Dr Charles Morgan on Psycho-Neurobiology and War

MWI Video: Dr. Charles Morgan on Neurobiology and War

MWI Staff | 06.15.18

Recently, Dr. Charles Morgan spoke to cadets and faculty at West Point about a range of topics, including psychology, neurobiology, and the science of humans at war.

Over the course of twenty years at Yale University and the Neurobiological Studies Unit of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dr. Morgan’s neurobiological and forensic research has established him as an international expert in post-traumatic stress disorder, eyewitness memory, and human performance under conditions of high stress. Dr. Morgan is a subject matter expert in the selection and assessment of US military special operations and special mission units. His work has provided insight into the psycho-neurobiology of resilience in elite soldiers and has contributed to the training mission of Army special programs. His work is on the cutting edge of battlefield innovations and assessments.

Watch the full video of Dr. Morgan’s remarks below.

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PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT

Army Soldier: (Introducing Dr Morgan) Today, we have Dr Charles Morgan to talk to us about neuroscience and psychology and a whole gamut of things.

Right now, he is a Professor of National Security Studies at the University of New Haven. His focus is teaching National Security Studies, Domestic and International Intelligence Analysis and issues.

Dr Morgan is developing a concentration in the human aspects, intelligence analysis and Psychological Operations arenas, that are relevant to the Intelligence Community.

He has a pretty robust background, with military folks, doing research at Sears School, helping with selection processes for Special Operations Forces, down in Fort Bragg, etc. So, without further ado, I’ll hand it over.

Dr Charles Morgan: So, what I would like to talk to you a little bit about today is something I was asked to do in 2010 and 2011. I was getting ready to leave, over at CIA, where I’d worked for a number of years.

And the Intelligence Science Board said, “Could you give us a brief on what’s in store for us in the future?”

I was like, “I don’t know. Predicting the future is really hard.” So I told my boss at the time, I said, “Well, I think the best I’ll do is make an estimate, over what I think is going to happen in the next five years,” given certain technologies that were being developed at the time – and this is a bit of an extension of that – I present it to the SSG.

And it was some information I think some people didn’t know. And I think it’s good for people to be aware of what’s going on out there.

The one thing that makes predicting a little bit of the future easier, when you look at biomedical science is that labs are working fairly systematically with overtly-stated goals.

But the really fun part was that you’re taking over somebody else’s physical body with the mind of another human. So what do you think would be the next step? You follow medical research: You say you can make a robot move. You can make a human hand move. What would you do next?

You say, “Wow, they’re getting brains connected to run things.” You have to begin to think either like doctors or like security and intelligence people, right? Can you actually send and receive sensory information, like ‘The Matrix’?

Dr [Craig] Venter’s work is, in my view the equivalent of the development of nuclear weapons, when you realize that he created life in a cell, back in 2010. I don’t know if people are familiar with his work, but this technology paired with something called CRISPR, which is like an editing software for genes, makes a number of things immediately available.

What he did is he programmed yeast cells to produce anything he wanted: They can produce perfume. They can produce petroleum. They can produce any peptide, anything we program the DNA to do and it’s in the living cell.

So in medicine, the goal in medicine now is to be able to do designer medicine and therapy. If we can design a cell to get into your body and release the right product for you, you won’t be losing half the drugs you take through your liver, when you swallow a pill and it gets digested.

These can be inserted into you through the hypospray needles, almost like Dr McCoy on Star Trek, getting the hypospray. It just blasts, now plasmids into your squamous cells. But Venter was able to do that and has the patent on the technology. But you can engineer anything.

You can engineer a engineer a thing that would only kill one person in the world.