all text below are not the entire articles linked, but excerpts:
Rapid Response: Navy’s Mad Scientists Seek ‘Sixth Sense’
Spencer Ackerman
March 21, 2012
The Navy says the sixth sense is the way to win wars.
Promising “new insights into intuitive decisionmaking,” the futuristic Office of Naval Research is putting together a new program to turn what it actually calls a “sixth sense” into a military advantage. “Evidence is accumulating that this capability, known as intuition or intuitive decision making,” the scientists say in a new proposal, “enables the rapid detection of patterns in ambiguous, uncertain and time restricted information contexts.” Mastering with intuition, the Navy says, should help troops with “Cyberwarfare, Unmanned System Operators, Information Analysts, Small Unit Leaders and other domains.”
The Navy doesn’t want to reserve the power of intuition for seasoned sailors. By commissioning greater study into how it works, the Office of Naval Research wants to “train non-experts to be more effective decision makers.” First, it has to create a “computational model” of how intuition works, followed by “training techniques & technologies that enhance intuitive decision making performance.”
The Navy isn’t the only one intrigued by neurology’s prospects for warfare. Years ago, Darpa sponsored a program called Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts, which sought to break down the cognitive silos between textual data, imagery, audio and other sensory information. And last year, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency sought to get the entire body involved in analyzing satellite data.
“Analytical decisions are sequential, methodical, and time consuming,” says Cmdr. Joseph Cohn, another Office of Naval Research official. “Intuitive decisions rely on a more holistic approach and take place very quickly — on the order of 100s milliseconds.” In other words, if you master intuition, it’ll be hard for an enemy to act faster than you.
Augmented Cognition (AugCog) and Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts
Pentagon Preps Mind Fields for Smarter War Stations
Noah Shachtman
03.21.07
The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking.
Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It's all part of a broader Darpa effort to radically boost the performance of American troops.
The computer learns how to use you, instead of the reverse: If a person's getting too much visual information, send him a text alert. If that person is reading too much at once, present some of the data visually -- in a chart or map.
"We began with the idea that there was too much information out there these days for anyone to comprehend," says Schmorrow. "So how can we present it in a way that people will remember? Proffitt tells me, 'And wouldn't it be even better if we could figure out what people were doing, what they were thinking, so we could present them with the right things?'" -Navy Commander/Darpa AuCog Program Commander Dylan Schmorrow and University of Virginia psychology professor Denny Proffitt
[By 2007] Darpa's involvement in Augmented Cognition program has mostly wound down. But the other military services -- as well as academic and corporate labs -- have picked up on the agency's efforts.
Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts: Even the best parsers of satellite imagery often miss the terrorist hideouts or missile silos hidden in the pictures taken from orbit. In tests, the Darpa project is improving these intelligence officers' accuracy as much as 600 percent. The secret is tapping into their unconscious minds.
this one is just a nod to Vernor Vinge's 'wearable computers':
Military Wants to Read Satellite Info by Playing Dance Dance Revolution
Spencer Ackerman
May 10, 2011
[National Geospace Intelligence Agency, NGA]
...the military’s professional interpreters of satellite data want a more efficient way of reading the intelligence they get from overhead. Fingers on keyboards are so passe. It’s time to combine exercise and surveillance.
...something’s lost by static keyboard tapping. And that something could be an enemy target, or a missile deployment or an impending natural disaster. “Our thought processes are intimately related to the parts of our body we use to accomplish a task,” the agency contends in a new plea for small businesses to change the dynamic. “Many analysts describe a reduced ability to envision themselves ‘in the image’ when they are working on workstations with digital imagery compared to searching using films.”
While keeping an analyst’s eyes focused on the screen, the “novel methods” NGA wants would, theoretically, allow an analyst to “walk” through an image on a trackpad beneath her feet.
