[This article by Prof. Steven Rose is based on openly-published
scientific results. The era of mind control is *already* here in
the black-budget special access programs, and it has already been
tested on and applied against nonconsensual citizens.]
-----------------------
We are moving ever closer to the era of mind control
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1702525,00.html
The military interest in new brain-scanning technology is beginning to
show a sinister side
Steven Rose
Sunday February 5, 2006
The Observer
Brain scientists are on a roll. Concern about rising levels of mental
distress have resulted in unprecedented levels of funding in the US
and Europe. And a range of new technologies, from genetics to brain
imaging, are offering extraordinary insights into the molecular and
cellular processes underlying how we see, how we remember, why we
become emotional.
Brain imaging has become familiar. Scanners, known by their initials -
CAT, PET, MRI - began as clinical tools, enabling surgeons to identify
potential tumours, the damage following a stroke or the diagnostic
signs of incipient dementia. But neuroscientists quickly seized on
their wider potential. The images of regions of the brain 'lighting
up' when a person is thinking of their lover, imagining travelling
from home to the shops, or solving a mathematical problem, have
captured the imagination of researchers and public alike. What if they
could do more?
Recently I published the results of an experiment in which we looked
at the regions of the brain that became active when people chose
between competing products in supermarkets. Major companies, ranging
from Coca-Cola to BMW, are starting to image the brains of potential
customers to study how they respond to new designs or brands. They are
beginning to speak of 'neuromarketing' and 'neuroeconomics.'
Such trends may be relatively innocuous, but the increasing state
interest in what the images might reveal is less so. Specifically,
what if brain imaging could predict future behaviour, or indicate
guilt or innocence of a crime? There are claims, for example, that it
could reveal potential 'psychopathy', that the brains of men convicted
of brutal murders show significantly abnormal patterns.
In the current legislative climate, where there have been attempts to
introduce pre-emptive detention for 'psychopaths' who have not yet
been convicted of any crime, such claims need to be addressed
critically. They are and will be resisted by the judiciary, but recent
developments suggest that this may be a frail defence against an
increasingly authoritarian state.
More seriously, there is increasing military interest in the
development of techniques that can survey and possibly manipulate the
mental processes of potential enemies, or enhance the potential of
one's own troops. There is nothing new about such an interest. In the
US, it stretches back at least half a century. Impressed by claims
that the Soviet Union was developing psychological warfare, the CIA
and the Defence Advanced Projects Agency (Darpa) began their own
programmes. Early experiments included the clandestine feeding of LSD
to their own operatives and attempts at 'brain-wa****ng'. These were
the forerunners of the hoods and white noise used by the British in
Northern Ireland - until judged illegal - and more recently in Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo, where they inhabit an uncertain borderline
between what the US government regards as an acceptable level of
violence and the torture that it denies committing.
By the 1960s, Darpa, along with the US Navy, was funding almost all US
research into 'artificial intelligence', in order to develop methods
and technologies for the 'automated battlefield' and the 'intelligent
soldier'. Contracts were let and patents taken out on techniques aimed
at recording signals from the brains of enemy personnel at a distance,
in order to 'read their minds'.
These efforts have burgeoned in the aftermath of the so-called 'war on
terror'. One US company claims to have developed a technique called
'brain- fingerprinting', which can 'determine the truth regarding a
crime, terrorist activities or terrorist training by detecting
information stored in the brain'. The stress of lying under
interrogation is supposed to result in a specific wave form which
electrodes measuring the brain's fluctuating electrical signals can
detect. We may be sceptical about the validity of such methods, but
they indicate the direction in which research is heading. The company
claims its procedures have been accepted in evidence in court in the
US.
The step beyond reading thoughts is to attempt to control them
directly. A new technique - transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) -
has begun to generate interest. This focuses an intense magnetic field
on specific brain regions, and has been shown to affect thoughts,
perceptions and behaviour. There are suggestions it could be used to
control obsessive-compulsive behaviour, while some even take seriously
the scenario envisaged in the film Eternal Sun****ne of the Spotless
Mind, in which TMS was used to erase unwanted memories of a love
affair gone wrong. Currently only possible if a subject's head is put
inside the relevant machine, TMS at a distance is now under active
military investigation. So is chip technology, which might provide
implanted prostheses to overcome sensory deficits or control
behaviour, and whose potential bioethics committees around Europe have
been scrutinising.
It is tempting to dismiss all these as technological fantasies and
their proponents as sellers of s**** oil, but the fact that a
technology is faulty doesn't mean it won't be used. One only has to
think of the tens of thousands of lobotomies carried out on
schizophrenic patients in the past century. Britain is one of the
world's leading examples of a surveillance society, observing its
citizens through CCTV cameras and controlling their behaviour with
Asbos and Ritalin. The potential for surveillance of citizen's
thoughts has moved far beyond the visions of 1984
Science cannot happen without major public or private expenditure but
its goals are set at least as much by the market and the military as
by the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. This is why neuroscientists
have a responsibility to make their subject and its potentials as
transparent as possible, and why the voices of concerned citizens
should be heard not 'downstream' when the technologies are already
fully formed, but 'upstream' while the science is still in
progress. We have to find ways of ensuring that such voices are
listened through the cacophony of slogans about 'better brains' - and
the power of the military and the market.
-- This is an edited extract from Better Humans? The Politics of Human
Enhancement and Life Extension, a collection of essays to be published
by Demos and the Wellcome Trust on Wednesday. Steven Rose is Professor
of Biology at the Open University.
--
Mind Control: TT&P ==> http://www.datafilter.com/mc
Music ==> http://www.soundclick.com/kingflowermusic.htm
Allen Barker | Home page ==> http://www.datafilter.com/alb
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