US says the next war will be all in our minds

Jedi mind tricks

~~~ These are not the terrorists you're looking for.

Typical US

Sorry but the US gov/military has failed to predict it so far what right to they have to go predicting the future war method.

Typical...

Harsh Realm

Sounds like Chris Carter's Harsh Realm to me

Is anyone called Santiago involved with the project?

Be afraid, be very afraid.

The "War on Terror"

is all just in our minds anyway.

Put there by THEM.

In order to control US.

Microsoft have been doing this for years...

... how else could they get 95% of computer users worldwide to accept the shoddy bloatware they call an operating system?

McDonalds-eating Paris-tards as a prelude to a new era of Pax Americana.

I for one intend to BE one of your new psycho-pharmacological overlords . . . !

Just think - a cheap, harmless pill/gas/food additive that:

1) Convinces religious fanatics of all flavors that peace and love-thy-neighbor is actually much better than killing them in the name of (fill in the deity of choice).

2) Convinces scammers of all kinds that honesty really is the best policy (all 419ers and their buddies would instantly be out of business).

3) Convinces democrats that Obama is NOT the Messiah, and will NOT be able to cure all the ills of the universe, real or imagined, .0000001 microseconds after he is annointed, er, elected, uh appointed.

4) Convinces OPEC that it is their duty to the human race to give away the oil to anyone who needs it, need being defined by desire.

5) Beautiful women . . . free love . . . the mind boggles . . .

6) That everyone should patronize MY business and give me ALL their money because I am such a nice guy . . . Muhahahahah!!

I could get really used to this stuff - I just need to make sure to lay in a good supply of the antidote in advance. Who's with me?

I had a war all in my mind.

I won.

Dirty nukes

blown up a few miles high, EMP takes out all US gadgets including mil-apendages. All their soldiers are now just flaying around cos they can't walk unaided anymore.

Vlad has another easy invasion. And he has alot of dirty nukes.

The corps

is mother, the corps is father.

Lazy journalism

"And once you understand brain states, you’ll of course want to be able to alter them – theirs and yours of course."

Ug. Just ug. I'd be embarrassed to write that in a tweet. Not that I tweet.

I sense a great disturbance in the force...

...the last great bastion of human dignity, privacy, is about to take a final step over the precipice. "I think, therefore, you know."

Great idea

This is definitely needed. How can you possibly defend freedom if you can't control people's thoughts?

and the British?

Due to budgetary constraints, the British military are unable to keep up with the U.S R&D - so the MoD are planning to get Korea to clone Paul McKenna and send him in to battle. It's predicted that smoking rates amongst Iraqi insurgents will drop by 75%.

Still staring at goats then ?

"The report says this will be achieved with new drugs."

The 1960s are on the phone, they want their science back.

Don't the US military ever learn from _anything_ ? MKULTRA, Vietnam, ring any bells ? No ?

"O brave new world that has such people in it."

One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

@Seán

If thought was a weapon, the right to bear arms wouldn't matter much anyway.

Most of our fellow Americans are unarmed.

Deja vu

Reading this has given me an idea - by creating special 'adverts' you could undermine the rational thinking of normal people by keying into subconcious fears and so bypass reasoning skills.

These 'adverts' could be deployed by electoral candidates in the run up to 'democratic' elections so as to bypass any intellectual or carefully considered preference any member of the electorate may have to voting for the other guy. Any political weakness, ideological unpleasentness or policy vacuum that may make you unelectable can be hidden beneath a false facade of attractiveness that subverts the electorate without them understanding why their voting intentions have changed.

Thus, a well planned campaign of adverts (esp. when supported by the popular press) can unjustly win you an election without having to go to all the effort of threatening people with guns.

It's a good job they didn't know about this stuff in the US for the last couple of elections - who knows who they would have ended up with as President!

Oh... hang on...

Big Brother meets Total Recall...

nuff said.

Doubleplusungood: Thoughtcrime, here we come

Orbital mind control lasers, anyone?

Has any commenter actually studied the advances in neuroimaging?

I actually have studied some recent results, and one of the things we know is how little we actually know (corny but true). Yes, methods such as diffusion tensor imaging allow better insight into the wiring of the brain, and functional MRI does let us know where activity takes place if you perform certain yasks (as do several other techniques, such as EEG and MEG). The resolutions of these techniques are really still very coarse (in the order of milimeters for fMRI, and worse for many others), and unlikely to reach into the cellular level resolution to capture real, lowest level brain states.

There are these pesky limitations physics imposes on things, but the "planners" do not want to let these get in the way of a juicy report.

Worse, thought the bulk anatomy and major wiring schemes are similar, even the details we see show large inter-individual differences, and changes in time within an individual. At finer levels of detail this gets worse. It is very likely that similar brain states in different individuals encode different infomation at a detailed level. Add to that that the brain is a chaotic system, and you will understand that it is impossible to derive information such as e.g. passwords from directly studying brain states. You might well be able to tell someone is lying from brain states, but if the subject stays silent, waterboarding is the better way to extract the information than any brain scanner.

But of course we can alter brain states at a distance already. Two common methods are:

(i) talking to people

(ii) shooting them in the head

I always prefer the former

Never mind the neuro-crap...

...wheres the frickin' lasers?

a consistent approach by the US government - how quaint

after all, the last couple of "battles" fought by the US military were also purely "in the mind".

hmmmmm new?!

Yup - I watched "Ghost in the Shell" Too - new research?

Re Typical US

Oh c'mon. The U.S. is the only one qualified to predict where the next battlefield will be.

We'll be the ones starting it. We might even pretend the rest of the world exists when we do. You'll be able to tell, we'll have an excuse first.

Whatever it takes to teach us americans geography.