-Caveat Lector- http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=169532 Monday, 19 March 2001 21:21 (ET) Future soldiers could get enhanced minds WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- Researchers hope to use advances in computers, communications and neuroscience to medically enhance the mental acuity of future soldiers, while connecting their body and minds to smarter machines. "Military planners are looking to science to find better ways to exploit human perception and memory," said Dr. Dennis McBride, a former naval officer and a professor in the department of psychology and engineering at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. "Thanks in part to MRIs we can actually see mental processes, or correlates of mental processes," McBride said. "That will one day help us to find ways, for example, to help information in the human brain move more quickly from short-term store to long-term store." McBride said scientists might be able to boost mental awareness, regulate mood, control anxieties and more, using custom-tailored medicines whose effect and dosage are based on genetic information and delivered by novel methods made possible through nanotechnology. Pharmaceutical companies are leading the way in developing drugs to those ends, but the most pressing challenge is avoiding side effects, he said. One key to augmenting the thinking of tomorrow's soldiers is learning more about how emotion affects decision-making, specifically learning how emotional attachments and highly stressful situations effect the brain's ability to retrieve information. McBride said the Navy has sponsored a research program, called tactical decision-making under stress, that has lead to an important understanding of the co-relationship between emotion and cognition. But real advances will occur when tomorrow's soldiers, perhaps already biologically enhanced through drugs, are seamlessly integrated with small, powerful computers. "It will likely be possible that the future soldier, for instance, will wear eyewear that allows him to see a person and instantaneously be presented with a complete dossier on who that person is," McBride said. He also described a video chip that might one day record a soldier's sensory experiences and perceptions and download it for access by other soldiers. "We have developed drugs that have proven to enhance mental acuity in animals, and we are very optimistic that they can be tailored for human use," said Dr. Dan Alkon, formerly of the National Institutes of Health and now scientific director of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute, co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and West Virginia University in Morgantown. "We have extracted mathematical principles to find and map neurological systems, then developed drugs that enhance those systems. From the perspective of warfighting, this is a great wave of the future." But many social and ethical considerations exist, as demonstrated by a publication entitled "Out of the Box and Into the Future," released by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. The publication cites a paper that highlights these worries: "Our understanding of all human social arrangements is based, ultimately, on an understanding of human nature. If that nature becomes subject to significant alteration through human artifice, then all such arrangements are thrown into doubt. Can humanity trust itself with such capabilities? Should it? How can we know before the fact?" (Reported by Technology Writer Kelly Hearn in Washington) Copyright 2001 by United Press International. 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