The war inside your mind: unprotected brain battlefields and neuro-vulnerability

摘要

The 21st century featured explosive discoveries, inventions, and finely crafted technologies where the vaguely dangerous and ambiguous mix of genomics, neuroscience, nanotech, robotics, cyber, and other advanced scientific ventures leads to unknown and possibly unpleasant outcomes pose an acute dilemma. The engineered convergence of advanced technology such as cutting-edge medical technology frontiers of cognitive dynamics, decoding key neural functions, explaining brain biochemistry, and exploring excursions into neuromodulation and plasticity research make the brain a prime object of sustained scientific desire. Today it has become a covert contentious battlefield. Experts in neuromedicine, technology, societal security, and strategy must grasp that a variety of technologies that arguably enhance brain function, influence or augment intelligence, link brains with computers, and enablenon invasice access to the brain-are highly attractive. Now the grim reality is that like so many other aspects of science and technology all ostensibly benign, decent, therapeutic, and beneficial they also contain a dark, malevolent, destructive warlike side as well. Our brains are vulnerable daily within a complex electromagnetic—cyber—RF saturated environment and that vulnerability is critical to grasping our collective dilemma. Cognitive integritys is a paramount risk for our times.