The field of neuroscience has made huge breakthroughs in recent years and soon it could provide new weapons that could attack enemy forces by disabling parts of their minds, according to a report from the UK.

The report looks at how neuroscience could be used in future military conflict and the outcome is something straight out of a science fiction movie. A panel of experts from the UK's Royal Society said researchers are on the path to discover weapons that use wave beams to cause pain, and electrical brain stimulation that boosts a soldier's combat ability.

Neuroscientists have made rapid progress in mapping brain activity and manipulating its responses with stimulants. This knowledge could lead to the new weapons that can target vital regions of the brain. There is also the danger that armies around the world would attempt to improve their troops by stimulating their brains. This improvement could come at the expense of the soldiers' overall health.

"We know neuroscience research has the potential to deliver great social benefit - researchers come closer every day to finding effective treatments for diseases and disorders such as Parkinson's, depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy and addiction," said Rod Flower, a professor of biochemical pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, who led the panel.

"However, understanding of the brain and human behavior, coupled with developments in drug delivery, also highlight ways of degrading human performance that could possibly be used in new weapons."

The report pointed out that machines could be controlled directly by the human brain due to the advancements in neural interface technologies.

"This idea brings about a bit of a blur in the distinction between mind and machine, which obviously has to be addressed very carefully," he said. "If we got to the point where we could control a sophisticated machine, and the machine did something ... like committing a war crime of some sort, who would be responsible for that, you or the machine?"

Advances in neuroimaging could help military chiefs to screen recruits for abilities suited to one task. Military chiefs would be able to screen which recruits are better at detecting targets or have better decision making skills under stress.

The report also looked at new weapons that use incapacitating chemical agents. While the developments in neuroscience are moving at a rapid pace the changes these could bring to warfare are still mostly in the future giving more time for experts to assess their impact.

"We're only at the beginning of a whole stream of neuroscience applications, and that gives us a window of opportunity to weigh up the pros and cons," said Malcom Dando, a professor of international security at the University of Bradford and another of the report's authors.

The report was written by experts in neuroscience, international security, psychology and ethics. It was published on Tuesday by the UK's national academy of science.