US military develops way to ‘read’ brain signals

The American army is working on a way to read the thoughts of soldiers via brain signals. The technology is not intended to make a ‘mind reader’, but to help with pattern recognition, according to the army.

The system called Mission Impact Through Neurotechnology Design, or MIND for short, is being developed in collaboration with neurologists. The website of the US military explains what the system can do; for example, a recent experiment is described in which a soldier was attached to the machine, after which he was shown a number of images from different categories. The soldier was asked to focus on a category, and count how many pictures passed in the category he chose.

By measuring differences in brain activity when looking at the different pictures, it was possible to find out which category the soldier was thinking of. It took the computer about two minutes to determine that the soldier had a boat in mind. Due to its success, the makers want to further develop the MIND system; in the future, for example, eye tracking should be added. By determining what someone is looking at, thought patterns can be determined with even more precision. That’s because using the eyes also provides brain signals, which can interfere with the detection of image patterns.

Despite the fact that brain signals are being measured, there seem to be no plans to read people’s actual thoughts. The military plans to use the system for pattern recognition in images collected by security forces. By reading brain signals and letting the person only think about what is and isn’t interesting, large amounts of data can be plowed faster. That’s because the neural signals in the brain work much faster than consciousness. It is not yet clear when MIND will be ready to be used in practice.