Enhancing Minds -- Or Clouding Them
The Air Force’s 711th Human Performance Wing (this is the first Joel hears of them) is inviting research proposals in a six-year, $49 million neuroscience and biotechnology effort. One suggestion is to use “external stimulant technology to enable the airman to maintain focus on aerospace tasks and to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.” Another asks scientists to look into fusing “multiple human sensing modalities” to develop the “capability for Special Operations Forces to rapidly identify human-borne threats.” But the real attention getter is: “The chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.”