The Pentagon has lately taken a very active interest in telepathy research, and has started pumping millions of dollars in funding of “silent communication techniques.” The goal is to create soldiers that are able to better coordinate their actions, without having to go through the inconveniences of telecommunication devices. No matter how high-end they are, they are prone to errors, and cases in which the receiver of a message misinterpreted what the other was saying were not seldom.
Thus far, more than $4 million have been invested in telepathy-related research in the United States. Behind the new line of research is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has lately begun to be compared with the “mad science division” of the Pentagon.
Wired reports that, for the next fiscal year, the agency will receive an important sum of money for beginning investigations into the Silent Talk program. According to available information, it will “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” This basically means that the soldiers will be able to read each other's minds.
Last year, the Army also funded DARPA with an additional $4 million, for the same project. The goal is to be able to establish a communication channel between the brains of two servicemen, for example, through the use of a computer-mediated interface. Basically, it would translate a soldier's brain waves into a standard language, and then send the message to the receiver, and vice-versa. Scientifically speaking, the brain creates a sort of “pre-speech” impulse before the actual words are uttered.
DARPA's plan is to intercept those electrical signals with electroencephalogram (EEG) machines, and to convert them into standard language. The message would then be immediately forwarded to the intended recipient. The obstacles that the agency currently faces could, however, prove insurmountable. That is to say, experts involved in Silent Talk first need to make sure that all human brains encode “pre-speech” in roughly the same manner, and that the difference between individual cortices is not too great.
If they manage to find the universal key of speech in the human brain, then they could, at least in theory, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range,” according to the agency's own words.
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