Updated: Friday, 02 Mar 2012, 6:43 PM EST FoxOrlando
Published : Friday, 02 Mar 2012, 8:26 AM EST FoxOrlando
TOKYO (Newscore) --
Japanese researchershave invented a speech-jamming gadget that painlessly forces people intosilence.
Kazutaka Kurihara ofthe National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and KojiTsukada of Ochanomizu University, developed a portable "SpeechJammer"gun that can silence people more than 30 meters away.
The device works byrecording its target's speech then firing their words back at them with a0.2-second delay, which affects the brain's cognitive processes and causesspeakers to stutter before silencing them completely.
Describing the devicein their research paper, Kurihara and Tsukada wrote, "In general, humanspeech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delayof a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physicaldiscomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking."
They found that thedevice works better on people who were reading aloud than engaged in"spontaneous speech" and it cannot stop people making meaninglesssounds, such as "ahhh," that are uttered over a long time period.
Kurihara and Tsukadasuggested the speech-jamming gun could be used to hush noisy speakers in publiclibraries or to silence people in group discussions who interrupt otherpeople's speeches.
"Thereare still many cases in which the negative aspects of speech become a barrierto the peaceful resolution of conflicts," the authors said.
NOTE: And to think that I wasalready sufficiently impressed with the electric rice cooker and the Walkman!!
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