Brain Warfare - An item from yesterday's Inside the Ring (Washington Times) by Bill Gertz.

The Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community are studying ways to better understand the how and why of human behavior to help war fighters deal with insurgencies such as those in Iraq, likely future conflicts and other global problems, said national security specialist John Stanton.

Mr. Stanton has written a paper to be presented at a conference in Portugal next week on the new research area called "evolutionary cognitive neuroscience," (ECN) a subject that captured his interest after he read Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus' revised Army counterinsurgency manual. The manual identifies the fact that the U.S. military needs to learn more about brain behavior relationships in networked, social environments.

Studies in the area "may produce tools that advance humanity's ability to understand and manage itself," he stated.

On the downside, Mr. Stanton warned that the ECN research could lead to the creation of "neuroweapons" that "seek to turn the speed of thought into a weapon, or programs that blur the line between human and machine."

Among the potential weapons are "non-traceable neuroweapons with viral genetic payloads" that could "be used to disrupt the brain and central nervous system."

The field could help social scientists get information from prisoners of war during interrogation and could find ways to minimize violence and ethnic conflict, and prevent or manage warfare, pandemics and poverty.