DARPA Plans To Begin Hacking Human Brains

So [DARPA] wants to start hacking human brains, With the help of the biomedical device center at the university of Texas in Dallas. This does sound a bit crazy but DARPA does crazy. Conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this one.

The initial plans to turn us all into mindless zombies seem to be shelved for now, however they are working on what they call Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT), which they explain means using the body’s nervous system to enhance and speed up the learning process. This could be achieved by using a process known as ‘synaptic plasticity‘ which opens and closes the brains synapses with electrical stimulation. They hope that by tuning the neural networks responsible for cognitive function it will enhance learning. Let’s just hope they don’t turn any humans into DARPA falling robots.

26 thoughts on “DARPA Plans To Begin Hacking Human Brains

      1. and? Kill the concerned people (more or less obvious and directly) and goto 0 – it’s military stuff from the gouvernment, i don’t think they care about some dead people. :-/

      1. Unferium is also a word bodge:

        The Realm of No Inferiority where both apply:

        Preferring to make/find/purchase/perform to an action/device/other above the “norm” (Far above, even if I have to use “Ancient things” because “They don’t build them like they used to”

        Always learning, To become one above his/her previous self (Cognitively, To not be inferior to ones self).

    1. They learn as they go. Once they make themselves smarter they’ll learn faster which makes the research go faster. Sure they turn a few dozen people into vegetables, epileptics, or Mr. Hyde but imagine the possibilities once they get those wrinkles ironed out.

      More seriously this research could greatly advance understanding of the human brain. Let’s just hope they’re more cautious than science fiction writers give them credit for.

    2. how is this different from targeted electro stimulation?

      it isnt a completely new field and even though the brain is a mystery it isnt a complete black box, we know quite a bit about it, just not everything.

  1. i hont know if i like that. look what haooened to our weather after they used the haarp because darpa does not like the violence of war.

    we used to have summer like weather by may 1 now we still have winter weather with storms that keep the weather from warming up

  2. TL:DR; We cant extract words your thinking off from the brain, and this is something specialized companys have worked on for decades, i dont believe just throwing more money at it will suddenlly make it possible.

    Anybody got a source for the memo that we all have to create hype around brain interfaces now?
    – Elon musk started a company
    – Facebook is apparently working on it
    – Now DARPA too?!

    Im sorry, but im just gonna reply the same thing as i did for the elon musk and facebook story:
    We’re not even close to understanding how brains and especially memory’s and sensor-input works, the best we’re able to do today is teach a computer to recognize certain brain patterns, which can then be attached to a certain action.
    Say if you think of a blue apple, that gives a unique enough brain pattern that you can use that to turn on the lights, but this quickly diminishes when you go further.

    Say you have a warehouse, full of rooms, each room has a different ‘command’ for the lights, one room you’ll have to think about a blue apple, another room you need to think about a purple apple, another room you need to think about a yellow orange, etc etc. The problem now arises that the brainwave pattern for a blue and purple apple is pretty much impossible to keep apart.

    Now take that one step further, in the direction all these people are claiming they will go.
    You think off a sentence in your head “Hey honey im late for dinner” and some magical process will be able to translate that to text, how would that actually work?

    For starters we have yet to manage to actually detect when somebody thinks of a word, all we got working so far is when somebody imagine’s an object, thats something we can vaguely detect, just thinking about the word banana isnt gonna do much good, thinking of the picture of a banana on the other hand is detectable (provided you dont then also have defined a carrot a cucumber and a corncob, because those will just make it harder to determine what the person was thinking off)

    Sooo, then say you want to relay that example sentance, “Hey honey im late for dinner”, that means you will have to think off something along the lines like:
    – You waving at your wife?
    – A pot of honey?
    – You pointing a finger at yourself?
    – A clock alongside a dayplanner?
    – I dont even know how your gonna envision ‘for’ as a visual
    – A dinner?

    Im sorry to say that that just wont fly, theres no way in hell that any of these companys is gonna come up with a system that will support the tens if not hundreds of thousands of words needed for this to work, and nobodys gonna remember all the proper things to think about either.

    So then, the only way forward is when somebody DOES somehow manage to extract words we think off? the problem with this is that there are companies specialized in this field working on this very subject for decades, and they have yet to make any breaktrough, just because you have a big budget (looking at elon musk, facebook, and darpa) doesnt mean you can suddenly solve this hurdle, you can not solve a problem just by throwing more money at it, its as simple as that.

    Even if they do find a way to achieve this (which i dont really believe they will for another few decades) it will still take years of work before they will be able to beat an average keyboard user, long story short, all this hype for brain-computer interfaces is about a decade to early, at the least.

    I recently heard some guy say that computers already ‘think’ 1000 times faster then us, and therefor they will one day enslave us, this is kind of the whole problem, brains dont work like computers, speed is very much relative & our brain can do a whole slew of tasks your average computer would be completely crap at, until we get seriously fast computers (like, real deal quantum computing) its very much a stretch to assume that we can monitor a brain to such extensive detail as needed for this sort of functionalities.

  3. I wish I could be excited about this. I just can’t help but remember that everything darpa does is for the end purpose of efficiently killing the people who aren’t us. All the benefits of darpa research are spinoffs and trickledown from that. For example, the internet: As a very rough summary, darpa wanted a way to make sure we could keep on killing after the apocalypse, and having your phone lines nuked made that hard. So invent a packet transmission system that can route around the destroyed stations. We reap the benefits, but why not invent a cool robust way for people to communicate because you want a cool way for everyone to communicate?

    1. Don’t feel too bad until I researched this article I didn’t have a clue what it was. I knew what synapses were etc but biology isn’t my strong suit.

  4. Soon all Americans will be super smart, like Trump is.
    Maybe they will all have the best words too!

    Or could it be that it’s all just silly nonsense people have been trying for almost as long as finding that rock that turns base metals into gold? Nah, super-trumps for sure.

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