Oh yeah, they’ve finally done it. Japanese researchers have developed a technology which can make someone stop talking from 100 ft. away. For all the brow beaten boyfriends & husbands and children of overly talkative moms, this one’s for you… It’s called a speech jamming device and it looks kinda like a toy gun an 8 year old kid taped together using a remote control and a garage door opener.
Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University worked off of a widely known psychological principle that a person who is talking will stop talking if their words are echoed back to them a split second later. Call it a taste of their own medicine. You like hearing the sound of your own voice as you yammer on? Well how’s this! FWAMP! (Okay the gun itself doesn’t really make a noise).
The gun’s design is basically a microphone and a speaker that records someone’s voice and plays it back 0.2 seconds later. Remember when you were five and that younger sibling or neighbor would mimick everything you were saying just to annoy you? It’s kinda like that. After a while, you just give up and stop talking. Uses for the device include maintaining silence in public libraries (God knows we have a desperate need for that one!), truncating filibusters and “facilitating discussion” in group meetings. Is that type A blowhard with the Napoleonic complex in your office bogarting the podium again? Just blast ’em with the speech jammer so everyone gets a turn to speak!
Kurihara and Tsukara did find that the device works better when the playback time delay varies and the speaker is reading out loud as opposed to speaking spontaneously. Global implications could be scary if this gets out. It could be the only non-violent weapon governments could use to silence Occupy protests. But just think of the wonders it could do in classrooms. This device could render the need for Ritalin obsolete.
It should be noted that no humans or animals were harmed in the testing of this device.
[Sources: Tech Review, PC World]
Loading ...