ARTICLE PUBLISHED BY DISSENT MAGAZINE,
Canberra. Australia
in edition No 25, Summer 2007/08
http://www.dissent.com.au/index.htm
“Carole Smith describes claims that neuroscientists are developing brain
scans that can read people’s intentions in the absence of serious discussions
about the ethical issues this raises, despite the fact that the research has
been backed by government in the UK and US.”
HACKING THE MIND
“We need a
program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is
physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be
surgically mutilated.
The
individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but
this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man
does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal
orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday
armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.
Dr José Delgado.
Director of
Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26,
Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.
The Guardian newspaper, that defender of
truth in the United Kingdom, published an article by the Science Correspondent,
Ian Sample, on 9 February 2007 entitled:
‘The Brain Scan
that can read people’s intentions’, with the sub-heading: ‘Call for ethical
debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation”.
“Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for
this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way
you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking
for writing on a wall”, the scientists were reported as saying.
At the same time,
London’s Science Museum was holding an exhibition entitled ‘Neurobotics: The
Future of Thinking’. This venue had been chosen for the launch in October 2006
of the news that human thoughts could be read using a scanner. Dr Geraint Rees’
smiling face could be seen in a photograph at the Neurobotics website[1],
under the heading “The Mind Reader”. Dr Rees is one of the scientists who have
apparently cracked the problem which has preoccupied philosophers and
scientists since before Plato: they had made entry into the conscious mind.
Such a reversal of human historical evolution, announced in such a pedestrian
fashion, makes one wonder what factors have been in play, and what omissions
made, in getting together this show, at once banal and extraordinary. The
announcement arrives as if out of a vacuum.
The neuroscientist -
modern-style hunter-gatherer of information and darling of the “Need to Know”
policies of modern government - does little to explain how he achieved this
goal of entering the conscious mind, nor does he put his work into any
historical context. Instead, we are asked in the Science Museum’s programme
notes:
How would you feel if someone could read your
innermost thoughts? Geraint Rees of UCL says he can. By using brain-imaging technology
he's beginning to decode thought and explore the difference between the
conscious and unconscious mind. But how far will it go? And shouldn’t your
thoughts remain your personal business?
If Dr Rees has decoded the mind sufficiently for such
an announcement to be made in an exhibition devoted to it, presumably somewhere
is the mind which has been, and is continuing to be, decoded. He is not merely
continuing his experiments using functional magnetic resolution scanning (fMRI)
in the way neuroscientists have been observing their subjects under scanning
devices for years, asking them to explain what they feel or think while the
scientists watch to see which area lights up, and what the cerebral flow in the
brain indicates for various brain areas. Dr Rees is decoding the mind in terms
of conscious and unconscious processes. For that, one must have accessed
consciousness itself. Whose consciousness? Where is the owner of that
consciousness – and unconsciousness? How did he/she feel? Why not ask them to tell us how it feels,
instead of asking us.
The Neurobotics
Exhibition was clearly set up to make these exciting new discoveries an
occasion for family fun, and there were lots of games for visitors to play. One
gets the distinct impression that we are being softened up for the introduction
of radical new technology which will, perhaps, make the mind a communal pool
rather than an individual possession. Information technology seeks to connect
us all to each other in as many ways as possible, but also, presumably, to
those vast data banks which allow government control not only to access all
information about our lives, but now also to our thoughts, even to our
unconscious processing. Does anyone care?
One of the most
popular exhibits was the ‘Mindball’ game, which required two players to go
literally head-to-head in a battle for brainpower, and used ‘brainpower’ alone.
Strapped up with headbands which pick up brain waves, the game uses
neurofeedback, but the person who is calm and relaxed wins the game. One
received the impression that this calmness was the spirit that the organisers
wished to reinforce, to deflect any undue public panic that might arise from
the news that private thoughts could now be read with a scanner.[2]
The ingress into the mind as a private place was primarily an event to be
enjoyed with the family on an afternoon out:
Imagine
being able to control a computer with only the power of your mind. Or read
people’s thoughts and know if they’re lying. And what if a magnetic shock to
the brain could make you more creative…but should we be able to engineer our
minds?
Think
your thoughts are private? Ever told a lie and been caught red-handed? Using
brain-scanning technology, scientists are beginning to probe our minds and tell
if we’re lying. Other scientists are decoding our desires and exploring the
difference between our conscious and unconscious mind. But can you really trust
the technology?
Other searching
questions are raised in the program notes, and more games:
Find
out if you’ve got what it takes to be a modern-day spy in this new interactive
family exhibition. After being recruited as a trainee spy, explore the skills
and abilities required by real agents and use some of the latest technologies
that help spies gather and analyse information. Later go on and discover what
it’s like to be spied upon. Uncover a secret store of prototype gadgets that
give you a glimpse into the future of spy technologies and finally use
everything you’ve learnt to escape before qualifying as a fully-fledged agent!
There were also
demonstrations of grateful paraplegics and quadriplegics showing how the gods
of science have so unselfishly liberated them from their prisons: this was the
serious Nobel Prize side of the show. But there was no-one representing Her
Majesty’s government to demonstrate how these very same devices[3]
can be used quite freely, and with relative ease, in our wireless age[4],
to conduct experiments on free-ranging civilians tracked anywhere in the world,
and using an infinitely extendable form of electrode which doesn’t require
visible contact with the scalp at all. Electrodes, like electricity, can also
take an invisible form – an electrode is a terminal of an electric source
through which electrical energy or current may flow in or out. The brain itself
is an electrical circuit. Every brain has its own unique resonating frequency.
The brain is an infinitely more sensitive receiver and transmitter than the
computer, and even in the wireless age, the comprehension of how wireless
networks operate appears not to extend to the workings of the brain. The
monotonous demonstration of scalps with electrodes attached to them, in order
to demonstrate the contained conduction of electrical charges, is a scientific
fatuity, in so far as it is intended to demonstrate comprehensively the
capability of conveying charges to the brain, or for that matter, to any nerve
in the body, as a form of invisible torture.
As Neurobotics
claims: ‘Your brain is amazing’, but the power and control over brains and nervous
systems achieved by targeting brain frequencies with radiowaves must have been
secretly amazing government scientists for many years. The problem that now
arises, at the point of readiness when so much has been achieved, is how to put
the technology into action in such a way, as it will be acceptable in the
public domain. This requires getting it through wider government and legal
bodies, and for that, it must be seen to spring from the unbiased scientific
investigations into the workings of the brain, in the best tradition of the
leading universities. It is given over to Dr Rees and his colleague, Professor
Haynes, endowed with the disclosure for weightier Guardian readers, to carry the torch for the government. Those
involved may also have noted the need to show the neuroscientist in a more
responsible light, following US neuroengineer for government sponsored Lockheed
Martin, John Norseen’s, ingenuous comment, in 2000, about his belief about the
consequences of his work in fMRI:
‘If
this research pans out’, said Norseen, ‘you can begin to manipulate what
someone is thinking even before they know it.’ And added: “The ethics don’t
concern me, but they should concern someone else.”
While the
neuroscientists report their discovery (without even so much as the specific
frequency of the light employed by this scanner/torch), issuing ethical
warnings while incongruously continuing with their mind-blowing work, the
government which sponsors them, remains absolutely mute. The present probing of people’s intentions, minds,
background thoughts, hopes and emotions[5]
is being expanded into the more complex and subtle aspects of thinking and
feeling. We have, however, next to no technical information about their
methods. The description of ‘shining a torch around the brain’ is as absurd a
report as one could read of a scientific endeavour, especially one that carries
such enormous implications for the future of mankind. What is this
announcement, with its technical obfuscation, preparing us for?
Writing in Wired[6]
contributing editor Steve Silberman points out that the lie-detection
capability of fMRI is ‘poised to transform the security system, the judicial
system, and our fundamental notions of privacy’. He quotes Cephos founder,
Steven Laken, whose company plans to market the new technology for lie
detection. Laken cites detainees held without charge at Guantanamo Bay as a
potential example. ‘If these detainees have information we haven’t been able to
extract that could prevent another 9/11, I think most Americans would agree
that we should be doing whatever it takes to extract it’. Silberman also quotes
Paul Root Wolpe, a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University
of Pennsylvania, who describes the accelerated advances in fMRI as ‘ a textbook
example of how something can be pushed forward by the convergence of basic
science, the government directing research through funding, and special
interests who desire a particular technology’. Are we to believe that with the
implied capability to scan jurors’ brains, the judiciary, the accused and the
defendant alike, influencing[7]
one at the expense of the other, that the legal implications alone of
mind-accessing scanners on university campuses, would not rouse the Minister
for Justice from his bench to say a few words about these potential mind
weapons?
So what of the
ethical debate called for by the busy scientists and the Guardian’s science reporter?[8]
Can this technology- more powerful in subverting thought itself than anything
in prior history – really be confined to deciding whether the ubiquitously
invoked terrorist has had the serious intention of blowing up the train, or
whether it was perhaps a foolish prank to make a bomb out of chapatti
flour? We can assume that the
government would certainly not give the go-ahead to the Science Museum
Exhibition, linked to Imperial College, a major government-sponsored
institution in laser-physics, if it was detrimental to surveillance programs.
It is salutary to bear in mind that government intelligence research is at
least ten years ahead of any public disclosure. It is implicit from history
that whatever affords the undetectable entry by the gatekeepers of society into
the brain and mind, will not only be sanctioned, but funded and employed by the
State, more specifically by trained operatives in the security forces, given
powers over defenceless citizens, and unaccountable to them.[9]
The actual
technology which is now said to be honing the technique ‘to distinguish between
passing thoughts and genuine intentions’ is described by Professor John-Dylan
Haynes in the Guardian in the most
disarmingly untechnical language which must surely not have been intended to
enlighten.
The Guardian piece ran as follows:
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed
a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and
read their intentions before they act.
The research breaks controversial new ground in
scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts,
and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used
in the future.
‘Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for
this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way
you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking
for writing on a wall,’ said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with
colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.
We know therefore that they are using light, but fMRI
has been used for many years to attempt the unravelling of neuronal activity,
and while there have been many efforts to record conscious and unconscious
processes, with particular emphasis on the visual cortex, there has been no
progress into consciousness itself. We can be sure that we are not being told
the real story.
Just as rats and chimpanzees have been used to
demonstrate findings from remote experiments on humans, electrode implants used
on cockroaches to remotely control them, lasers used to steer fruit-flies[10]
[11],
and worms engineered so that their nerves and muscles can be controlled with
pinpricks of light[12],
the information and techniques that have been ruthlessly forged using
opportunistic onslaughts on defenceless humans as guinea pigs - used for myriad
purposes from creating 3D haptic gloves in computer games to creating
artificial intelligence to send visual
processing into outer space - require appropriate replication for peer group
approval and to meet ethical demands for scientific and public probity.
The use of light to peer into the brain is almost
certainly that of terahertz, which occurs in the wavelengths which lie between
30mm and 1mm of the electromagnetic spectrum. Terahertz
has the ability to penetrate deep into organic materials, without (it is said)
the damage associated with ionising radiation such as x-rays. It can
distinguish between materials with varying water content – for example fat
versus lean meat. These properties lend themselves to applications in process
and quality control as well as biomedical imaging. Terahertz can penetrate
bricks, and also human skulls. Other applications can be learnt from the major
developer of terahertz in the UK, Teraview, which is in Cambridge, and
partially owned by Toshiba.
Efforts to alert human rights’ groups about the loss
of the mind as a place to call your own, have met with little discernible
reaction, in spite of reports about over decades of the dangers of remote
manipulation using technology to access the mind[13],
Dr Nick Begich’s book, Controlling the
human mind[14], being an important recent
contribution. A different approach did in fact, elicit a response. When
informed of the use of terahertz at Heathrow and Luton airports in the UK to
scan passengers, the news that passengers would be revealed naked by a machine
which looked directly through their clothes produced a small, but highly
indignant, article in the spring 2007 edition of the leading human rights
organisation, Liberty.[15]
If the reading of the mind met with no protest, seeing through one’s clothes
certainly did. It seems humans’ assumption of the mind as a private place has
been so secured by evolution that it will take a sustained battle to convince
the public that, through events of which we are not yet fully informed, such
former innocence has been lost.
Trained light, targeted atomic spectroscopy, the use
of powerful magnets to absorb moisture from human tissues, the transfer of
radiative energy – these have replaced the microwave harassment which was used
to transmit auditory messages directly into the hearing.[16]
With the discovery of light to disentangle thousands of neurons and encode
signals from the complex circuitry of the brain, present programs will not even
present the symptoms which simulated schizoid states. Medically, even if
terahertz does not ionise, we do not yet know how the sustained application of
intense light will affect the delicate workings of the brain and how cells
might be damaged, dehydrated, stretched, obliterated.
This year, 2007, has also brought the news that
terahertz lasers small enough to incorporate into portable devices had been
developed.[17]
Sandia National Laboratories in the US in
collaboration with MIT have produced a transmitter-receiver (transceiver) that
enables a number of applications. In addition to scanning for explosives, we
may also assume their integration into hand-held communication systems. ‘These
semiconductor devices have output powers which previously could only be obtained
by molecular gas lasers occupying cubic meters and weighing more than 100kg, or
free electron lasers weighing tons and occupying buildings.’ As far back as
1996 the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board predicted that the development
of electromagnetic energy sources would ‘open the door for the development of
some novel capabilities that can be used in armed conflict, in
terrorist/hostage situations, and in training’ and ‘new weapons that offer the
opportunity of control of an adversary … can be developed around this concept’.[18]
The surveillance technology of today is the
surveillance of the human mind and, through access to the brain and nervous
system, the control of behaviour and the body’s functions. The messaging of
auditory hallucinations has given way to silent techniques of influencing and
implanting thoughts. The development of the terahertz technologies has
illuminated the workings of the brain, facilitated the capture of emitted
photons which are derived from the visual cortex which processes picture
formation in the brain, and enabled the microelectronic receiver which has, in
turn, been developed by growing unique semi-conductor crystals. In this way,
the technology is now in place for the detection and reading of spectral
‘signatures’ of gases. All humans emit gases. Humans, like explosives, emit
their own spectral signature in the form of a gas. With the reading of the
brain’s electrical frequency, and of the spectral gas signature, the systems
have been established for the control of populations – and with the necessary
technology integrated into a cell-phone.
‘We are very optimistic about working in the terahertz
electromagnetic spectrum,’ says the principal investigator of the Terahertz
Microelectronics Transceiver at Sandia: ‘This is an unexplored area, and a lot
of science can come out of it. We are just beginning to scratch the surface of
what THz can do to improve national security’.
Carole Smith was born and educated in Australia,
where she gained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University. She trained as
a psychoanalyst in London where she has had a private practice. In recent years
she has been a researcher into the invasive methods of accessing minds using
technological means, and has published papers on the subject. She has written
the first draft of a book entitled: “The Controlled Society”.
[1]
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/neurobotics/private/121.asp
At the time of
writing it is still accessible. The exhibition ran from October 2006 to April
2007.
[2]
Where are the scanners? Who controls them? Are they guarded by police to avoid
them being stolen by terrorists? How many are they in number? Are they going into
mass production? Do we have any say about their deployment? It is perhaps not
unduly paranoid to want to have some answers to these questions.
[3]
There is insufficient space here to deal with microchips, the covert
implantation of radio transmitting devices which were referred to in Senator
Glenn’s extraordinary speech to Congress on the occasion of his attempt to
introduce the Human Research Subject
Protection Act in 1997:
[4]
Ref: The Coming Wireless revolution: When Everything Connects: The Economist: 26 April 2007.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=9080024
[5]
Guardian: ‘The Brain Scan that can
read people’s intentions’: 9 February 2007. www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,2009229,00.html
[7]
I say, ‘influencing’, advisedly since the technology that enables thoughts to
be accessed, certainly also allows for the dulling of mental processes, the
interference of memory, the excitation of mental or bodily processes, the
infliction of pain on any organ or nerve, the increase of blood pressure,
breathing or the slowing down of these, as well as the activation of rage,
sadness, hysteria, or inappropriate behaviour. Ref:John Norseen’s work: Images of Mind: The
Semiotic Alphabet. The implantation of silent messages,
experienced as thoughts arising in the mind, is now possible.
[8]
Despite three letters to the Guardian
science correspondent, and Editor, I
had no reply from them, having asked them to consider my points, as
psychoanalyst and researcher, for the
ethical debate which was called for. Nor was there any response from my
approach to the Cambridge ethicists and scientists who were said to be forming
a committee. I have seen no correspondence nor reference to the whole matter
since February, 2007. There was some marked regression in the New Scientist about worms being used for
experiments for remote control
See: Douglas Fox, ‘Remote Control Brains: a
neuroscience revolution’, New Scientist,
18 July 2007.
[9] The covert action group in the newly formed CIA recommended to President Eisenhower in 1954 that the US must pursue “a fundamentally repugnant philosophy”, and that they must learn to “subvert, sabotage and destroy” its enemies by “more clever and more ruthless methods” than those of its opponents:
Ref: James Doolittle et al: “The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Univ.Alabama Press, 1984.
[10]
Fruit flies share to a remarkable degree, the DNA of humans.
[11] Fruit Flies and You: NASA sends fruit flies into Space:
[12]
Ref: New Scientist, 18 July 2007:
‘Remote Control Brains: a neuroscience revolution’:
[13] See author’s
paper: http://www.btinternet.com/~psycho_social/Vol3/V3.html
[14] Nick Begich, Controlling the human mind: the technologies
of political control or tools for peak performance, Earthpulse Press
Publications.
[15]
Liberty, and Lawyers for Liberty have staunchly maintained a thorough-going
campaign against the protracted government plan to issue biometric ID cards,
taking the case to the House of Lords where they have gained support. In view
of the undisclosed work being carried out which will enable direct access to
the brain through the technology coming to light, and using light, one cannot
but suspect that the biometric ID card is but an adjunct to the tracking and
data sourcing of citizens, and as such has fulfilled the function of a very
effective smokescreen, having deflected the energies of the protectors of
individual liberties in terms of thousands of hours of concentrated protest
effort, with enormous expenditure spent on their campaign.
[16]
Human subjects, once computers for research experiments program them, remain
targeted, even if the original reasons for their usage have become obsolete.
Some have been continuously abused for over
thirty years.
[17]
Thz Lasers Small Enough for Screening Devices:
www.photonics.com/content/
news/2007/February/7/86317.aspx
http://www.whatsnextnetwork.com/technology/index.php/2007/01/23/miniaturized_terahertz_transmitter_recei