It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
How it would work
The BrainGate Neural Interface is being developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
The device is a 4 by 4 millimeter arrangement of 100 electrodes. It is surgically implanted in the motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for creating movement in the limbs.
The implanted chip connects to a small platform protruding from the patient's skull that is linked to an external processor.
If the system works as hoped, the chip detects and sends signals from the motor cortex to the processor, which interprets them and feeds them into a computer.
"What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?" the article asks. The answer lies in the stated goal of the US military - "Total Spectrum Dominance".
The project is developing technology that "promises to directly read thoughts from a living brain - and even instill thoughts as well... It does not take much imagination to see in this the makings of a matrix-like cyberpunk dystopia: chips that impose false memories, machines that scan for wayward thoughts, cognitively augmented government security forces that impose a ruthless order on a recalcitrant population." The Globe reported.
Government funded advances in neurotechnology which also focus on developing the ability to essentially read people's minds should also set alarm bells ringing.
It is also well documented that the military and the federal government have been dabbling in mind control and manipulation experimentation for decades.
"What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?" the article asks. The answer lies in the stated goal of the US military - "Total Spectrum Dominance".
The project is developing technology that "promises to directly read thoughts from a living brain - and even instill thoughts as well... It does not take much imagination to see in this the makings of a matrix-like cyberpunk dystopia: chips that impose false memories, machines that scan for wayward thoughts, cognitively augmented government security forces that impose a ruthless order on a recalcitrant population." The Globe reported.
Government funded advances in neurotechnology which also focus on developing the ability to essentially read people's minds should also set alarm bells ringing.
It is also well documented that the military and the federal government have been dabbling in mind control and manipulation experimentation for decades.
Scientists develop 'brain chip'
BBC News, March 12, 2003
Posted: 2006-12-23 17:33:21
news.bbc.co.uk...
US scientists say a silicon chip could be used to replace the hippocampus, where the storage of memories is co-ordinated. They are due to start testing the device on rats' brains shortly. If that goes well, the Californian researchers will test the artificial hippocampus in live rats within six months and then monkeys trained to carry out memory tasks before progressing to human trials once the chip has been proved to be safe. The hippocampus is an area at the base of the brain in humans, close to the junction with the spinal cord. It is believed it "encodes" experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories in another part of the brain. the researchers were able to devise a mathematical model of a whole hippocampus. The model was then programmed on to a chip. They suggest the chip would sit on a patient's skull, rather than inside the brain. Bernard Williams, a philosopher at Oxford University, UK, who is an expert in personal identity, said people might find the technology hard to accept at first.
Note: Consider that top secret military experiments in almost all fields are generally at least a decade ahead of anything reported in the media. What do you think they might have developed by now? Could they have developed a way to erase and even replace memories? For more, click here.
US military experts are attempting to create an army of super-human soldiers who will be more intelligent and deadly thanks to a microchip implanted in their brains.
Scientists believe the implant will vastly improve the memory of troops so that they can recall every detail of their training and become more effective fighters.
Researchers at the University of Southern California's bio-engineering department have created the chip, which acts in exactly the same way as the hippocampus - the part of the brain that deals with memory.
In experiments, the team removed that section of the brain of dead rats and inserted the chip in its place. The implant sent exactly the same electronic signals as the real thing.
The next stage of the project is to test the implant on live animals. If this work proves to be as successful, experiments could one day be carried out on soldiers.
"But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.
If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.