Thomas Porter wrote: > > One of the things one has to remember when looking at all these patent > applications, and even granted patents, is that there is no requirement that > the devices described have to _work_. There are lots of patents in existance > for perpetual motion machines, antigravity devices, etc, etc. that have never > been demonstrated in practice.From the patent office page on specifications:
The specification must include a written description of the invention and of the manner and process of making and using it, and is required to be in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the technological area to which the invention pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same.Sure, the patent office makes mistakes. Most of the patents, though, are for real, working inventions. The investigators have to keep up somewhat with their field of specialty (though some people have taken exception to this lately with respect to software patents...). It also helps to consider who the patent is issued to, e.g., a patent to IBM versus a patent to a single individual.
In researching mind control you take what you can get, as public information is purposely restricted. I think the patent office is a good source.
> To the best of my knowledge there have not been any public demonstrations of an > EEG 'mind-reader' that could pickup a thought as distinct and complex as "I > like mayonnaise on my french-fries". > > There _have_ been demonstrations of devices that could pick up traces of motor > commands in the brain before the triggering of muscle movement, or scans of the > visual cortex that would tell what quadrant of the visual field someone was > looking at, and even PET scan's that could tell which of the largescale areas > of the brain was using the most nutrients at one time, but all of these are a > very far cry from being able to read thoughts.From an article titled "Thought Control," by Peter Thomas, in New Scientist, 9 March, 1996:
"Last year, at the University of Tottori, near Osaka in Japan, a team of computer scientists lead by Michio Inoue took this idea further by analysing the EEG signals that correspond to a subject concentrating on a specific word...Note that the time to guess is not really meaningful by itself (as it depends on both the computer and algorithm employed) and that significant improvements to both the signal measurements and the pattern matching algorithm are almost surely possible."The system depends on a database of EEG patterns taken from a subject concentrating on known words. To work out what the subject is thinking, the computer attempts to match their EEG signals with the patterns in the database. For the moment the computer has a vocabulary of only five words and takes 25 seconds to make its guess. In tests, Inoue claims a success rate of 80 percent, but he is working on improvements..."
Such a device need not work exclusively on EEG measurements: Any externally measured signal that is correlated to the desired "thought" could be used as part of a feature vector. Systems like speech recognition systems, whose publicly available versions have recently improved dramatically, would map these measured signals into whatever representation was defined for a "thought." For example, the output signal could be pseudo-English text produced from measurements correlated with internal speech production. [The input signal might also be processed and fed to a loudspeaker, where a human listener could try to interpret it.]
As a computer scientist, the above excerpt from New Scientist illustrates to me that the concept is sound. [I almost used it as an illustrative example in my dissertation, but chose an artificial nose example instead.] The questions become 1) what sorts of measurements can be made, 2) how can the measurements be made, e.g. by remote sensing, etc., and 3) how can these measurements best be processed to yield the desired result, here the words a person is thinking. Clearly these are interrelated questions.
So is this currently being done? At some level it definitely is, as the experiment above indicates. The question is how advanced the technology has become in secret, which is part of what we are discussing. These techniques have been studied by the CIA et al. for decades. For instance, this is from Robert Becker's The Body Electric:
"The Central Intelligence Agency funded research on electromagnetic mind control at least as early as 1960, when the notorious MKULTRA program, mostly concerned with hypnosis and psychedelic drugs, included money for adapting bioelectric sensing methods (at that time primarily the EEG) to surveillance and interrogation, as well as for finding `techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means.'"The computer power available to, say, the NSA far exceeds what we are used to dealing with. I believe their signal analysis techniques and available prior art in this field also far exceed those in the public sector. (They also have "other methods" to maintain their technical lead.)
As always in engineering, there need not be just one way of doing something, and I can speculate on various other ways for "mind reading" to occur. But the above example is quite real.
On that speculative note, an unwitting subject told he was testing remote viewing and subjected to the following experiment might make an interesting "receiver" or "interpreter" for recorded (or live) brain waves or "thoughts." This is again from Body Electric:
"As a preliminary test of the general concept, Schapitz proposed recording the brain waves induced by specific drugs, then modulating them onto a microwave beam and feeding them back into an undrugged person's brain to see if the same state of consciousness could be produced by the beam alone."