The Military and Dual Use Neuroscience

If there’s one thing I learned from the most recent installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, it’s this:  if you’re doing interesting research, it probably has a military application.

In the interest of spoiler avoidance, let's just call this Wayne Enterprises invention "dual-use." (http://ixpower.com/2012/07/dark-knight-rises-batman-movie-does-infant-smr-industry-no-favors/)

Dual Use Technology

The formal name for it is “dual-use technology,” and it’s difficult to find an area of research in which it’s not a relevant concern. Innovations in renewable energy may avert catastrophic global warming, but they also promise to significantly lower military fuel costs and improve the mobility of forces newly unconstrained by the logistics of fossil fuel transportation. Research into nuclear fusion foreshadows essentially inexhaustible carbon-free energy at the same time as it provides a technological foundation for fusion-triggered nuclear weapons that some believe may lower the threshold for nuclear weapons use. Even ostensibly benign anti-obesity campaigns have military implications, as suggested by a recent CBS News article ominously titled “Too Fat To Serve: Military Wages War on Obesity.”



Physics and engineering tend to be the disciplines most readily associated with high-profile military innovations, but it’s biology – and neuroscience in particular – that has increasingly captured the interest of the military research establishment. In 2006’s Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Jonathan Moreno estimates that “most of [DARPA’s][1] desired research proposals directly or indirectly involve the brain” and, in a journal article published this year, finds that the fiscal year 2011 budget contains over $350 million in military neuroscience research. A 2009 Army report entitled “Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications” similarly emphasizes the importance of neuroscientific research, declaring that “emerging neuroscience opportunities have great potential to improve soldier performance and enable the development of technologies to increase the effectiveness of soldiers on the battlefield."

Jonathan Moreno’s Mind Wars, to my knowledge the most comprehensive work on the military applications of neuroscience.  (http://scienceprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/MindWars_cover.jpg)

The military applications of neuroscience are vast, but can be divided[2] into three categories: performance enhancement and degradation, surveillance and threat assessment, and neural interface.



Performance Enhancement and Degradation

Performance and cognitive enhancement technologies are not new to the military, though they’ve certainly taken on new forms in recent years. The use of stimulants - methamphetamine in Germany and Japan, and amphetamine among the British and Americans – was widespread throughout militaries during World War 2, and the 2009 Army report includes a section on good ‘ol caffeine as a means to “to improve cognitive functioning during sustained military operations.” Recent military research has investigated new drugs, most notably ampakines[3], that attempt to combat the negative effects of sleep deprivation without incurring the abuse potential and side effects often attributed to traditional stimulants. A 2012 report on neuroscience and conflict published by the UK Royal Society cites a number of additional substances – notably, the Parkinson’s drug and dopamine precursor L-DOPA for learning enhancement, the social-behavior-modulating hormone oxytocin for unit cohesion, and anxiety-dulling beta-blockers for decision-making under stressful conditions – with apparent potential for military use. Which substances will find an ultimate military application remains, at this point, unclear. For all the well-publicized success of underground chemists in producing euphoric knockoffs of popular recreational drugs[4], however, it seems inevitable that the military’s best pharmaceutical minds will eventually develop a set of chemicals appropriate to the wide variety of tasks faced by military personnel.

This woman’s oxytocin foot tattoo inspires a certain degree of love in me, though I’m told by more studied colleagues that “looking at molecular diagrams” doesn’t constitute an effective route of drug administration (http://io9.com/5925206/10-reasons-why-oxytocin-is-the-most-amazing-molecule-in-the-world)

Military interest in performance enhancement extends well beyond chemicals. “Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications” recommends medium-term field deployment of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a form of direct electrical brain stimulation that has been associated with memory enhancement. The 2009 DARPA Strategic Plan references a DARPA program, intended for intelligence analysts[5], that aims to develop a neuroimaging system capable of detecting visual information below the level of conscious apprehension. The same strategic plan cites applications for neuroimaging in prescreening potential recruits and in expertise development for high-skill activities such as marksmanship and language acquisition.



In addition to the performance enhancement of its own personnel, the military stands to benefit from the performance degradation of the enemy. Techniques for achieving this goal, which might be categorized broadly as “chemical incapacitation,” have applications in crowd control, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and direct warfighting[6]. Incapacitating substances include opiates, notably utilized by Russia during the Moscow Theater hostage crisis for purposes of mass sedation, as well as other agents with established or theoretical sedating properties such as benzodiazepines, alpha-2 adrenoreceptor agonists, and orexin antagonists[7]. The U.S. military has also conducted research into the somewhat more science-fiction suggestive (and, depending on your political preferences, substantially more sinister sounding[8]) “directed energy weapons,” concentrated beams of small particles or electromagnetic radiation with the ability to cause cognitive impairment as well as physical incapacitation.



Surveillance and Threat Assessment

An EEG device marketed as the Veritas TruthWave helmet has received a fair bit of media coverage over the past several months for its supposed “mind-reading” properties. Attached to the head of a suspicious individual, TruthWave uses EEG to determine if a subject recognizes a given suspicious visual stimulus[9]. If the suspect responds with a pattern of brain activity known as a “P300 signal,” recognition – and therefore, it is thought, guilt – can be inferred. The CEO of Veritas Scientific, Eric Elbot, has been about as ominous as any person could realistically be about a product they hope to sell, telling the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that “The last realm of privacy is your mind… This will invade that.” Veritas’ research is funded by the U.S. military, and Elbot claims that a similar Veritas product has already been deployed in a border control context.

Veritas Scientific, the company behind theTruthWave helmet (http://www.veritasscientific.com/)

Along similar lines, a company called No Lie MRI has marketed fMRI truth detection technology to the Department of Defense. If you’re a loyal reader of the Neuroethics Blog, this likely won’t strike you as too surprising: the accuracy and usability of fMRI for lie detection have been discussed extensively here in the past. While fMRI has demonstrated impressive lie-detection capabilities in some studies, Neuroethics blogger David Nicholson points out that the current generation of fMRI machines also “take up an entire room and… sound like a dishwasher powered by the souls of unborn babies,” a fact which likely limits their usability in a field context. TruthWave, which neither takes up an entire room nor (to my knowledge) sounds anything like unborn children, may go some way towards ameliorating these limitations.



Neural Interface

Of all the neuroscience technologies currently under investigation by the military, it is neural interface that may produce the most far-ranging implications. Civilian researchers have made remarkable strides in direct neurological control of limbs and other objects, including the successful neural control of prosthetic robotic arms in both primates and humans. Neural interface technology has clear short-term applications in producing high-quality prosthetics for injured servicemembers, to the point where the website for DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program suggests that “servicemembers with arm loss may one day have the option of choosing to return to duty.”

The guy on the left looks amused out of his mind. (http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=62114)

In the medium-to-long term, it is conceivable that neural interface systems may revolutionize warfare in its entirety. The UK Royal Society report suggests a number of applications that appear at first glance to border on science fiction: imagine, for instance, remote-operated and brain-controlled vehicles for operations in enemy territory, neutrally-interfaced weapons systems that use unconscious brain data to enhance reaction times, or magnetic implants in the fingers that, when connected to the brain, allow the user to “feel” heat at a distance. In a fascinating Penn State interview, Jonathan Moreno is asked which military neuroscience technologies he feels are most “eye-opening or scary.” Dr. Moreno responds that neural interface technologies enabling what is “essentially a robot army… with the creativity and spontaneity of a human operator” may constitute the ultimate future of warfare (though perhaps, he cautions, not in his lifetime). Such warfare would be conducted not with “boots on the ground,” but by military personnel sequestered safely in a bunker dozens or hundreds of miles away.



Concluding Remarks

A generation ago, a young, patriotic science student might have aspired to work at the Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos national laboratories, designing multi-megaton nuclear weapons to contain the Communist threat. Today, that same student – perusing a DARPA budget now easily accessible to her online – might reasonably conclude that it is neuroscience, not physics, in which the bulk of future military research opportunities lie. The implications of this paradigm shift for present-day neuroscientists are substantial, a fact which has increasingly been recognized by publications in the field (see here, here, and here). The potentially coercive use of performance enhancing substances among military service members, the consequences of EEG and fMRI for privacy, and the legal and ethical implications of next-generation chemical incapacitants are just some of topics that have been discussed extensively in this literature.



In my next post, I’ll look more comprehensively at the legal, ethical, and geopolitical implications of novel military neuroscience technologies, and discuss the role of neuroscientists in influencing possible future applications of their research.

Want to cite this post?

Gordon, R. (2012). The Military and Dual Use Neuroscience. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/08/the-military-and-dual-use-neuroscience.html





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[1] Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the federal agency responsible for research into military-relevant technology.



[2] Imperfectly, and according to a more or less arbitrary system of personal categorization.



[3] Drugs whose action is mediated, as might be expected, through the AMPA subtype of glutamate receptors.



[4] e.g. “bath salts” and synthetic cannabis, among others.



[5] Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts (NIA).



[6] Although many of these applications are either clearly or ambiguously restricted by international law.



[7] See the UK Royal Society report (http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/brain-waves/2012-02-06-BW3.pdf) for more information on these and similar incapacitating substances.



[8] Sinister sounding enough, in fact, that a Google search for “‘directed energy weapons’ conspiracy” yields 58,000 results, the first page of which contains diverse allegations involving mind control, the anti-Christ, 9/11 truth, and a Russian scheme to melt the polar ice caps.



[9] It’s not clear to me what constitutes a “suspicious visual stimulus,” but one article (http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/the-mindreading-machine/) suggests “bomb specs or Osama bin Laden’s face” as possible examples.

Who Owns My Thoughts?

I attended the excellent Neuroscience, Law, and Ethics of Lie Detection Technologies Symposium in May, and as a consequence, I have spent the last month trying to answer questions I hadn’t even thought to ask before: Who owns the thoughts in my head? Could I be compelled to submit them? Can someone else decide that keeping my ideas to myself is a violation of the law or a threat to my country? If they force me to surrender them, do I lose ownership? So this week, I thought I would share some of the things I learned as I tried to find out answers.

You can actually buy this online. I am considering getting it printed on a hat.

Two preliminary points: first, I want specify what I mean when I say “compelled” to undergo a brain scan. It seems, at least it seemed to me while sitting in the audience, that Americans are pretty afraid of having someone else read their minds without their permission, or, worse, being forced to have their minds read. This extends even to a simplistic form of mind reading such as rudimentary lie detection. I have to say, I understand this fear, and for me, it boils down to this – I would be afraid that the government could, by compelling me to undergo a brain scan, make me give up information that I didn't even know I was concealing. Lest I spin totally into conspiracy theory territory, I tried to approach the question more systematically by researching how brain scans fit into our current constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure.

Second, a note about how lie detection is currently used. Both during the lunch we had earlier in the afternoon and the symposium itself, all of the featured speakers pointed out that fMRI lie detection evidence isn’t admissible in court.[1] Laken himself has even been involved in several landmark cases. In actuality, the forensic application of lie detection technology goes far beyond courtrooms. Results from a lie detector, including those done via fMRI, can be used in a variety of situations, including, but not limited to: arbitration, civil commitment, and parole, sentencing or administrative hearings. They can also, in theory, be used by law enforcement officials in the course of an investigation as long as such procedures lead to evidence that can be used in court, and nothing is obtained illegally (more on what that means later).[2] So, fMRI technology can already be used for legal applications, both in the civil and the criminal areas (although I am leaving aside some of the more complex legal arenas, like military courts and investigations done under the PATRIOT act). 

So, let’s go back to my original question: who owns the thoughts in my head? Do I own them? What process must someone follow in order to seize them?

I started by thinking about thoughts as a product of my body. After all, don’t I own what is inside my body?  Well, it turns out, I only own it until someone takes it from me. This might happen as part of a routine medical examination, where a doctor takes a blood or urine sample for testing. I might even request that someone remove something from inside of me- a tumor, for instance. But once they have taken it, guess what? I don’t own it anymore.[3] And that is just for medical use. Legally, persons can be compelled to give up physical evidence, such as DNA, or succumb to measurements and recording, such as fingerprints. All of these fall under the Fourth Amendment, meaning as long as law enforcement attains the proper warrants, they can gather physical evidence- even if that evidence is part of your body.

But thoughts are different- or, at least, they probably are. As both Paul Wolpe and Hank Greely emphasized during the symposium, lie detection technology, even technology measured through fMRI, is likely going to be considered testimony and not physical evidence. That is, it would be subject to the rules of the Fifth Amendment and not the Fourth.[4] The Fifth Amendment, for anyone who hasn’t spent a ridiculous amount of his or her life watching Law & Order, is the rule that says you can refuse to testify if the testimony you give would incriminate you. Since about the mid 1960s, physical evidence has been exempt from the Fifth Amendment, meaning you can be forced to surrender physical evidence (or, for example, try on a glove or clothing in front of a jury) even if that evidence would incriminate you. 

To paraphrase Nita Farahany, the Fifth Amendment covers what comes out of your mouth,

as long as what comes out is words and not saliva.

Okay, that’s all well and good - there are people considering how and when someone can scan my brain in the event that I am charged with a crime. But what about accidental discovery? What if, while being scanned about whether or not I ran that stop sign over on Clairemont Avenue last week (for the record, I absolutely did not), I happen to let slip that I’ve discovered the secret to safe, efficient nuclear power? (I also haven’t done that, just to be clear.) Does the person questioning me now own that statement too? Could they compel me to release it to the government? Or, worse yet, could they claim it as their own?

There are already laws and procedures in place for what happens if, in the course of the investigation of one crime, law enforcement officers find information about other criminal activity (you can, for example, give a witness immunity in order to convince them to testify.) But my right to protect my knowledge about nuclear power is another matter entirely. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that questions about brain images and ideas that only exist in someone’s head (i.e., haven’t been written down yet) get into a fair amount of copyright, trademark and patent law… and my head already hurts.

I know those feels, man.

Luckily for me and my aching head, legal scholar Nita Farahany has already started investigating these questions. In “Incriminating Thoughts” she points out that emerging neurotechnology has so changed the way we  measure the mind, it justifies an entirely new system of cataloging evidence.[5] She argues for abandoning the older physical/testimony dichotomy (which I’ve starting thinking of as the Fourth/Fifth Amendment dichotomy) in favor of a spectrum of evidence which includes “identifying, automatic, memorialized, and uttered.” This would cover all the different ways a person’s thoughts could be measured or recorded during the investigation of a crime.



In a newer article titled “Searching Secrets,” set to be published sometime later this year, she applies this standard to a wider spectrum of information, including “tangible and intangible thoughts, ambitions, and expressions.”[6] In her system, investigators would be guided by the rules of intellectual property law rather than more traditional Fourth Amendment concepts of property (home, possessions, papers.) This system integrates copyright concerns into discussions of what secrets can be investigated and uncovered, by whom, and for what purpose, and would offer more protection. This is largely because it would have a wider concept of the “reasonable expectation of privacy,” the guiding principle when deciding what can and cannot be collected as evidence without a warrant.[7] This integration would also, as far as I understand, allow for a more thorough investigation into how copyright functions when it comes to un-uttered and un-written ideas.

Alright, so, that covers whether or not I can be forced to submit my mind to scrutiny, and what people can do with the thoughts they may find there. The answers are far from set in stone, but there are definitely debates going on, which puts my mind at ease (har har.)

Except...

What about the things I am thinking of doing? What if, in the course of an investigation of my thoughts (admittedly one using a much more advanced system than we have now) law enforcement agents find that I am planning to commit a pretty terrible crime?

Precrime. It Works.

This may seem like I have ventured into the realm of science fiction (when an audience member asked a similar question during the symposium, Paul Wolpe answered "What you are talking about is Minority Report.") In fact, future dangerousness has long been a concern of forensic psychiatry, and there are forms of prediction in forensic application now. Civil commitment hearings are designed to determine the likelihood that someone will cause harm in the future, that is, whether the person in question is a danger to self and others, and therefore should be locked up. But what about beyond that? What about systems designed not only to curtail the actions of dangerously ill persons, but systems which attempt to prevent crime by predicting it?



In terms of brain imaging, and certainly as far as the technology discussed at the symposium, this is a futuristic vision indeed. But that doesn't mean there aren't emerging crime prediction technologies. (Go ahead and Google "precrime" if you don't believe me.) Tune in next month, where I’ll be blogging about how, where, and why "precrime" technology is being developed.

Want to cite this post?


Cipolla, C. (2012). Who Owns My Thoughts?. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/06/who-owns-my-thoughts.html

So

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[1] For details about the use of Steven Laken’s technology in court, see David Nicholson’s blog post. For an overview of the standards for admitting scientific evidence, see Jamie Witter’s guest post.  

[2] For an overview of emerging uses for neuroimagining,  including fMRI, see Joseph R. Simpson, Neuroimaging in Forensic Psychiatry : From the Clinic to the Courtroom (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

[3] The rules of ownership governing medical tissue samples have been the subject of a lot of recent media attention, largely due to the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

[4] Sarah E. Stoller and Paul Root Wolpe, “Emerging Neurotechnologies for Lie Detection and the Fifth Amendment,” 33 Am. J.L. & Med. 359 (2007).

[5] Nita A. Farahany, “Incriminating Thoughts,” Stanford Law Review Vol. 64, 351 (2012); Available at SSRN.

[6] Nita A. Farahany, “Searching Secrets,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, (2012). Available via UChicago.edu.

[7] Basically, and I am really paraphrasing here, the key is that copyright also gives people the right not to publish something, that is, to keep it secret. Farahany uses the famous J.D. Salinger case as an example.

Neuroimaging in the Courtroom: Video by Neuroethics Creative Team

The undergraduate Neuroethics Program Creative Team embarked on making one of their first videos featuring Dr. Paul Root Wolpe.  This short 3 minute video discusses the ethical implications of using neuroimaging as evidence in the courtroom. This video is a teaser for our upcoming event on May 25th at Emory (see below for more information). 

Thanks to our Neuroethics Creative Team!

• Giacomo Waller


• Sabrina Bernstein


• Lauren Ladov

The Truth About Lies: the Neuroscience, Law, and Ethics of Lie Detection Technologies

You Can’t Handle the Truth! The Neuroscience Program, Center for Ethics Neuroethics Program, and the Scholars Program in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research (SPINR) are combining forces to hold a symposium on the intersection of neuroscience and law pertaining to the use of fMRI and other lie detection technologies in the courtroom. Drs. Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and Biosciences at Stanford Law School, Daniel Langleben, a professor of Psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania and pioneer of using fMRI to detect lies, and Steven Laken, founder, president, and CEO of Cephos; a company that markets the use of fMRI for courtroom lie detection will be providing their expertise through a series of talks. Following the talks, Emory’s Carolyn Meltzer, Chair of the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, will join the speakers answering questions from the audience during a panel discussion moderated by Julie Seaman from Emory Law School. Mark your calendars for 1pm-5pm, May 25^th, 2012 for this thought-provoking event. More information to come.

1 hot brain pic > 1k words?

Pretty pictures of brains with some parts lit up: Do they convince us that scientific results are real? Do they convince us more than text or bar graphs? McCabe and Castel ask these questions in their 2008 article "Seeing is Believing".