national security, which I believe is a rich field for research. 2 President Obama recently announced a new ambitious 'BRAIN' (Brain Research through AdvanCing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative in the United States. Budgeted at a hundred million dollars for its first year, this is a public/private project involving three government agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - which is the cutting edge science agency of the Pentagon.
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The author is senior advisor to the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. None of the views expressed in this paper should be construed as those of the commission. For a more thorough treatment see Jonathan D. Moreno, Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century, New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012. 83
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One of the principle goals of the BRAIN project is to see if progress can be made in understanding disorders like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and Alzheimer's disease. Those familiar with the psychopath/pharmacology world are aware that the funding formula is restricted at the moment, so there is not a lot in the pipeline for neurological psychiatric disorders. It is hoped that improved understanding of brain cell connections will result in new therapeutic approaches to such diseases. It is currently possible to identify activity of individual neurons, but the goal of the BRAIN project is to better understand how neurons talk to each other - Le., cell signaling in the brain. Relevant research has led to the remarkable growth of neuroscience in the last twenty years or so, and there are numerous ways to measure this growth. For instance: the number of publications in neuroscience; the number of people who belong to esoteric-sounding organisations, like the Society for Neuroscience, which now holds one of the biggest annual meetings in the world (Le., with forty thousand attendees); and at the University of Pennsylvania there is a Neuroscience 'boot camp' where individuals can learn about neuroscience. Whether you are a lawyer or a journalist - or even a philosopher - there is an International Neuroethics Society for you. Clearly there is a tremendous amount of interest in what is going on in neuroscience; however, I am most interested in the national security side of neuroscience.
National security and neuroscience The Pentagon, of course, is interested in neuroscience, particularly in cognitive neuroscience, although this is just a small part of its overall research. Cognitive neuroscience essentially aims discover the connection between our subjective experience and what is actually going on physiologically or neuro-physiologically. To give you just an idea of the interest in this area of research, here are the 20ll fiscal year figures for investment by US government departments into cognitive neuroscience: Army, fifty-five million; Navy, thirty-four million; Air Force, twenty-four million; and DARPA, at least two hundred and forty million dollars. It is a substantial investment. However, 84
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it is even greater than this if you include neuroscience more generally. Most likely the funding is included in what might be called 'black budgets' budgets that are not necessarily published. This makes it difficult to know exactly how much is going on in this research field and thus motivates my interest into what is going on in the security side of neuroscience. If you do a search for key words like 'neuroscience: 'national security: 'biotech: 'neuroterrorism' 'bioterrorism' 'neuro-technology: 'interrogation: and 'brainwashing' you come up with what you might call a '9/11 factor' in the numbers of papers published that are relevant to neuroscience and national security, which is another way of measuring the fact that there is a clear interest in this area. So what happens in scientific research? You have got some kind of proposal on your hard drive; a new request for applications for money comes in across your desk; you get an email about it; you tweet your study and include a key word that might be included in the RFA (Research Funding Application). You think/say 'I can do neuroscience and I can do something that is relevant to interrogation, why not?' And that is what happens ... there is a new paper and the rate of publication goes up. Colleagues in Denmark actually found the 9/11 factor in general for the life sciences since the Fall of 2001. Another way of demonstrating that there is reason to be interested in this is that the people who have a security role are interested in this.
195Ds - 196Ds: Post World War 2 First some history about national security and the brain before turning to neuroscience. Let's start in the 1950s. My preferred method for illustrating issues about the brain and national security is to provide explanations through cultural references. I do this visually, with movies. Here is the trailer for a film called The Manchurian Candidate, which was based on a novel of the same name. It was an early 1960s film, and I will playa couple of minutes of this trailer. (Dialogue from excerpt follows.) Excerpt from The Manchurian Candidate:
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[Voiceover] The war in Korea was over. Captain, now Major, Bennett Marco had been reassigned to Army Intelligence in Washington. It was by and large a pleasant assignment, except for one thing. Night after night, the major was plagued by the same reoccurring nightmare ... [Mrs. Whittaker] ... Another modern discovery, which we owe to the hydrangea, concerns the influence of air drainage upon plant climate. Many years ago when I was travelling about the country I noticed magnificent hydrangeas on the hills where the air drainage was, er, perfect. And very poor specimens, or perhaps none at all, in the valleys. Formerly, we used to consider sheltered valleys more favourable to plants than hilltops ... but the avoidance oflate spring and early autumn frost enjoyed by sites with good air drainage where the cold air can drain safely away to lower levels gives the hills a decided advantage. Thus it was the hydrangeas that gave the first pointer in another modern discovery of horticultural importance. From this, it might appear that the hydrangea is a fairly simple plant but there are more complications. The cultivation of hydrangeas was evolved from a number of varieties originally found in Japan, not all of which, of course, have the same characteristics. Two of them do not share the quality of producing blue flowers in mineral rich soils. [Yen Lo] Allow me to introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to forgive their somewhat lackadaisical manners but I have conditioned them - or 'brainwashed' them, which I understand is the new American word ... to believe that they are waiting out a storm in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey where a meeting of the ladies' garden club is in progress. [Mrs. Whittaker] You may notice that I have told them they can smoke (chuckles) I've allowed my people to have a little fun in the selection of bizarre tobacco substitutes ... This is the way popular culture understood what had happened to some US prisoners during the Korean War. The reason these prisoners signed a war crimes confession is that they were 'brainwashed.' Nobody exactly knew what brainwashing was, or what the word 'brainwashing' meant, however that word became part of the vocabulary of the early nineteen fifties. It has remained part
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of our culture - everybody knows that word. The word was actually created by a journalist during the Korean War. One of the suspected substances that might have been used on prisoners in the Korean War by the North Koreans was LSD. LSD 25, as it was known in those days, is a hallucinogen. During the mid-1950s, the CIA was also very interested in the effect of LSD. LSD was first synthesized, by accident, in 1938 by a Swiss/German chemist named Albert Hofmann while experimenting with the fungus ergot, which has interesting chemical properties. One day 5 years later, in 1943, out of curiosity he took the 25th version of his reanalysis of ergot off the shelf to work with it. He apparently got some on his hands, and then started feeling funny. He asked one of his colleagues to accompany him home on his bicycle. This then became a very long ride home. This was the first LSD trip, a term that was actually created by the US Army, not by hippies in the 1960s. However, there was concern that if you gave LSD to, for example, an atomic scientist with a high security clearance, you could, in the gentile language of the 1950s, make a discrete man indiscrete. Similarly, if you were in a conference in a nice place like Melbourne and you asked the fellow out for a drink afterwards, and put some LSD in his drink, maybe you could get him to spill the beans. Sex and alcohol are probably still the best ways to turn somebody, but in those days it was thought that LSD might work well too. A 1953 memorandum on biological and chemical weapons (now declassified), signed by CIA expert Sidney Gottlieb, authorises the expenditure of $39,500 for study of the biochemical, neurophysiological, sociological and clinical psychiatric aspects of LSD. This was part of what was known as MKUltra, an organization headed by Gottlieb, who was sort of the biological and chemical weapons version of Q from James Bond. There were also programs before this with similar aims and code-names such as Artichoke and Bluebird. The CIA had great interest in hallucinogens and mind control techniques which had been used on US prisoners of war in North Korea. Some of this type of testing was also done the military - the UK, Canada and the US apparently co-operated in the late fifties and early sixties. Their concern was whether hallucinogens could affect a military unit and what would happen 87
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to people if somehow a drug like LSD got into the water or something similar. This video shows a group of British military men who were given LSD-25 in the field, and the following voiceover will explain what happens. Video excerpt voiceover: The drug is administered with a drink of water given at the start of each day's exercise. Twenty-five minutes later the first effects of the drug became apparent. The men became relaxed and [began] to giggle. But this man was more seriously affected and had to be removed from the exercise. After thirty-five minutes one of the radio operators had become incapable of using his set and the efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired. Ten minutes later the attacking section had lost all sense of urgency. Notice the bunching and indecision as they enter a wood occupied by the enemy. Almost immediately the section commander tried to use a map to find the location of troop headquarters and the prisoner's escort had to have the way pointed out to him although it was in plain sight seven hundred yards away over open country. Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult if not impossible but the men are still capable of sustaining a physical effort. However, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility in spite of physical symptoms. But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men ... He himself then relaxed into laughter. This is a real film from the Imperial War Museum. It was put up on YouTube a number of years ago and I have been using it as an example in my lectures for years. There are other films, apparently from this exercise, in the series and one is quite distressing where you see a fellow who had to be taken off the field and counseled. This type of experimenting continued into the early 1960s.
1980s - 1990s: The mind race Let's move forward to parapsychology and the period just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when there was a worry in the Tax Department that we 88
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were losing what was being called the 'mind race' to the Soviets. The National Academy of Sciences was asked to produce a report on human performance enhancement3 • The following is one paragraph in the report which I think is fascinating because here we have gone from the drug experience to other ways of expanding consciousness that do not require drugs: natural consciousness
expansion. This is from this report: 'The claimed phenomena and applications' ... presented by several military officers, 'range from the incredible to the outrageously incredible. The 'anti-missile time warp,' for example, is somehow supposed to deflect attack from nuclear warheads so that they will transcend time and explode among the ancient dinosaurs ... ' I was a science fiction fan when I was a kid and I read a short story about a guy who goes back in time. He steps on a butterfly there, comes back, and everything is different. So these guys were obviously reading the same stories as I was or they would already know you could not do this. 'One suggested application is a conception of the 'First Earth Battalion,' made up of 'warrior monks' ... including the use of ESP, leaving their bodies at will, levitating, psychic healing and walking through walls.' This is a real report. Our colleagues, twenty-five years ago, politely suggested that the army might not want to keep spending our money on this. However, this type of research did inspire a movie that has a great trailer which portrays these experiments in 'natural consciousness expansion.' This film was based on real life. Film clip from The Men who stare at Goats: Django (Jeff Bridges): K9.... Scottie? Scotty (Nick Offerman): (looks intensely at cupboard) It's something cylindrical, it's a pencil? Django (Jeff Bridges): Okay.... Larry? 3
'Enhancing Human Performance: Issues Theories, and Techniques: Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance, The National Research Council, 1988. 89
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Larry (Kevin Spacey) (eyes roll back): ...This is Larry's spirit guide, Maude. I'm looking into the cupboard now and I see, I see, a tin mug. Django: Lyn? Lyn (George Clooney) (breathes) It's a man sitting in a chair. Django walks over to the cabinet and takes the box in question, opens it and takes out a photo. He turns it towards the three men. It is a photo of a man sitting in a chair.
Lyn: (smiles): Phooa. Larry: No, wait a minute, you said A not K. He said A. Django: Bravo Zulu Lyn ... outstanding. The movie overall was not very good, however the trailer was. The film was based on a British book called Men who stare at Goats about warrior monks and apparently the true story of experiments where some of these guys were trying to psychokinesis or telekinesis at a bunch of goats in a trailer in Maryland, not far from Washington. One day while they were doing this exercise a goat actually collapsed and they thought ... it works. Now let's move from parapsychology to the world of psychopharmacology. Right around the time the warrior monks were experimenting, a company started working on a drug called modafinil. This drug is actually approved for people who have narcolepsy, but it turns out that, at least for many people, it is able to increase waking time with no measurable detriment of attention or concentration. For example, Air Force pilots now are using modafinil, also known as Provigil, as a complement to speed, which they've been using for a long time. The mechanism of modafinil is not understood, and it was only patented last year by a company in Philadelphia. You will probably see modafinil grey marketed on campus soon because it does seem to be able to keep responders up for sixty hours with no measurable loss of attention or function. I personally would not advise anybody to take modafinil for a long time; however, it is prescribed for shift workers, for long-haul truck drivers, or possibly, as one of my colleagues suggested, for those who are travelling from 90
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Pennsylvania to Melbourne - 'my prescription is Ambien when you get on the plane and modafinal when you get off the plane.' In the area of pharmacology, oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It is recruited as a versatile drug which does a lot of different things. Women who are in labour often use Pitocin (a trade name for oxytocin) as it seems to stimulate the let down reflex. It is also known as the 'cuddle hormone' or 'cuddle drug' and there is some evidence, under highly restrictive laboratory conditions, that if you give someone a shot of oxytocin through the nasal route and then they participate in a competitive gaming situation, they are more generous with the person with whom they are competing. It has been suggested by some that if you gave oxytocin to somebody who was being interrogated, then they would be more trusting to whoever was in the room. You would not have to do 'good cop, bad cop' and you would not have to water-board, you would just give them some oxytocin and they would trust you.
Brain imaging technology Now let's move from psychopharmacology to a quick tour of brain imaging technology. Imaging and scanning techniques have advanced considerably - we have non-invasive brain imaging and functional MRI, which people are excited about, but there are also PET scans, STAT and functional neuroinfrared spectroscopy - all sorts of ways to do brain imaging. A very highly regarded group at Stanford recently announced that they had been able to make the brains of a mouse and part of a human cadaver transparent. If that is the case, which I believe is so, then maybe we will not need to do so much imaging, which is a major step forward. This is all part of the new BRAIN initiative the President announced. Professor Jack Gallant is also doing interesting work at Berkeley. Gallant has put people in a functional MRI, which is a big, sort of cigar like sort of shell that you lie in, with a big magnet. Basically it will follow where the oxygen is going in the brain; and it is inferred that this reveals the systems, pathways and organs that are the most active. Gallant takes subjects and monitors them. They have to lie very still, so he needs very cooperative subjects, who are presented with videos to watch. Based on a large amount of 91
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data he gets from functional MRI and some highly complicated algorithms, and then using six million still images, he is able to reconstruct roughly what is going on inside the subject's head while looking at the video. Gallant's findings have been pretty interesting thus far and you can well imagine that technological advance will enable increasingly precise imagery. If interested you can watch some of Gallant's talks on YouTube. He starts one of them by saying 'you know, this scares me.' In reality you don't need to worry about walking into an airport and having your brain scanned this way to reveal what you are thinking. It's not that simple. Nonetheless, Gallant's work provides proof of concept. When I discussed this with my undergraduates at University of Pennsylvania about a year ago I said, 'although this is all fine there are signs that are telling me that it is kind of cheating because the visual cortex at the back of the brain is big, and we know a lot about it already, so what is the big deal?' It is only one of the sensoria that we can do this with. However, then another group at Berkley produced an article describing their experiment with an audio clip, that I'll play for you, and this experiment was located in the temporal cortex, where we process sound. The set up is as follows: patients who have Parkinson's disease have open skull surgery and electrodes are implanted for brain stimulation to help them manage their symptoms. They have given informed consent to have some other electrodes placed and while they are listening to somebody reading a word, the word is being reconstructed in two different ways, with different technologies, based on the cells that are firing while they are hearing the word pronounced. So basically, based on the neural pathways that are being stimulated, they reconstruct the sound. Now you are going to hear two different ways of doing it. (You can read the article to understand the different systems they use.)4 'Waldo?' Waldo; Waldo (blurred) [hearing the word and the two ... J
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See PLOS Biology, Reconstructing Speech from the Human Auditory Cortex, Pasleyet a!., http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/l0.1371/journaI.pbio.l001251 92
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'structure' structure, structure (blurred) 'counting' counting, counting (blurred) 'doubt' doubt, doubt (blurred) 'company' company, company (blurred) 'pencil' pencil, pencil (blurred) In the recording you can hear that consonants are easier than vowels, however I am sure they will find out the reason soon. So again, the recording is kind of fuzzy, but it shows that if we could open up your brain and mess around with the placement of electrodes for a while, we could know what you hear, even if we have not heard it ourselves. So this is pretty interesting. It is not mind-reading but it is forcing us to rethink the conditions under which we think about the brain. Then there is also brain-machine imaging interface and this is kind of an unnecessary experiment in neuro-robotics. It was done at a Brooklyn Medical School and basically demonstrates the concept that you can control the movements of a rat through discretely placed electrodes and a couple of buttons on a laptop. I will play this clip for you, Robo Rat - The Brain/Machine InterfaceS Voiceover: Dr John Chapin has been exploring the minds of rats for more than twenty years. The culmination of all this research is an unique interface between animal and machine. The remote-control rat.
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A Remote Controlled Rat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-jTkqHSWlg (Accessed: 18 September 2013). 93
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Dr Chapin: What we have been doing is actually guiding him wirelessly, by sending him signals from the laptop computer to his brain. And we also have a camera on his backpack so that we can see the world from the way the rat sees it. Voiceover: Chapin has gained control over the rat's decisions by tapping directly into its brain. A radio signal from the computer stimulates the brain areas that are connected to the whiskers. When they stimulate the left whisker, the rat turns left. Stimulate the right, the rat turns right. It does have a choice, but ifit does as asked the rat is rewarded with a hit to the pleasure centre of the brain. He needs get some walking, he needs to lose some weight, hey you need to be, you doing aerobics guy.... So probably if you used lots of micro screws and you gave me a shot in my pleasure centre, this might work in some ways for me too, but people are more complicated organisms than rats so it would not be the same. However, it is interesting and raises interesting questions about how far, evolutionarily speaking, someone could go to get a result like this. But there are also ways of stimulating cognition, attitudes, perceptions and experiences without opening up the skull. For example, there is a technology called transcranial recurrent simulation and transcranial direct current simulation (tDCS) - the slight difference being the technologies used. Basically they involve targeting of simple electrical pulses (using devices you can buy for $500 to $600). There is now reasonably good evidence that they do have an effect on cognition. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been used in experiments directed at the skull for problems such as stuttering and chronic pain for example. There are all sorts of references to tDCS or trans cranial DC stimulation on the web. 6 Four or five years ago I was in Tokyo presenting an earlier version of this paper to the Japanese Bioethics Association. I got to a point in the lecture like this when a young Japanese nerve scientist who was on the panel with me said, 6
See for example John Hopkins - Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences http://www. hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/specialty_areas/brain_stimulation/tdcs.html 94
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'Oh yeah, I had one of these in my leg: 'Really?' 'Yes: And I said, 'Well do you use it?' 'Oh yeah, yeah ifI'm getting a little tired one of my graduate students comes over and gives me a little shot.' 'How often have you done that?' 'Oh, hundreds of times. It's fine.' This is something I would not necessarily recommend, but TMS was approved in the mid-eighties for people who have clinical depression who do not respond to standard therapies, particularly ECT. There are some psychiatrists who believe that it is actually preferable to use TMS because it does not create a seizure. So in the coming years we may see TMS replacing an ECT for people for whom anti-depressants or ETC have failed. A fascinating paper out of MIT reports a study where a group of young men were exposed to transcranial DC stimulation and then presented with a scenario in which their girlfriend was walking across a bridge that was known to be dangerous. Without TMS the young men reasoned, deontologically, that you have a duty to warn, especially somebody you love, that they shouldn't walk across a dangerous bridge. But after they were exposed in some way to the tDCS their reasoning became more utilitarian. So clearly there is some evidence that you can actually change people's reasoning. This is also being done in ways that I find a little scary. For example, there is actually a 'do it yourself' transcranial DC stimulation blogger (and probably more than one). On this particular one there is a young man who reports that he is able to learn more quickly, improving his memory and so forth. I am not sure how reliable this one person's experience is; however, DARPA is now working to see if snipers can be trained with trans cranial magnetic stimulation and there is also some interest in using tDCS for improving memory and learning. It seems likely that we have not seen the last of trans cranial recurrent simulation. Another technology that's going to be exploited in the President's BRAIN initiative is called optogenetics. This research started a number of years ago by a team at Stanford. The advantage of optogenetics is that you can actually follow a current around the brain and then you can begin to figure out what the connections are between the neurons, which for the most part we have not been able to do yet.
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Neurotechnology and the military About a year ago I published an article in The Wall Street Journal where I pOinted out that for all the discussion about drones, the public discussion has largely missed the interaction between these kinds of remote technologies, whether in the air or on the ground, and what's going on in neurotechnology.7 The argument is that learning more about the way real brains operate - and they don't have to be human brains, they can be lower animal brains - will probably change the way software is written. Recently, the acting Director of the Office of Naval Research said that, in a financially constrained period as the US Army is in now, unmanned systems are going to be of more and more interest. There is already an autonomous defensive weapon system that is deployed on US naval vessels - and most likely used by the Australian Navy as well. It is called the Egis Missile System and basically it removes the need for an operations person. It is able to fire a weapon at an object that is approaching in the air space of a
vessel without any human being pushing a button. Thus the question that is currently being discussed in the US war colleges concerns the ethics of autonomous offensive lethal weapons. Now there seem to be a couple of systems, and again the neuroscience connection is present in these systems, and they operate just in the way brains function. They also understand content and make judgments better than any computer system. Now there is a kind of a legal debate going on, right up to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, about whether autonomous, unmanned offensive systems are acceptable. Here is this one example. This is a North Korean advertisement from Samsung - those of you who want to buy Robocop. This is the Techquin Robot that is now being tested in the unmilitarised zone. The South Korean government has bought it. Now this is a system that is loaded for BEAR (Battlefield ExtractionAssist Robot) and it has got very sophisticated biosensors - i.e., visual sensing capacity - though it still requires a human being to actually fire a weapon from it. But that, of course, is only an engineering triviality. This is just one example,
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Jonathan D. Moreno, 'Robot Soldiers Will Be a Reality - and a Threat: Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2012, A1S 96
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that I believe is very provocative, of the intersection between neurotechnology and the potential unmanned autonomous software for autonomous lethal weapons in the future.
Ethical Principles It is very hard to come up with new ethical principles in the field of bioethics.
However, there are a couple of principles specifically for the ethics for neuroscience that are relevant to the future security questions that I have canvassed. One is cognitive liberty - that is the understanding that I should be the only one to have access to my thoughts or that only I should be able to decide who has access to my thoughts. However, like all philosophical principles, this sounds good until you start thinking about the counter-examples. If only I have access to my thoughts then probably none of us would be here - because we have evolved to be able to read other people's faces unconsciously. Micro muscular impressions or the way that pupils are dilated, for example, reveal whether someone is interested in us or not. We have actually evolved to read other peoples' minds in some sense all the time. Nonetheless, the principle of cognitive liberty may still be a good place to start. Another principle that people talk about is reversibility. Anything that you do to me, particularly my brain - which moderns tend to identify with themselves - ought to be reversible. But we know and have known since the late nineteenth century (i.e., since the electrophysiology experiments of people like Wilhelm Wundt in Germany) that when you change the brain, you change the brain. It does not change back. This does not mean that people are going to act on whatever you have done to them. However, the brain does change because it is plastic and it adapts. So there are reasonable arguments both pro and con. Like all ethical principles, there must be justifiable exceptions, as there is no experience that does not effect some change in the brain, however minimal or trivial, and some of those changes may not be wholly reversible. Then there is international law. In the US not a great deal of attention is paid to international law; however, when I attend conferences in other countries, I often hear people refer to international law. There are human rights laws that 97
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do apply to these questions (Le., the Geneva conventions), and there are disarmament conventions which have worked well (such as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention). The question is whether these conventions could be applied to the new neuroscience and the new neuro-technologies. Some believe we need to develop new conventions for cyberspace, for example, which is related to neurotechnology. We do not have them yet, but there are people who are interested in drafting appropriate conventions. The problem is that science is changing so quickly and new conventions would get adopted over twenty or thirty years by sovereign countries, each with their own internal way of adopting them. So it is a problem because technologies are changing too quickly for appropriate conventions to be developed at the same rate. 8 In 2008 I was part of a group that wrote a report entitled Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience which was produced by the Defence Intelligence Agency confirming that there is clearly an interest in cognitive neuroscience at that level. At that time there was also an Army report that discussed ideas about opportunities in neuroscience. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, for example, was listed as something that might be done in a vehicle, or perhaps even a helmet, to wake up people while they are driving when the biosensor registers that they are getting tired. An interesting example which shows how much junk theory is on the web is a workshop we did in 2009. I was part of the organising committee for this workshop on field testing of cognitive sciences methods. PCASS is a handheld lie detector that basically fits on your finger using the same technology as the standard lie detector. It is about 70% accurate in the hands of a skilled operator, and thus 30% inaccurate. At this public workshop a fellow stood up and said that he was a trainer for the army and that the PCASS was being used to screen local workers in Iraq for work in the Green Zone, which is the American Embassy compound. Interesting. Why? Well, it is very simple, you can train a young soldier to use it in a few minutes. It has three lights on it to tell if somebody is lying. Red, yellow and green - the universal language. To which I said, 'is that
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The report is called the Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies published by National Academies Press. 98
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the only way you're telling if somebody is a potential terrorist, to work in the Green Zone?' He was about to answer but - I'm not making this up - when he looked around the room and saw a lot of uniforms, he hesitated. He then said 'well I better not say any more, there are other ways.' So, these technologies are out there. Currently, I am on a committee sponsored by DARPA that is going to report in the Fall of 2013. This committee was created by the National Academies at DARPA's request. Basically, the idea is to conduct research identifying the emerging ethical, legal and social issues that agencies like DARPA should be concerned about. One example is the Internet. Who anticipated the effect of the Internet on the world, and where did the Internet come from? Well, as you know, from the Arpanet, which was developed in the 60s in part by DARPA under its old name. But hardly anybody thought about the implications - the cultural, social implications of the Internet. So maybe we can do better than that.
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