> ### Defense Department funding brain-machine work

> BY GARETH COOK
> The Boston Globe
> Even by Washington scandal standards, the "terrorism futures" scandal was strange and dramatic.
> It started when two senators discovered an obscure military program designed to gauge the chances of various geopolitical developments, including terrorist attacks, by asking people to bet money on them. Within 48 hours -- or, more precisely, two news cycles -- the program was canceled and the man behind it, John Poindexter of Iran-contra fame, had tendered his resignation.
> What most people don't know is that the Department of Defense is already funding a research program with far creepier implications.
> The $24 million enterprise called Brain Machine Interfaces is developing technology that promises to directly read thoughts from a living brain -- and even instill thoughts as well.
> The research, some of which is being done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is already surprisingly advanced. Monkeys in a laboratory can control the movement of a robotic arm using only their thoughts. And last year scientists in New York announced they could control the skittering motions of a rat by implanting electrodes in its brain, steering it around the lab floor as if it were a radio-controlled toy car.
> 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.
> It is one thing to propose a tasteless market for gambling on terrorism. It is quite another to set some of the nation's top neuroscientists to work on mind control.
> But though they differ in degree, the Brain Machine Interface program and the terrorism futures market share many features. They are shocking. They are bizarre. And they are far more worthy of taxpayer money than at first they seem.
> The terrorism futures idea, the subject of near hysterical media coverage, is rooted in well-established economic principles. The Brain Machine Interface program, which may well be next in the spotlight, could offer help to the paralyzed and is no more likely to bring about a virtual police state than technologies that already are available.
> With Congress clamoring for much stricter oversight of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funds both programs, the episode is less a drama of Poindexter and a band of mad bureaucrats than it is a reminder of how important it is for the government to spend some of its resources on the outlandish. Money from DARPA and other small government agencies, such as the Office of Naval Research, has produced profound scientific advances, Nobel Prizes, and technologies -- such as the Internet -- that have changed the world.
> "It is important to have horizons longer than three years and the chance to try out bold ideas," said Tomaso Poggio, one of the MIT scientists involved in Brain Machine Interfaces. More traditional funding agencies can be so conservative, Poggio said, that "people sometimes joke that you have to have done the experiment before you can write the proposal."
> Like the futures market, the Brain Machine Interface program grew out of DARPA's long involvement in information processing. DARPA is the successor to ARPA, an office that was created in 1958, in the wake of Sputnik, to push forward scientific research with potential military applications. ARPA laid the foundation for what is today the Internet, and also contributed to a wide variety of computer applications currently in use.
> DARPA's brain-machine work, which is unclassified and eventually will be published in scientific journals, attracts scientists because it explores some of the central questions in neuroscience, such as the nature of consciousness and memory, and the neural code the brain uses to store and process information.
> http://www.charleston.net/stories/080503/wor_05darpa.shtml
> DARPA: Brain Machine Interfaces
> Brain Machine Interfaces
> From the DARPA Website
> Original Link: http://www.arpa.mil/dso/thrust/biosci/brainmi.htm
> Program Manager: Dr. Alan Rudolph
> The Brain Machine Interfaces Program represents a major DSO thrust area that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multipronged approach with far reaching impact. The program will create new technologies for augmenting human performance through the ability to noninvasively access codes in the brain in real time and integrate them into peripheral device or system operations. Focus will be on the following areas:
> 1. Extraction of neural and force dynamic codes related to patterns of motor or sensory activity required for executing simple to complex motor or sensory activity (e.g., reaching, grasping, manipulating, running, walking, kicking, digging, hearing, seeing, tactile). Accessing sensory activity directly could result in the ability to monitor or transmit communications by the brain (visual, auditory, or other). This will require the exploitation of new interfaces and algorithms for providing useful nonlinear transformation, pattern extraction techniques, and the ability to test these in appropriate models or systems.
> 2. Determination of necessary force and sensory feedback (positional, postural, visual, acoustic, or other) from a peripheral device or interface that will provide critical inputs required for closed loop control of a working device (robotic appendage or other peripheral control device or system). Such feedback could be received from peripheral systems or sent directly into appropriate brain regions.
> 3. New methods, processes, and instrumentation for accessing neural codes noninvasively at appropriate spatiotemporal resolution to provide closed loop control of a peripheral device. This could include both fundamental interactions of neural cells, tissue, and brain with energy profiles that could provide noninvasive access to codes (magnetics, light, or other).
> 4. New materials and device design and fabrication methods that embody compliance and elastic principles, and that capture force dynamics that integrate with neural control commands. These include the use of dynamic materials and designs into working prototypes.
> 5. Demonstrations of plasticity from the neural system and from an integrated working device or system that result in real time control under relevant conditions of force perturbation and cluttered sensory environments from which tasks must be performed (e.g., recognizing and picking up a target and manipulating it).
> 6. Biomimetic implementation of controllers (with robotics or other devices and systems) that integrate neural sensory or motor control integrated with force dynamic and sensory feedback from a working device or system. The first phase of the program may include dynamic control of simple and complex motor or sensory activity directly using neural codes integrated into a machine, device, or system. Simple actions considered include using a robotic arm or leg to sense a target, reach for it and manipulate it, throw or kick an object at a target, or recognize a sensory input and responding to it (visual, acoustic) directly through input/output brain integration. More complex activity may include issues related to force or sensory perturbation in more complex environments.
> http://www.infowars.com/print/ps/brain_machine_darpa.htm