Staff Sgt. Philip Mendoza and his military working dog, Rico, wearing "doggles," during training aboard a helicopter at Joint Base Balad, Iraq.
Cry havoc, Shakespeare wrote, and let slip the dogs of war. The U.S. military has taken the Bard's words to heart, but with a new, high-tech way of finding the very best dogs for military operations.
DARPA, the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is planning to use functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) to scan the brains of puppies. Those that show a lot of neural activity in the ventral caudate — a brain region associated with positive rewards — will be selected for training, Wired reports.
By selecting those pups, the military hopes their enhanced reward impulses will make it easier, faster and cheaper to train the dogs to carry out complex tasks. "Belly rubs won’t cut it anymore," said Wired.
DARPA, the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is planning to use functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) to scan the brains of puppies. Those that show a lot of neural activity in the ventral caudate — a brain region associated with positive rewards — will be selected for training, Wired reports.
By selecting those pups, the military hopes their enhanced reward impulses will make it easier, faster and cheaper to train the dogs to carry out complex tasks. "Belly rubs won’t cut it anymore," said Wired.
For the rest of the story: http://www.livescience.com/26708-military-dogs-brain-scans.html
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