Scientists can now create ‘super soldiers

‘Super soldiers

Scientists have found the part of the brain that controls “effortful” behavior and have learned to stimulate it. The result is, in tests on mice, scientists have been able to turn shy, passive beta mice into bold and aggressive alpha mice that almost always win in contests of competitive dominance and effort.

In an article published in the journal Science, researchers describe how they found that mice that won a dominance competition in a “tube test” showed activity in the portion of the brain called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which is associated with “effortful behavior” and “social dominance.” In a tube test, two mice are placed in both ends of a tube that is sized so as to not allow them to pass each other. The mice push on one another until one or the other reaches the end of the tube and exits. The mouse that pushes the most mice aside will win the dominance game. Mice whose dmPFC was quiet during the tube test always lost the tube test.

Neuroscientist Zhou Tingting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, and his colleagues learned that they could take “loser” mice and  use a brain stimulation technique that triggers neural activity in the dmPFC and those mice would then win the tube test almost every time, even against the most dominate mouse.

The researchers determined that much more than physical strength was at play in determining the winners and losers. Once they became winners, some mice continued to win even after the brain stimulations stopped.

According to The Guardian:

“We observed that not all the mice returned to their original rank,” said [Prof Hailan Hu, a neuroscientist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China]. “Some mice [did], but some of them had this newly dominant position.” The scientists described this as the “winner effect”, hinting that there may be a grain of truth in the self-help mantra “fake it ‘til you make it”.

The authors note that similar circuitry exists in the human brain, and although our own social hierarchies are less rigid they argue that similar mechanisms may be at play. The findings, they suggest, could have applications in understanding a variety of psychiatric conditions where people exhibit overly dominant behaviours, or lack motivation to compete socially.

They could have other frightening implications as well. Government spooks and the warfare complex have sought to create the perfect soldier for warfighting at least since World War II, after medicine had advanced to learn that the “weakling of the battlefield” was often attributed to fatigue caused by fear.

As Sergeant Brush Hensley told U.S. Army combat historian S.L.A. Mashall in describing what happened to him as hit the beach at Normandy on D-Day:

“I didn’t know my strength was gone until I hit the beach. I was carrying part of a machine gun. Normally I could run with it … but I found I couldn’t even walk with it. … So I crawled across the sand dragging it with me. I felt ashamed of my own weakness, but looking around I saw the others crawling and dragging the weights they normally carried.”

Revelations such as this led to the creation by the Pentagon and the CIA — and doubtless in similar agencies in other governments — of mind-control programs like DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Project MKUltra designed to control the human mind and human behavior.

Among the programs to come out of DARPA research:

• A 24/7 soldier program was created a decade ago which aimed to discern and strengthen parts of a soldier’s brain which are immune to sleep deprivation.
• DARPA’s “Revolutionizing Prosthetics” program involves developing an artificial limb which is regulated by the brain signals of the individual who is wearing it.
• The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System Project and aims at devising brain goggles which will tap into the subconscious of the wearer and help him detect threats.
• DARPA’s Blast Gauge can measure the exposure of the wearer to any explosion. This technology helps identify individuals with hidden injuries.
• DARPA has also initiated a program which will aid intelligence analysts identify interesting satellite images. Brain patterns of skilled personnel are used to train its filters.

DARPA has also worked with connecting the brains of two people so they would think as one and toward creating mind-controlled drones. If you’ve read about some type of mind-link technology in science fiction, odds are DARPA has worked on creating it.

The famous CIA mind-control program MKUltra was revealed by the Church Committee. Documents uncovered in the 1960s demonstrated that the CIA was experimenting on people — often without their knowledge — in an effort to find drugs and methods that would affect the human mind in ways that would make them obey commands or react to spontaneous signals without hesitation and forget their actions and that would alter their personalities and disable them. These are just some the nefarious mind-control experiments the CIA engaged in.

The goal of the programs was — among others — to create soldiers and secret agents who perform their tasks without thinking and without a conscience; like drones or machines.

In an article published in 2012 in the journal Plos Biology, Michael N.  Tennison, neurology professor, and  Jonathan Moreno, medical ethics professor, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare or consider the ethical implication of such work:

The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare.

If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control, then the ethical implications are immense. As Peter W. Singer has observed, “the Pentagon’s real-world record with things like the aboveground testing of atomic bombs, Agent Orange, and Gulf War syndrome certainly doesn’t inspire the greatest confidence among the first generation of soldiers involved [in human enhancement]”

And it’s not much of a stretch to conceive of a time in the near future when a chemical to activate the dmPFC will be included in the round of vaccinations given to children as part of the vaccine protocol so there will never be a shortage of war fighters. Its success at creating a population of unquestioning warriors would far surpass the pro-war propaganda coming from government and the corporate media.