Neurotelepathy: rise of the mind-reading machines
BBC Focus magazine, September 2015
. . . but recently, ‘mind reading’ by brain imaging has taken some big steps into the real world.
German and US researchers recently produced speech that was communicated by a patient undergoing brain surgery. The words in the recording were translated from a readout of the electrical patterns generated in the patient’s brain.
This brain-to-text study is the latest to demonstrate that neuro-telepathy—knowing what a person is experiencing by interpreting their brain activity—is a reality, even if it is still relatively crude. Last year, a group of Yale researchers produced digital reconstructions of faces that were being viewed by people in an fMRI scanner. Again, the source of the images was the pattern of activity detected in the viewers’ brains. The published results suggest the reconstructed faces are as recognizable, or more so, than traditional photo-fits.
Professor Marvin Chun, who ran the study in his lab at Yale, says it has finally given him an answer to the question so often asked by strangers when they learn he is a psychologist: “They want to know if I can read their mind,’ he says. “Now I have an answer. Yes. If I can get them in a scanner, I can.”
UW team links two human brains for question-and-answer experiment
UW Today, September 23, 2015
Imagine a question-and-answer game played by two people who are not in the same place and not talking to each other. Round after round, one player asks a series of questions and accurately guesses the object the other is thinking about.
Sci-fi? Mind-reading superpowers? Not quite.
University of Washington researchers recently used a direct brain-to-brain connection to enable pairs of participants to play a question-and-answer game by transmitting signals from one brain to the other over the Internet. “This is the most complex brain-to-brain experiment, I think, that’s been done to date in humans,” said lead author Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor of psychology and a researcher at UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
The study builds on the UW team’s initial experiment in 2013, when it was the first to demonstrate a direct brain-to-brain connection between humans. In the 2013 experiment, the UW team used noninvasive technology to send a person’s brain signals over the Internet to control the hand motions of another person.
Sensors and the Internet of Things
In MindWar I present several instances in which strongholds controlled by the bad guys are protected by sensor arrays, and this is something that is already quite possible. For example, according to an article in Information Week, technology is being developed for the Defense and Homeland Security departments, “that could use hundreds of tiny, wireless sensors packed with computing power to help secure U.S. borders, bridges, power plants, and ships by detecting suspicious movements or dangerous cargo and radioing warnings back to a command center.” (from a 2015 article entitled, “Sensors Everywhere: A bucket brigade of tiny, wirelessly networked sensors someday may be able to track anything, anytime, anywhere.”)
In general, the rise of ubiquitous and ever-cheaper microsensors and microcameras described in the novel is real, and coming faster than you might imagine. For many years now these MEMS—which stands for Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems—have seen a staggering rate of growth, and there is no end in sight. Microsensors have been developed to detect, among other things, temperature, pressure, motion, chemicals, gas concentration, the electromagnetic spectrum (light, microwave, infrared, radio, and so on), and radiation.
The Internet of Things envisions a world in which everything is “smart.” Every tennis racquet, article of clothing, rug, appliance, and more, all armed with tiny sensors connected to the Web, generating data and helping to make our lives a little easier.
Cities themselves can be made smart. Imagine a day when every car, street, and traffic light talks to each other, allowing stoplights and travel routes to be adjusted second by second to optimize traffic flow.
When the Web was in its infancy, it was impossible to imagine just how profoundly this technology would reshape society and change our lives. I believe the same will be true of the Internet of Things. No matter how imaginative and forward thinking we believe we are being in predicting its impact, I’m confident that we aren’t even scratching the surface.
Drone catching drones
I spent more time than I want to admit researching different ways to catch a falling drone, but the method I finally landed on is about to become a reality. I’ve pasted an excerpt from an article entitled, “Drone catcher: 'robotic falcon' can capture, retrieve renegade drones” from Science News, January 8, 2016.
Mo Rastgaar, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University, and his team have developed a drone catcher that can pursue and capture rogue drones that might threaten military installations, air traffic, sporting events, and even the White House—as startled Secret Service officers discovered when one crash-landed on the White House lawn last January.
It’s a simple system: a launcher shoots a big net attached to a large drone by a string. After an intruding drone is spotted, the drone catcher takes up the chase and fires the net at it from a distance of up to 40 feet (perhaps more spider than falcon). Because the net is so big and can be deployed so quickly, it can overwhelm even the fastest, most maneuverable small drone, the engineers claim.
Once trapped, the net swings down below the drone catcher, which ferries its cargo to a safe location. The system can be autonomous, controlled by a ground-based human pilot, or a combination of the two.
“If the threat is a drone, you really don’t want to shoot it down — it might contain explosives and blow up,” says Rastgaar. “What you want to do is catch it and get it out of there.”
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai is an extraordinary young woman and I hope my admiration for her courage and inspirational message was able to shine through in the novel. Everything I wrote about her is accurate (except the part about her speaking to a stadium full of little girls at USD in the year two thousand twenty something—I’m not sure that’s been scheduled quite yet).
For narrative purposes, I chose to briefly use Malala as a point-of-view character, and have her actually deliver a few minutes of a speech before getting interrupted by the president. This presented me with the challenge of trying to imagine what the real Malala might say during a fictionalized future address. To help me get a feel for this, I read the lecture she gave during her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. In the end, I decided that rather than putting my own fictionalized words into the mouth of such a special young woman, it would be best to simply borrow an excerpt from her actual speech.
Below I have excerpted a few additional sections of this speech, given before the Nobel Prize committee on December 10, 2014, just to give you more of a flavor.
Bismillah hir rahman ir rahim. In the name of God, the most merciful, the most beneficent.
Your Majesties, Your royal highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Dear sisters and brothers, today is a day of great happiness for me. I am humbled that the Nobel Committee has selected me for this precious award.
. . . Thank you to my father for not clipping my wings and for letting me fly. Thank you to my mother for inspiring me to be patient and to always speak the truth—which we strongly believe is the true message of Islam.
Dear brothers and sisters, I was named after the inspirational Malalai of Maiwand who is the Pashtun Joan of Arc. The word Malala means grief stricken, “sad”, but in order to lend some happiness to it, my grandfather would always call me “Malala—The happiest girl in the world,” and today I am very happy that we are together fighting for an important cause.
This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless childre
n who want change.
I am here to stand up for their rights, to raise their voice.
. . . As far as I know, I am just a committed and even stubborn person who wants to see every child getting quality education, who wants to see women having equal rights and who wants peace in every corner of the world.
Education is one of the blessings of life—and one of its necessities. That has been my experience during the 17 years of my life.
. . . When I was in Swat, which was a place of tourism and beauty, suddenly changed into a place of terrorism. I was just ten when more than 400 schools were destroyed. Women were flogged. People were killed. And our beautiful dreams turned into nightmares.
Education went from being a right to being a crime. Girls were stopped from going to school.
When my world suddenly changed, my priorities changed too. I had two options. One was to remain silent and wait to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed.
I chose the second one. I decided to speak up.
We could not just stand by and see those injustices of the terrorists denying our rights, ruthlessly killing people and misusing the name of Islam.
The terrorists tried to stop us and attacked me and my friends who are here today, on our school bus in 2012, but neither their ideas nor their bullets could win.
We survived. And since that day, our voices have grown louder and louder.
I tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not.
It is the story of many girls.
. . .
Amnesty International report on ISIS’s ethnic cleansing
Early on in the novel, Lucas tells his father about a report he read from Amnesty International on the roundup and murder of large numbers of innocents by ISIS. I based this short scene on a report I found in my research, which was written many years prior to the events in MindWar. Still for anyone interested, here is an excerpt from a September 2, 2014 article in the Daily Beast entitled, “Amnesty Report: ISIS Committing Ethnic Cleansing on an Historic Scale.”
An ISIS fighter approached a Christian woman two weeks ago and lifted the 3-year-old child from her arms. Little Kristina wailed as she was taken out of sight of her mother; she has not been seen since.
This heartless crime, carried out in northern Iraq, is just the latest act in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing which is being carried out on an historic scale by the so-called Islamic State, according to a report by Amnesty International.
The human rights organization says thousands of women and children have been abducted, while men and boys over the age of 12 have been massacred, in a calculated campaign to drive non-Muslims out of the area. “It’s a clear-cut case of ethnic cleansing,” Donatella Rovera, author of the Amnesty report, told The Daily Beast. “I can see it happening in front of my eyes very quickly.”
Amnesty has spoken to hundreds of survivors some of whom watched family members and neighbors lined up along the edge of mass graves and shot dead, execution-style. In two of the killings, detailed in the report, up to 90 civilians were shot in the back after being separated from their wives and children and made to kneel before their killers.
Those criminals took their killing spree to tiny Kocho just south of Sinjar on August 15. A group of Yazidi had been trapped by fighting in the village, which has a population of 1,200. ISIS fighters told the residents to gather at the local high school where they took their phones, jewelry and cash. They were separated into groups of men, women, and children. The men were packed into vehicles, taken out a short distance and shot.
University of San Diego
USD is a real college, of course, and one only twenty miles away from my home. In fact, my daughter just graduated from this school (and my wife before her), so I know it well. The architecture and feel of the campus truly is magnificent, and I’ve been inside the stadium to root on the football team on more than one occasion. What I wrote about USD in MindWar is accurate, except that the university doesn’t host six thousand little girls each summer.
Just weeks before this novel was due to be released, my wife and I attended Homecoming at USD, where we not only got to watch a big win by the USD Toreros football team (where I couldn’t help but look up to make sure no drones were flying overhead), but also had the chance to see the women’s volleyball team in action (ranked number five in the nation, with wins over UCLA and Stanford).
While we were there, my wife and I randomly happened to run into the president of the university, James Harris, and his wife Mary. After I introduced myself, I couldn’t help but mention that I was a novelist and had included the university, and a fictitious president, in my latest offering. We chatted for several minutes, and they were very nice people, who expressed interest in reading MindWar.
This caused me to wince just a bit, and I felt the need to reveal just how USD appeared in the novel, as the target of a horrendous terror attack. I immediately felt the need to explain that the attack had failed, and that no one was hurt, even at the risk of providing a spoiler. They took it quite well, and were even amenable to having our chance encounter included at the end of this note.
Salt Lake City
My son is finishing up college, but was living in the Salt Lake City area during the summer of 2016, working as a summer intern, when I started writing MindWar. I had never been to this region before, but after paying my son a visit, I have to say I fell in love with it. Mountains with white caps everywhere. Streams and woods and spectacular rock formations seemingly without limit. A city and surroundings that I found to be clean, well kept, and thriving.
When I returned home and needed a place to locate the most secret fictional organization in America, I decided the Salt Lake City region would be ideal.
About the Author and List of Books
Douglas E. Richards is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of WIRED and numerous other novels (see list below). A former biotech executive, Richards earned a BS in microbiology from the Ohio State University, a master's degree in genetic engineering from the University of Wisconsin (where he engineered mutant viruses now named after him), and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
In recognition of his work, Richards was selected to be a "special guest" at San Diego Comic-Con International, along with such icons as Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury. His essays have been featured in National Geographic, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Earth & Sky, Today's Parent, and many others.
The author has two children and currently lives with his wife and two dogs in San Diego, California.
You can friend Richards on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author, visit his website at douglaserichards.com, and write to him at [email protected]
Near Future Science Fiction Thrillers by Douglas E. Richards
WIRED (Wired 1)
AMPED (Wired 2)
MIND'S EYE (Nick Hall 1)
BRAINWEB (Nick Hall 2)
MIND WAR (Nick Hall 3)
QUANTUM LENS
SPLIT SECOND
GAME CHANGER
Kids Science Fiction Thrillers (9 and up, enjoyed by kids and adults alike)
TRAPPED (Prometheus Project 1)
CAPTURED (Prometheus Project 2)
STRANDED (Prometheus Project 3)
OUT OF THIS WORLD
THE DEVIL'S SWORD
Table of Contents
PART 1Victor
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART 2Trojan Horse Taskforce
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
PART 3Lucas
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
PART 4Troy Browning
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
PART 5Dennis Sargent
39
40
41
42
PART 6Craig Bostic
43
44
45
46
47
48
PART 7Victor
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
PART 8Troy Browning
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
PART 9THT
69
MindWar (Nick Hall Book 3) Page 39
