The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is researching how computers reading brain waves may one day speed up the ways intelligence analysts detect targets in satellite images and also alert platoon leaders when soldiers are losing situational awareness.

This may sound like a scenario out of the science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a computer named Hal overrides instructions from an astronaut to take control of a spaceship. But in the Darpa experiments, the computer is just a tool that processes brain waves, of which the human being isn’t even aware, and turns them into actionable information.

Amy Kruse, the Darpa program manager for these projects, has a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Illinois. She moved to Washington after graduation and became a technical consultant to the director of Darpa. The Defense Dept.’s interest in making operational use of neuroscience proved to be a great opportunity, and she says the research efforts she is now leading would not be done anywhere else.

In a summary of her programs at the annual DarpaTech conference in 2005, Kruse spelled out the importance of the work: “The operational environment will continue to become more crowded with information, so it is clear that our war fighters must be able to manage complex situations with faster, more accurate and more concentrated cognitive capabilities. This means that issues such as cognitive overload, fatigue and decision-making under stress are fast becoming crucial factors in performance.”

The latest project Kruse has been working on is the Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts (NIA) program. This effort builds on an earlier one titled Augmentated Cognition, or AugCog. One of the leading contractors on both efforts has been Honeywell.

Under a $4-million, multiphase contract, the company has been developing what it calls the Honeywell Image Triage System (HITS) for Darpa. Bob Smith, vice president for advanced technology at Honeywell Aerospace, explains that HITS takes a satellite image and breaks it up into smaller image “chips” that can be shown to an intelligence analyst like flash cards at a rate of 5-20 images per second.

The analyst’s brain is treated as a sensor: Electrical activity it produces is recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp, the same way electroencephalography (EEG) is used in hospitals to monitor brain activity. Then, when the analyst looks at one of the images flashing by, a scalp plot shows when there is increased brain activity.

As images flash by, the analyst is asked to look for a target such as an airplane. After viewing about 50 of the smaller images (chips), he is asked if he saw an airplane—and he may answer “no.” But digital signal processing of the brain wave activity reveals that, in fact, he did see an airplane on slide 32.

“This process allows us to do triage on large amounts of visual information we get from different soruces and improve an analyst’s ability to go through a large amount of imagery,” says Smith. In fact, the analyst can do the job 5-7 times faster using the triage system than unaided. This is because the triage system picks up brain waves showing recognition of a target even before the human analyst is cognizant he has spotted it.

Smith says it is the equivalent of a person seeing something “out of the corner of his eye.”