University Place  Jonathan Moreno Brain Science and the Military  October 18, 2013 UP934  cc >> So, we're here today to hear from Jonathan Moreno, who is considered by most people to be one of the foremost bioethicists in the country. Jonathan is a very, very unusual person in that he is a professor of three different fields, and because these fields are so widespread, and I think I should probably mention them to you, except I can't see anything now anymore without my glasses. The fields are medical ethics and health policy, the history and sociology of science, and philosophy. And because he is so competent in so many fields, he's one of 14 professors at Penn who are designated Integrate Knowledge Professors. These professors are university professors, and he's also a university professor. So he holds a PhD from Washington University, an honorary doctorate from Hofstra, a Benjamin Rush Medal from the College of William and Mary, and a Jean Mayer Award in Global Citizenship from one of my alma maters, Tufts University. He served, as did my son, on President Obama's transition team in 2008 and 2009. And he is a member of a number of organizations and an advisor to several federal and private institutions, including the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control, the FBI, and, switching over to the other side of the aisle, Howard Hughes, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition to all of these responsibilities, he must stay up about 25 hours a day, seven days a week because he's written 21 books, and he's published 300 papers, and he's frequently writing articles for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today. So he's just incredible. 

Anyway, one of the things that has sort of catapulted him to the attention of very many people is his work on the use of results from neuroscience by the military. So, a show of hands, how many people have seen The Bourne Legacy? Show of hands. Okay. I'll leave it until we've finished with Jonathan's lecture for you to decide what part of that screenplay was influenced by his work because he did influence the screenplay for that movie. So today what he's going to talk to us about is "Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century." He certainly is deserving to be a Kavli Foundation lecturer, and when he leaves UW Madison, he can put that on his CV because they want to build a community of people who can say we were Kavli Foundation lecturers at UW Madison, it'll be there. So, Jonathan. >> Thank you, Ron. [APPLAUSE]  Thanks, Ron, for that very, very generous introduction, and I look forward to hearing it again. So, I was here, I think, five or six years ago to give a talk in this series. The same title, but I hope it's better now. 

And apparently Ron didn't remember how bad the first one was. So he'll forgive me for that. I do have to start with this disclaimer since I'm currently senior advisor for the President's Bioethics Commission, nothing that I say, do, none of my gestures, none of my stupid jokes should be attributed to the commission. So we are in the era, as everybody in this room knows, of big neuroscience. There are all sorts of international, inter-institutional programs going on to understand more about how the brain works. I just mentioned two of these here because they're the ones that are the most government oriented. One is the one that President Obama announced in April, the Human Brain Project, the goal of which is to simulate the human brain. Sorry, this is the European project, to simulate the human brain. Apparently the Europeans have billions of dollars to spend on this project. This is in the European Union, sort of federated project. 

And then, on the right, the Obama initiative, the brain initiative to map the activity of neurons. A hundred million dollars which is less than they pay Ron Kalil a year here at the University of Wisconsin. So, not a lot, but it's a start. Somewhat following up on the tradition of sort of big physics, the bomb, big genomics, the human genome project, we're now in the era of big neuroscience. I don't have to chart for you, I think, the growth of neuroscience the last 30 years or so. There are lots of ways of measuring. You have the numbers of published papers, the upward curve in funding, the fact that we have an International Neuroethics Society, which I serve on the board. At Penn we have a Center for Neuroscience and Society. We also have at Penn a neuroscience boot camp for non-neuroscientists who want to learn about neuroscience over the summer. There's all sorts of neuroscience going on and all sorts of ways in which people are talking about and trying to communicate what's going on in the brain. 

I want to establish in this talk the fact that there's also a lot of interest in neuroscience in the national security establishment. I'll say that in a bunch of different ways, but here's one way of expressing it. These numbers come from my colleague Margaret Kosal at Georgia Tech. They're a little old now, but, still, they give the general idea. And notice that this is only cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience being the psychological side, the subjective phenomenal side of brain activity. This doesn't include all of the interests that there might be in the brain. And one problem with this subject matter is that it is not that easy to define exactly what neuroscience is. It's sort of everything from a fancy computational mathematics at one extreme, the good philosophers of mine working in philosophy departments to people who are working on more impressive, more powerful microscopes, to some of the technologies that I'll talk about in the next few minutes. We also know that there's a bit of a 9/11 effect. 

That is to say since 9/11 and the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, if you put in some key words into the web of science, you'll find that combinations of words like brainwashing, neuroscience, neurotechnology, mind control, you get, and it depends on what words you use of course, but you do tend to get a general curve upward in the number of publications that include these keywords. So, in 2004 I was asked by the Dana Foundation to write a little paper for a journal that is now, of course, only electronic. It's called Cerebrum. And they asked me what I wanted to write about, and I said, you know, I've had this idea for a while. Ideas for me often take the form of titles of books or articles I'd like to write. And I come up with what I think is a really hip title, and then I want to write something to go behind the title. It's true. So the title that I had been mulling over for a while was DARPA on Your Mind. Now, for the uninitiated, DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the Pentagon's cutting-edge science agency. And I knew from going to meetings of people in neuroscience that a number of them were supported by DARPA or by other intelligence agencies, and I also knew that nobody had really connected the dots, as it were, to see what projects these agencies were supporting that might tell us what the intelligence and national security communities were interested in with respect to the brain. 

So, I said, look, this is what I'd like to write. They said fine. They gave me a couple of weeks. I wrote it in 24 hours because you know how you're thinking about this stuff, then you sleep on it, then magic happens that the neuroscientists like Kalil know about, and you can just write it out. The president of the foundation was a man named William Safire who was a Nixon speech writer. He is known for such magic phrases as the "nattering nabobs of negativism," which I guess includes me and the academics. But he had been president of the Dana Foundation and he was also writing his own language column for the New York Times, and he asked me if I could write a book about this. And it was the easiest book contract I'd ever gotten, so I said, well, I think so. But a question that I had before I accepted the offer was, could you write a book about this? Because, after all, how much of this is classified information? Well, I Googled DARPA and neuroscience and I come up with hundreds of thousands of hits. Now, most of them weren't relevant, of course, but there were a number of them. 

This is back in 2004. Googling, of course, I know that is only known to a few high end professors at elite universities like Wisconsin, so let me explain to you that you can put these keywords in and you get all this stuff. That's what I did. So I got, for example, lists of contracts that DARPA had offered to various people, requests for applications, RFAs, and you could see by the topics what they were interested in. So I said there's something to be written here. But I was so terrified that a real science writer, which I'm not, a real science journalist would put this low hanging fruit together that I actually kept a secret for a year. In other words, my book project was more secret than the stuff that DARPA was doing with the brain, for year. No I really did. I didn't tell anybody because I really was afraid that somebody was going to pick up on this. These are some of the topics in the book. 

This is, by the way, the cover of the paperback that came out last year. My wife think that this looks like a maple syrup dispenser. [LAUGHTER] But she's a lawyer, she's not the target audience for this book. I hope you don't quite see it that way. I wish I could take credit for this high concept image, but it was really a good artist that did that. So, a lot of people want to know, what do you work on? Well, I work on neuroscience and national security. What the hell is that? I love history so those of you who may not have been around for the release of this film, I want to play this little clip from the "Manchurian Candidate." And this is sort of a little bit of the prehistory of neuroscience and national security. >> The war in Korea was over. Captain, now Major, Bennet Marco had been reassigned to Army Intelligence in Washington. It was, by and large, a pleasant assignment, except for one thing. 

Night after night, the major was plagued by the same reoccurring nightmare. >> This is Frank Sinatra's return to fame and glory.  [menacing, dramatic music]  >> [mumbling in his sleep] Stop...  >> Woman: Another modern discovery which we owe to the hydrangea concerns the influence of air drainage upon plant climate. Many years ago, when I was traveling about the country, I noticed magnificent hydrangeas on the hills where the air drainage was, um, perfect, and very poor specimens, or perhaps none at all, in the valleys. Formerly, we used to consider sheltered valleys more favorable to plants than hilltops. But the avoidance of late spring and early autumn frost enjoyed by sites with good air drainage where the cold air can drain safely away to lower levels gives the hills a decided advantage. Thus it was the hydrangeas that gave the first pointer in another modern discovery of horticultural importance. From this, it might appear that the hydrangea is a fairly simple plant, but there are more complications. The cultivation of hydrangeas was evolved from a number of varieties originally found in Japan, not all of which, of course, have the same characteristics. 

Two of them do not share the quality of producing blue flowers in mineral rich soils.  >> Allow me to introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to forgive their somewhat lackadaisical manners, but I have conditioned them, or brainwashed them, which I understand is the new American word, to believe that they are waiting out a storm in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey, where a meeting of the ladies' garden club is in progress. >> You will notice that I have told them they may smoke. I've allowed my people to have a little fun in the selection of bizarre tobacco substitutes. >> All right. So you get the general idea. The "Manchurian Candidate" comes out about 10 years after the Korean War where our prisoners of war are signing false confessions, having turned over to the other side. The question was, did the North Koreans and the Communist Chinese, we don't call them Communist anymore, I'm not sure what we should call them, we don't call them red Chinese either, it's all very confusing, the notion was that perhaps they'd come up with some dark oriental secret that was able to transform these good American boys into traitors for saying the things they were saying. One concern was that perhaps a new product of a Swiss/German chemistry lab in 1938, LSD-25, was responsible. 

And, if that's so, then we really need to learn about how to protect our people from LSD-25. After all, what if a nuclear scientist with a high security clearance in the early '50s went to a conference and then went to dinner with some seemingly trustworthy colleagues and then somebody slipped some LSD-25 into his drink? Then it could, in the words and the gentile language of the 1950s, you could make a discreet man indiscreet. So this was a security concern. By the way, it turned out that the false confessions problem had nothing to do with LSD at all. It's just the Chinese and the North Koreans were really good at using group pressure to get people to say what they wanted them to say. However, the CIA was concerned about this, so, as many of you know, the agency created a program, actually a number of programs, with code words like artichoke and bluebird, the most famous one was MK-Ultra, in which they tried to understand what the effects of LSD are on people and how they could prevent those effects, how they could defend our people against those effects. Now, in the mid-1970s when the activities of the CIA came out through commissions created by Vice President Rockefeller and Senator Frank Church of Idaho, they found that the CIA records related to MK-Ultra had been sanitized. Except that apparently they had forgotten another set of documents. Anybody who has run an academic department or had been responsible for a business, been in a big bureaucracy knows there's one thing you have to do, and you have to a paper trail for the money. So apparently the accounting documents survived, and this is one. 

This is from February, excuse me, from June 1953, signed by Sidney Gottlieb who was in charge of the MK-Ultra project. What this says, some of you may be able to read it, is this has to do with spending about $40,000 on LSD, LSD antagonists, related substances, and how are they going to spend this money. Well, essentially, what they did was they did things like going into bars and putting some LSD into people's drinks to see what happened. These were not well controlled experiments. [LAUGHTER] I think it's fair to say. The next phase of curiosity of LSD, and I think LSD is a fascinating story, was whether the military needed to be worried about LSD if somehow it got into the water supply. I'll play this for you. >> The drug is administered in a drink of water given at the start of each day's exercise. Twenty-five minutes later, the first effects of the drug became apparent. The men began to relax and to giggle. 

But this man was more seriously affected and had to be removed from the exercise. After 35 minutes, one of the radio operators had become incapable of using his set, and the efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired. [LAUGHTER] Ten minutes later, the attacking section had lost all sense of urgency. Notice the bunching and indecision as they enter a wood occupied by the enemy. Almost immediately, the section commander tried to use a map to find the location of troop headquarters, and a prisoner's escort had to have the way pointed out to him, although it was in plain sight, 700 yards away over open country. Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult, if not impossible, but the men are still capable of sustained physical effort. However, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility in spite of physical symptoms. But one hour and 10 minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds... [LAUGHTER] The troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men.  He, himself, then collapsed into laughter. 

[LAUGHTER] >> So, this is real. There were these exercises in the UK in the early '60s. I love the cut glass Oxford accent makes it even better somehow, the narrator. These videos are in the Imperial War Museum. There's a series of them. I've seen one other in this series. This one is the most amusing one. Nobody knows how this got up on YouTube about a dozen years ago, but obviously somebody spirited it out of the building. There's another one, the other one I saw that isn't so funny. That one fellow who had to be taken out of the exercise is seen walking around in the barracks surrounded by some colleagues, and he's obviously in great distress and he's saying please don't kill me, please don't kill me. 

So this is obviously not a benign experience for some of these people. By the way, Albert Hofmann, who synthesized LSD when he was messing around with ergot, the Swiss-German chemist I mentioned. He lived to 101. He died a couple of years ago, and he had tripped hundreds of times. I'm not sure what that says, though, about the health effects of LSD. And I certainly would not recommend it. But it was something that struck people as odd that a substance that you could get from ergot, because it has interesting biological qualities, how it could have these remarkable effects on people. And I think what's noteworthy is that we generally think of technologies as sort of coming out of the military and then being disseminated to the rest of society. That was true of the Internet. But this is a case in which it came out of pharma, got into the national security world, and then became the iconic drug, of course, of the counterculture. 

I know there's none of that in Madison, so I won't dwell on it. [LAUGHTER] Now, this is actually a concern for quite a while in other ways. So what I want to read to you is a segment of a 1988, skipping up now to the late '80s, a 1988 report that was done by the National Security Council, National Research Council rather, and they're worried about the mind race. And I'm just going to read you this excerpt. Again, I'm not making this up. This is from a report called Enhancing Human Performance, National Research Council, 1988. The mind race refers to the worry that the Soviets are getting ahead of us with respect to understanding how the brain works, or the mind, depending on your metaphysics. The claimed phenomena applications presented by several military officers, range from the incredible to the outrageously incredible. The anti-missile time warp, for example, is somehow supposed to deflect attack from nuclear warheads so that they will transcend time and explode among the ancient dinosaurs. Now, timeout. 

[LAUGHTER] I read those short stories by Phillip K Dick and all those cool guys in the '60s, and I know from reading those short stories that if you go back in time and just step on a butterfly, let alone destroy a dinosaur, that when you come back, everything will be different. So, obviously, they weren't reading those stories. One suggested application is a conception of the First Earth Battalion made up of warrior monks, including the use of ESP, leaving their bodies at will, levitating, psychic healing, and walking through walls. By the way, I was just in a meeting last week with I think the only surviving member of the committee, and you'll be happy to know that they really urged politely, they urged the army not to continue this project. You might have heard about it, though, because all these things in way or another get into popular culture, which, as we know, is where you really learn about the world. Here are the warrior monks. >> K-9. Scotty. >> It's... It's something cylindrical. 

It's a pencil. >> Okay. Larry.  >> This is Larry's spirit guide, Maud. I'm looking into the cupboard now, and I see... I see... a tin mug. >> Lyn?  >> It's a man sitting in a chair.  >> No, wait a minute. You said A, not K. 

You said A. >> Bravo Zulu, Lyn. Outstanding. >> So, the British author who wrote the book, "The Men Who Stare at Goats," got his idea from that report. And by the way, you can read that report on Enhancing Human Performance. It's online. Got to National Academies Press and you can read it. It's really quite interesting. I mention it because I think the history of sort of speculation and forecasting about the power of science in general but in particular of science about the brain and the mind, sometimes it gets a little out of hand. There's a whole lot of hyperbole, and I think these should give us reason to be a little careful about what we can predict. 

So as I move into sort of what's going on now, I want you to keep this history in mind. Let's be cautious about how far we think and what direction we think these things can go. So, last time when I was here, I mentioned Modafinil. Some of you know about Modafinil, a brand name Provigil. This is actually produced by a drug company in suburban Philadelphia. Modafinil has been shown at the NIMH to be able to keep you awake and alert for 60 to 80 hours, if you're a responder without any measurable loss of cognitive function. Now, this really excites my first year medical students. And, in fact, if it's gone off patent so I predict a gray market in Modafinil on campus. I know it's already around. Traditionally, pilots have used speed to stay alert, but the problem, and I won't go into detail about this, but as you can imagine, if you're a military commander, the problem of getting as much out of your fighters as you can, particularly when they're in combat situations when they might be getting four hours of sleep a night and really not very good sleep, is an ancient problem. 

The Prussians tried cocaine in the late 19th century. Everybody was trying cocaine in the late 19th century, apparently. That didn't work so well. We mostly relied in the 20th century on nicotine and caffeine and then speed. Provigil is used as a supplement, apparently, by some pilots at least. When I was here last time, Ron, I think I said for scientific reasons only I had asked my physician to prescribe me some Modafinil. It was originally prescribed, I should say, or approved by the FDA in the '80s for people with narcolepsy. But people had the idea, well, if you have an abnormal sleep pattern, maybe if you have a normal sleep pattern it can make you even more alert for a longer amount of time. So shift workers started to use it, long haul truck drivers, academics. One of my colleagues at Penn, who is a neurologist, says his prescriptions for colleagues who were flying from, say, Philadelphia to Beijing to give an academic paper and then flying back is Ambien when you get on the plane and Modafinil when you get off the plane. 

But I said at that time that I got a dozen pills or so for $148 or something, and afterwards, Ron, your student blogged about my talk and he said, "I like this guy, but he's paying way too much for his Modafinil." [LAUGHTER] Anyway, I've been waiting years to be able to tell that story. Also, in pharmaceuticals there's some evidence that Oxytocin, which is sometimes known as the cuddle drug, people know about Oxytocin. Oxytocin is produced whenever you're having a nice trusting situation. When you're in a romantic situation, supposedly you're making a whole lot of Oxytocin. It does a lot of things. Like most of our neurohormones, it does a lot of things. There's also evidence that it can be used, if it's introduced through the nasal route, it can be used to make people more generous and trusting when they're in competitive gaming situations. These are highly restricted laboratory settings. But nonetheless, it's interesting which has raised the question: could you use Oxytocin in an interrogation? When you wanted to interrogate somebody in a mythical place like Guantanamo that the next person that came into the room after you gave them a shot of Oxytocin would be the good cop. Now, minor problem with that notion is that would be a violation, I think, of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and it's not clear that simply because you're making somebody more trusting doesn't mean you're making them more gullible nor does it mean that whatever they're saying to you is accurate, which is a little problem with a lot of the people who are being interrogated that they often are saying things that they think are true that are not true, partly because they want to impress the interrogator. 

Another topic. Also in the drug area, there has been some evidence in published papers that people who have had a traumatic experience, they've been a victim of a violent crime for example, that if they're put into a two-arm study, one talk therapy and the other talk therapy plus a beta blocker like Propranolol, that they might not combine their memory of the event itself with the fear or shame, whatever the emotion is that consolidates long-term memory with an emotion in the hippocampus. The question was raised about 15 years ago whether you could also give it to war fighters prophylactically before they went into combat so that whatever they experienced in combat, they would not associate with an emotion so that it might prevent post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, this raises a very interesting moral question, if you could prevent a lifetime of PTSD, which is essentially epidemic these days in people coming back from places like Iraq and Afghanistan, if you could do that but it would mean that you would have a cohort of guilt-free soldiers, of people who had seen and perhaps had to do terrible things but didn't feel any guilt or shame or remorse or regret about it, would that be acceptable. Perhaps I'm looking at my philosophy colleague, perhaps an interesting question for a seminar on moral philosophy. Now, one of the problems with this idea, though, is that, first of all, it's not clear that Propranolol can really do that much good, work that way. Also, another neuroscientist has pointed out to me that actually what might happen is that the person would remember the emotion, would have the emotion without knowing why, which would be just the inverse of what presumably the goal would be. So now we get to some of the technology, all the non-invasive brain imaging that's going on. Functional MRI is an industry now. It's responsible for paying the salaries of many professors and graduate students and postdocs, which is a good thing. 

There's some funny stuff out there that I won't dwell on, like the so-called brain finger printer which is sort of an oxymoron of an oxymoron. But the idea is that we emit a wave, the P300 wave, before we're actually aware that we recognize something, and so somebody is making some money on this idea. I think more interesting is the work of Jack Gallant and colleagues at Berkeley. A number of you have seen this. Have you seen this? Everybody seen this? Not everybody has seen this? So, here's the set up. Jack puts the subject in the big magnet, functional MRI, he runs this video clip, that's the one on the left, and then, through a whole bunch of complicated algorithms and some really fast computers, he takes about six million images, and he tries to recreate what they are looking at. So there's been quite a bit of publicity about this. There's his recreation on the right. Now, it's a little vague. It's pretty fuzzy. 

I understand that he's now trying to do this with tens of millions of more images. So he's getting something and it will almost certainly get sharper. Some people want to know if this will work with dream images, and I understand it does not. Nonetheless, something kind of interesting here. I should tell you this, Carol Browner, former EPA director, is associated with the think tank that I hang around in Washington, Center of American Progress, and when I saw this I wrote Carol. Carol, you're at a mind reading experiment. And she wrote back to me and said, Jonathan, you have to explain that to me. So I told my undergraduates about two and a half years ago. I showed them this in a science technology seminar. I said look, this is very interesting but the neuroscientists tell me it's kind of, again, low hanging fruit. 

The visual cortex is big. It's well understood. It's a really cool kind of technical feat, but it's really not that interesting because it's the only one of our sensoria, one of our senses that we can reproduce this way. Two weeks later, and this is why it's so different teaching Plato's Republic, as I used to, from teaching neuroethics because not a lot has changed when you teach Plato's Republic, but every week something new is happening in neuroethics. So another group of people also at Berkeley, I don't know what's going on out there, published this paper in PLOS Biology. So the setup is, some of you have probably seen this, or I should say heard this, the setup is Parkinson's patient getting brain stimulation. They've got informed consent to put some other electrodes in some neural pathways that have to do with the processing of audition. You're going to hear a word and then you're going to hear two different ways in which they have reconstructed the word as heard by the patient. All right? So here it is. [INDISTINCT COMPUTERIZED WORDS]  >> Structure... 

[INDISTINCT COMPUTERIZED WORDS]  >> Doubt... [INDISTINCT COMPUTERIZED WORDS] >> Pixel... [INDISTINCT COMPUTERIZED WORDS] >> Pretty cool. Again, you know, vague. A little fuzzy. They're clearly getting something. Consonants, it turns out, are easier to get than vowels for reasons that they understand that I don't. Is this mind reading? I don't think so. This is a highly controlled laboratory environment. Though, when Jack Gallant talks about his work, he does say that this kind of freaks him out that he can go this far, and my guess is that neuroscience will go further in this direction. 

Most recently there was a very interesting publication about a month ago. Brain/brain interface. So basically the idea is, you probably heard about this one, this got a lot of publicity, so this is a University of Washington Seattle. There's a sender on the left who's looking at a game that involves hitting a target. He imagines moving his hand to hit the target. Very simple device. Over the Internet, then, across campus there is a receiver. Transcoded by simulation is then used to get him to think about moving his right hand, again without actually moving it, and he hits the target. Pretty cool demonstration. There's lots of this going on. 

We're able to, now there's memory implantation, there's so-called memory eraser. The technology is moving along pretty quickly. Here's kind of a silly project that DARPA sponsored at my former medical school, Downstate Medical School, where I used to teach in Brooklyn. >> Dr. John Chapin has been exploring the minds of rats for more than 20 years. The combination of all this research is a unique interface between animal and machine.  The remote control rat... >> If you teach at hospitals in Brooklyn, you see this all the time. >> What we've been doing is actually guiding him wirelessly by sending signals from a laptop computer to his brain.  And we also have a camera on his backpack, so that we can see the world from the way the rat sees it.  >> It's really not the way the rat sees it. 

It's a rat's eye view. >> Chapin is gaining control over the rat's decisions by tapping directly into its brain. A radio signal from the computer stimulates the brain areas that are connected to the whiskers. When they stimulate the left whisker, the rat turns left. Stimulate the right, the rat turns right. It does have a choice, but if it does as asked, the rat is rewarded with a hit to the pleasure center of the brain. >> Now, that's cheating. >> He needs to get some walking. He needs to lose sme weight. Hey, you need to be doing aerobics, guy. 

>> All right, so you get the general idea. We can turn rats into robots. A Japanese television producer who was in that lab at Downstate told me that there was also a  roboprimate which has not been filmed. It's very hard to know how far up the evolutionary scale this can go, what it really means. Nonetheless, a lot is being learned about the brain through these really cool engineering experiments. Here's one for those of you who like to do things at home. This is do-it-yourself transcranial direct current stimulation, and this is a guy who blogs about using transcranial stimulation, or TDCS, and he does a puzzle and then he zaps himself. He feels he's making progress. He's getting smarter and smarter and sharper and sharper every time he does this, I guess. I think there are a number of people who are doing TDCS at home. 

I'm not sure I advise it. But it is known that these technologies do make at least a short-term difference in attitude and perception. There's one really cool experiment, I actually was talking about this earlier, that was done at MIT that will really screw up the moral philosophers. About three years ago they took a number of young men at MIT and told them that their loved one, their spouse, their partner, was about to walk over a dangerous bridge, and they asked them to assess how they felt about this. And they were able to say or write as a matter of principle you really shouldn't let a loved one go into a dangerous situation. Then they zapped them, and they were unable to reason from principle, they were unable to reason, as the philosophers would say, deontologically. They were only able to reason in a utilitarian fashion, that is to say nothing bad happens to them from walking across the bridge and that's okay. So, I've said to some of my colleagues who are utilitarian, you see, you don't need to make any philosophical arguments. You just zap them the right way, and you turn them into little utilitarians. There's a lot of this going on. 

These are not expensive devices. Thousands of dollars. They're all over the place. And they are actually going to have important purposes. People who have depression that's refractory to medication or to ECT are in clinical trials getting TMS or TDCS, and it is, I think it does seem to show some benefits for those people. The most exciting new technology is called optogenetics by colleagues at Stanford. It's a very interesting concept. Basically, it's described in the blurb on this slide, and it not only sort of controls where proteins are released but can follow them as they're released through the neural network. Here's just one example that I picked up of a mouse in two conditions, with the laser on, the light that's going into his brain on, releasing the protein, and with the light off. You can see that when the light is on, suddenly he gets very interested in the buttered popcorn. 

I presume it's salted and buttered. That's the way I like it, anyway. I don't even need the laser for that, by the way. And then, the other condition, they turn it off. It doesn't seem so interesting. I'll go over here. What is that? What's that round thing? Maybe there's something else over here. Hmm, oh, that's good. So, anyway, just published in Science a couple of months ago. So this is actually the experiment that I mentioned at MIT. 

I can tell you more about that. So, what's the upshot here? Well, first of all, a lot of international interest. The Royal Society in the UK has done a report on neuroscience and ethics, particularly focusing on the national security side. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which is the sort of informal UK de facto bioethics commission, published a report on neuroethics with a chapter on human enhancement and the military applications of neuroscience. I found this out when I was in Europe about five weeks ago. Even the Italians have got into the act. The Italian Bioethics Commission has taken the position that you shouldn't use these military enhancement technologies, but it's a pretty thin set of recommendations, I must say, and not a very impressive report. Maybe they had Berlusconi on the commission and he really didn't want to spend a lot of time on neuroscience. But now we get into some even more serious business, I think, which is how the robotics and neuroscience could merge in a very provocative way. So about, what, a year and a half ago I published a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which I said, look, people who do AI have had a certain philosophical approach all these years. 

Generally the idea is we don't know what's in the black box, we don't know how it works, but we can create conditions where we sort of know what comes out of the black box. We can kind of replicate the results of the black box. But now if we learned actually how the black box works, we can improve the way that we write the software that controls machines. And we can prove it, for example, with respect to things computers can't do. A philosopher at Berkeley a number of years ago called "What Computers Can't Do." What computers can't do is they can remember a lot, one of my colleagues in computer science at Penn said Google years ago had more memory than we have, but the software isn't as good. So robots and computers can't appreciate context. They can't make judgments, but what if they could. There's already operating in naval vessels a defensive system that is essentially autonomous. It's called the ageless missile system. And it makes decisions instantly with a human being sort of on the loop but not really pulling the trigger. 

Those are defensive systems. What about an offensive system? So, a few years ago the South Koreans bought from Samsung a robot that has very sophisticated software that's armed for bear. They are testing them, have been field testing them at the demilitarized zone for a few years. And this is the Samsung ad I'm going to show you. If you want to have one of these things in front of your house, it's probably better than the sign that says your house is protected by some alarm company. And the point of this is that at a certain point it could be very attractive to have a device that can respond quicker than a human beings can to fire a weapon in an offensive capacity. I don't want to diminish the complexity of this issue, but I nonetheless think that this is kind of an interesting video that Samsung produced to sell this thing. And they're not the only ones. I understand there's an Israeli company that is working on something like this. There's a few. 

So, if you had this guy on your front porch, you would convince me to walk past your house. But the question is, again, whether it would be ever politically or morally acceptable to have a device make its own decision of whether to fire or not. Now, the DMZ is a special case because nothing is supposed to be moving in the DMZ. If it's a rat or a dog, who cares. So there's a lot of room for error here. And it's not being used this way now, but it's simply a matter flipping a switch, I'm told by the engineers, to let it decide to fire on its own. There's still a human being in the loop, but there doesn't need to be a human being in the loop. And I also understand that the Israeli Iron Dome operates with it as an on the loop system not an out of the loop system, but, again, someday could be out of the loop. This actually has excited a big controversy, a big controversy, it's excited conversation within the war groups, so people talking to each other about whether autonomous offensive weapons would ever be acceptable. And I think, actually, you're going to see more resistance on the military side than you will see in the political side to these kinds of weapons. 

So, very briefly, if you want to read more about this, what I think is really interesting about these National Research Council reports is who sponsored them. This was sponsored by the DIA. I was on the committee for this one. The National Research Council published this report in 2009, sponsored by the army on army opportunities in neuroscience. I just want to point out to you that in-vehicle or in-helmet transcranial stimulation is one of the technologies that they think might be useful for soldiers to kind of, there's a sensor on a soldier and maybe he's driving a vehicle and we can tell that he or she is kind of getting a little sleepy. We can give them a little zap and refine their attention for the moment. This is kind of a stupid technology, actually. This is a hand-held lie detector. It fits on your finger. It's called the PCASS, and it uses the same crappy technology that the traditional lie detector uses. 

It's amazing they're still being used. They're really only used to intimidate people in forensic processes. But I'm told that some generals like this because you can teach a 19-year-old soldier how to use this in about 10 minutes. It's a lie detector. It has three lights on it. You want to guess what colors they are? [LAUGHTER] Yeah, red, yellow, and green. Apparently, according to a remark that was made at a workshop that helped organize the National Research Council in 2009, it's being used to screen locals for employment in the green zone in Baghdad. That's where our embassy is. That is apparently not the only way they're being screened. It should not be the only way they're being screened since even a lie detector in the hands of a very competent operator has about a 70% true positive rate. 

So probably not a good idea to rely too much on the PCASS. This is a committee I'm on right now. It's supposed to report out within the next few months, those of you who want to follow this. This is a committee whose name was obviously created by a committee. [LAUGHTER] I'm not responsible. The general idea here is that what we're looking at is what are the sort of low entry technologies that potential adversaries could be interested in, and that could be game changers, as the popular language is these days, game changing access technologies. And neuroscience is on the list. So this report should be out in the next few months. And, as well, under President Obama's brain initiative, the President's Commission on Bioethics has been charged with writing a report on neuroethics that I'm helping with. It should be out, I think, sometime next year. 

One last thing, just as another way of measuring that the intelligence community is interested in these questions, about five weeks ago I was asked by a publication called Jane's Intelligence Review, anybody hear of Jane's Intelligence Review? That's the go-to magazine for people in the intelligence community. They asked me to write a piece on neuroscience and national intelligence. So I said, okay, sure. So this is the piece. It will be out in a couple of weeks. Those of you who have a log-in to Jane's Intelligence review, you can get into it now. Those of you who don't, the hard copy version will be out in a couple of weeks. So the whole talk really has had not much to do with asking ethical questions. These are only a few that I wrote when I was not on Modafinil, just off the top of my head. There are a lot of questions that we could be asking about where we're going with these technologies. 

Again, I spent so much time on the history, first of all because it's fun, but also because I think it should make us more cautious about some of the wild predictions that we could make. But some of these things are going to pan out in interesting ways. Whenever I go to Europe to talk about these things, I run into people who know international law. We hardly ever talk international law in the United States. Nonetheless, there are international legal agreements that cover some of these technologies with respect to national security. There's a question whether our ethical principles are adequate to cover some of these things. Do we need, for example, a principle of cognitive liberty? Do we need a principle that anything that somebody does to you should be reversible? I think all of these are reasonable questions that I'm not going to answer today. But this is my thank you slide. I noticed when I taught philosophy, first of all, I never use PowerPoint; secondly, philosophers, maybe I'm wrong about this, Dan, I'm looking at Dan here, philosophers don't generally have thank you slides. But I noticed when I started going to science meetings, scientists have thank slides. 

Usually it's a picture of your lab. I don't have a lab, so this is the best I can do. Take a picture of my head, I don't know, of my keyboard. I'm not sure how I would do this. But these are some of the organizations that have supported my work. And I want to thank you for showing up today. [APPLAUSE]