"One of the problems is as far as anyone in our field can find, it’s not possible to find a totally safe drug that you could use," says Flower, citing the example of the Moscow theatre siege in which 150 civilians died alongside their Chechen rebel captors.
One controversial subject the report touches on is that of neuropsychology-inspired chemical weapons, discussing the fact that although the international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) bans the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, they are allowed for civil law-enforcement purposes. "One controversial subject the report touches on is that of neuropsychology-inspired chemical weapons." Control studies showed it can improve the rate at which things are learnt, and possibly result in better memory formation. "It could also help you focus when you have a lot of information to process, like being a fighter pilot in a particularly tense situation when you’re trying to get a missile lock on a target while the aircraft and radio are bombarding you with information and you have to communicate back."Īnother approach that could improve the way the brain works is known as trans-cranial electrical stimulation where electrodes attached to a 9V battery are clamped to the head. "It could help when flying a long mission where you may become fatigued and your attention begins to drift off," says Flower. Among these, drugs developed to relieve the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children, such as Ritalin, have shown great promise on unaffected adults who want to focus their attention on a specific task. The report also examines evidence that certain drugs can improve the performance of personnel performing certain military tasks. "You would probably have a much better appreciation of an incoming threat and fire off a couple of missiles without having to consciously think." Drugs to stimulate troops and disable enemies "If you couple that with your subconscious mind being much faster at dealing with information you can see a situation sometime in the future where you’re not thinking about flying the aircraft, but your subconscious is doing it without interfering in any way," says Flower. The obvious application for the military is mind-controlled weaponry and remotely-piloted aircraft, which could make operation and reactions far faster. Technologies such as the BrainGate implant have already shown that machinery can be controlled with the mind alone, and games manufacturers have already brought out low-cost helmet controllers than enable wearers to play by mind power alone. Situational awareness solutions allow soldiers to make effective use of varied information in a battlefield context. Solutions for situational awareness – battlefield innovations "Wearing a helmet like a hairnet can pick up a spike in brain activity which you can correlate to differences identified between two images, even if they were flashed up too quickly to process consciously." "It has been discovered that when you show the brain different images, it spots the differences between them even though they may not reach conscious awareness," says Flower. "If they could be subjected to imaging during assessment you could identify who has good risk-taking behaviour, strategy and planning ability, or 3D analytical skills." Brain scanning for target identificationīrain scanning could also speed up and improve target recognition or identify changes in surveillance satellite images by recognising subconscious objective identification rather than an operator having to process and actively react. "At the moment it’s very much a case of taking people on and subjecting them to high-stress exercises and choosing the ones who make it," says Flower. One of its applications could be to screen potential recruits for a specific role, for example to see if they are temperamentally suited to be a commander, pilot or diver. "We relied on what was publicly available, and while the US is extremely open about what its military does, the UK is not so open, and countries like Russia and China are a complete cipher."Ī key advance in neuroscience has been improvements in real-time neuro-imaging, which can indicate in great detail which parts of the brain "light up" when undertaking certain activities. "The people we were in contact with there were the horizon scanning team whose job it is to look out for potential new applications of research," Flower said. "A key advance in neuroscience has been improvements in real-time neuro-imaging, which can indicate in great detail which parts of the brain ‘light up’ when undertaking certain activities."
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