NEUROTECHNOLOGY | NEUROCOGNITIVE WARFARE

The Global Neurohacking Crisis: A Real World ‘Dark Mirror’

Hundreds-of-thousands of people are being driven to suicide through the use of horrific neuropsychological torture that is completely invisible to anyone except the victims.

An Brief Summary of the Unprecedented Global Crisis that You Have Heard Nothing About

A global human atrocity and has managed to persist for decades, become iteratively more advanced and grow to ensnare progressively more victims at a steadily increasing rate.

Hundreds-of-thousands of civilians worldwide have become victims of ‘Neurohacking’ — the hacking of the human brain, nervous system and systems of sensory perception — in the human biological equivalent of the cyberhacking of a computer system.

This neurohacking is accomplished through the use of military-grade systems of neuromodulation which seem impossibly advanced and possess functionality which would seem to exceed what ought to be possible with the science and technology of the present day.

The victims tend to be normal people with careers, families and no history of mental illness. They remain unaware that they have become ensnared by a malevolent phenomenon for years after it has already begun and are caught completely by surprise when they come under assault.

The victims find themselves indefinitely trapped in a horrific state of cognitive “alternate reality” in which their conscious perception of the world is composed of both real and artificial sensory stimuli (“sensory illusions”). The sensory illusions can be finely controlled, in realtime, and with a level of fidelity and nuance which is as stupefying as it is disquieting.

The illusory sensory stimuli is also ‘multimodal’ — inclusive of visual, auditory, haptic (touch), olfactory (smell), thermoception (temperature) and proprioception (body position) — and does not possess the sorts of artifacts that one would generally expect with next-generation technology of today’s day and age.

The result is that, notwithstanding its logical inconsistencies, the illusory sensory stimuli is almost impossible to detect. In this part-real, part-manufactured version of reality, the victim’s perception is different from that of other people — importantly, a condition which neither they themselves are others are aware.

They perceive the world to be dark, ominous and threatening, in which common sense and logic don’t seem to apply, rational interactions and behavior are inexplicably absent and they are treated with anger and disrespect by everyone they encounter — including the people close to them in their lives — and misfortune and injustice befall them with a frequency that exceeds any form of normal probability.

In this state of ‘neurocompromise,’ the victims are subjected to years of merciless neuropsychological abuse in what presents as the covert development and testing of Cognitive Warfare, Neurowarfare and Neuroespionage on civilian test subjects in operations which span decades and which are comprehensive, disciplined and possess a level of technical capability, logistical reach, persistence and robustness against mitigation that evokes a major military power or private defense contractor as the source.

As these operations progress through their final stages — which the victims understably misidentify as the beginning — the victims are made to endure an endless series of exercises in the supportive military functions of Psychological Warfare (PSYWAR), Information Warfare (IW), Espionage, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ESR) and Cyberwarfare (CW) meted out with aggravating factors whenever possible in a manner seemingly devoid of any semblance of empathy or remorse.

Their lives are hyper-gamed into decimation, they lose their jobs, their marriages and the custody of their children, their personal and business relationships are systematically destroyed and they typically become destitute and homeless with nowhere to turn for help.

In the end, in what can only be characterized as a ‘kill program’ the victims are coerced into committing suicide through continuous, closed-loop neuromodulation of persistent fear, anxiety, lethargy and depression and an onslaught of illusory psychosocial and illusory auditory torture.

This has become a global humanitarian crisis; however, because it has no visible external presentation, it is entirely invisible and, in fact, imperceptible to anyone except for the victim themselves.

Further, due to its exploitation of certain aspects of the neurological underpinnings of human cognition to ‘frontrun’ the victim’s communications and actions, the victim may not even be able to articulate their demise.

The ‘Cold War’ II

The world’s major powers are engaged in an arms race, which some experts have characterized as a new “Cold War,” in the development of Neurowarfare, Cognitive Warfare systems, methods and tactical procedures. ¹ ² ³ and Neuroespionage. ⁴ ⁵ ⁶

In this “6th Domain” of warfare (Cognition), in which conflict is largely virtual and carried out from a remote location in cyberspace or through the use of drones or robotics, the human brain “becomes the battlefield” ⁴ and Cognitive Science are Neuroscience are weaponized to “attack, exploit, degrade or even destroy how someone builds their own reality, their mental self confidence and the efficient functioning of groups, societies or even nations.” ¹

As per the lead presentation at a NATO science meeting last summer, this new form of warfare is “already being used, with more or less success and not necessarily under that name, by a number of state and non-state players, institutions or companies, including terrorist organizations, aggressive religious movements and specialized, highly-competent units working for digital intelligence services.” ¹

In late 2016, U.S. government personnel at foreign embassies began to experience “mysterious attacks” and subsequent neurological and cognitive symptoms which became known as the “Havana Syndrome.” ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹²

These attacks were first reported at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba and later spread to China, Russia, Colombia, Austria, Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, Poland, the United States and several other countries. By the time the attacks ceased in 2021, more than 200 cases had been reported — mostly by CIA and Department of Defense personnel and their families. ⁶

The symptoms of Havana Syndrome, or “Anomalous Health Incidents” (AHIs), as they are referred to by the U.S. Department of Defense, and which are now generally believed to be the result of “some type of viable neuroweapon,” ⁶ include “piercing pain, unexplained sounds, vertigo, vision loss, memory loss, insomnia and signs of brain damage.” ⁶ ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵

An investigation by the the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) said that the cluster of symptoms without a traumatic incident or known etiology and which are described as “the sudden onset of a perceived loud sound, sometimes described as screeching, chirping, clicking, or piercing, a sensation of intense pressure or vibration in the head, and pain in the ear or more diffusely in the head, dizziness, fatigue, impaired balance, headache, and impaired concentration” as “unlike any disorder reported in the neurological or general medical literature.” ¹⁶

In December of 2021 the U.S. government, through the U.S. Department of Commerce, sanctioned China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, its related research institutes and almost two dozen private companies, for participation in the weaponization of technology and “a broader Chinese government strategy to develop and deploy biotechnology, including ‘brain-control weaponry,’ for possible offensive use.” ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸

China’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) has been transparent about the existence and objectives of its “NeuroStrike” neurowarfare program, which was rumored, though not confirmed, to include aspirations of infecting and controlling entire populations.

A 2019 report entitled The Future of the Concept of Military Supremacy authored by China’s PLA and obtained by the Washington Times revealed that the PLA had been discussing the development of weapons designed to control the brain and asserted that war had begun to shift from the “pursuit of destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent,” and that the focus had become to “attack the enemy’s will to resist.”

A report published earlier this month by the CCP Biothreats Initiative entitled Warfare in the Cognitive Age: NeuroStrike and the PLA’s Advanced Psychological Weapons and Tactics, and covered by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, identifies two recent studies by the Chinese army which indicate that it is developing brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that establish a direct connection between the brain and external technology. ¹⁹

Harrowing Attacks on the Brain

The pursuit of this technology and its capabilities, which was born out of the Information Warfare (IW) of the Cold War and has now reached the confluence of decades of advancement in technology, neuroscience, cognitive science, nanotechnology, biotechnology and computing, has led to widespread human atrocities.

As many as hundreds-of-thousands of people worldwide have become victims of Neurological Hacking (“Neurohacking”) — the hacking of the human neurological system, in particular the brain, nervous system and systems of sensory perception — in the biological equivalent of the cyberhacking and cyberespionage of a computer system. ²⁰ ²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁴

The assaults present as covert, non-consensual development and testing of Cognitive Warfare, Neurowarfare and Neuroespionage on civilians in long-running operations spanning years or decades. They are comprehensive, structured and disciplined and possess an apparent technical capability, logistical reach, persistence and robustness against mitigation that evokes a major military power as their source.

In these operations the brains, nervous systems and systems of sensory perception of the victims are compromised through the invasive implantation of advanced systems of neuromodulation which possess the functionality, or its equivalent, of a high-performance neurocomputer, a very-high spatial- and temporal-resolution neuromodulation array, continuous power delivery and, speculatively, mobile data communications and geolocation capability. ¹ ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸

The precise technical instrumentation of those capabilities and the means by which thy are deployed is unknown; however, a review of research published in scientific and technical journals throughout the past decade reveals numerous advancements which appear promising and may have already reached production status. ²⁸ ²⁹ ³⁰ ³¹ ³²

The victims of the operations tend to be normal people with careers, families and no history of mental illness. Their lives proceed unaffected for years after the operations have already begun during which time they remain completely unaware that they have become ensnared by a malevolent phenomenon and that their lives and their privacy are under assault.

About three quarters of the way into an operation, for what seems to be the dual purposes of testing which is more intensive and to facilitate the victim’s own precipitous demise, the visible activities which characterize the later stages of the operations begin.

The victims find themselves indefinitely trapped in a horrific state of cognitive “alternate reality” in which their subjective perception is composed of both real sensory stimuli and illusory stimuli (“sensory illusions”), they perceive the world around them to be threatening and ominous, basic logic does not seem apply and their voice, video and in-person, face-to-face communication are “front-run” such that the content or character of those interactions is not as intended and their personal and professional relations are manipulated to the detriment. ³⁵ ³⁸ ⁴²

The most troubling aspect is that the illusory stimuli possesses a subjective fidelity which is completely true-to-life and nearly impossible to differentiate from real stimuli.

The illusory stimuli introduced into the victim’s conscious sensory perception is fully multimodal — inclusive of visual, auditory, olfactory (smell), haptic (touch), thermoception (temperature) and proprioception (body position) and can be granularly controlled, in realtime, with no observable artifacts, while simultaneously performing object identification (“feature extraction”), spatial mapping, occlusion or modification and, most importantly, instantaneous concomitant artificial emotional affect to control the victim’s perception of the nature, characteristics and intention of the people, objects and events of their daily experiences.

These neuromodulation and neurosensory systems exploit aspects of human neuroanatomy which provide the foundations of consciousness and which evolved to suit the natural environment of ancient humans — not modern man. In the context of the technology which has emerged in recent years, many aspects of the human neurological system become vulnerable to exploitation.

In particular, at a minimum these systems appear to exploit:

1. The half-second delay between the sensation of sensory stimuli and conscious awareness of that stimuli (“Libet’s Delay”) ³³
2. The neurological functions which give rise to subconscious decisions preceding conscious awareness of decisions by several seconds.
3. The vast quantity of information which is received, processed and stored in permanent episodic memory by the subconscious neurological functions and most of which an individual never ever becomes aware of or has the ability to access themselves.

The systems are effectively inserted in between the victim’s systems of sensory perception and subconscious processing and their conscious mind. The implication is that not only can the attacker exercise near-total-control over the victim’s sensory stimuli and perception of reality, they can modify instructions to the body in carrying out communications such as modification of speech, tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, motions and movements.

Machiavellian Abuse

The victims of these operations are made to endure years of aggravated neuropsychological torture as the subjects of an extensive runbook of operations in the supportive military functions spanning Psychological Warfare (PSYWAR), Information Warfare (IW), Cyberwarfare (CW) and Espionage, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ESR).

The victims’ lives, and by extension those of their family members, are systematically deconstructed through the systematic hyper-gaming of their personal affairs and professional business at the hands of a distributed supercomputer machine-learning-trained in game theory, asymmetric information warfare and deception.

The victim’s mobile phones and computing devices are persistently hacked and malware continuously tracks their location, intercepts their communications, disrupts, alters or forges the substance of their interactions and limits their access to information.

The victims’ personal relationships, including sacrosanct relationships with parents, children, siblings and spouses, are sabotaged through the introduction of fictitious narratives designed to engendered feelings of anger, mistrust or betrayal. This frequently involves the notion that money has been misappropriated or is being purposefully withheld. A common refrain is that friends or family members who would normally be expected to be supportive are “in on it.” ³⁸ ⁴¹

The victim’s perception of other people, especially those whose assistance is needed in order to conduct important personal business, is altered to create the impression that those people are unhelpful, argumentative, dismissive and view the victim with disrespect.

The victims are subjected to the illusory perception that they are the subjects of elaborate campaigns of organized stalking in which they are followed, surveilled and harassed by large, coordinated groups of people everywhere they go in public. This form of psychosocial torture is referred to as “gangstalking” and is the most commonly reported experience by victims. It is instrumented though realtime modification of sensory stimuli in the victim’s auditory and visual fields and the application of simultaneous neurostimulation to induce artificial emotional affect. ⁴¹ ⁴² ⁴³

Illusory psychosocial torture is implemented through the modification of the victim’s perception of the verbal expressions, non-verbal expressions, body language and movements of others to create the fictitious but entirely realistic impression that everyone the victim encounters is:

1. Disappointed, displeased or exasperated with the victim for their perpetual personal failures as indicated by their sighs, disapproving glances and stares, shaking of the head and sudden, suggestive body movements.
2. Engaged in secretive, schoolyard-like disparagement, mockery or bullying at the victim’s expense or, alternatively, engaged in conversation which is purposefully meant to be overheard by the victim.
3. Engaged in harassing movements such as walking slowly directly in front of the victim or in lockstep just to the side or behind.
4. Aware of the victim and either overtly threatening or a made to appear to be an undesirable character and potential danger.

In addition to illusory psychosocial torture, and through the same fundamental mechanisms, victims are subjected to an onslaught of constant auditory torture through, for example:

1. The “modulation” of simple verbal expressions onto sources of repetitive, periodic noise such as the whirl of the compressor of a refrigerator or an air conditioning unit.
2. Similarly, the modulation of words or simple expressions onto the victim’s clothing brushing against itself while in motion, or in the most extreme case, directly inside the victim’s throat when swallowing or clearing their throat.
3. In the outdoors environment, all of the most common natural sounds are recorded, quantized and shaped to be purposefully conspicuous and identical from one instance to the next.
4. Inside the home, in what should be complete silence, the victim is subjected to the incessant sounds of, for example, construction in adjacent or nearby residences, distant sirens, loud motorcycles, exaggerated doppler effects from airplanes, vehicles honking loudly and children screaming in horror.

Throughout all of this, the victims are made to endure the psychological trauma of suffering in solitude unable to obtain help from friends, family members, law enforcement or medical professionals for claims of fantastic experiences which are imperceptible to anyone except for the victim themselves and only serve to make them appear to be schizophrenic or suffering from delusional disorder.

The Humanitarian Crisis

In the end, the victims are coerced into committing suicide through the application of continuous, closed-loop neuromodulation of persistent feelings of fear, anxiety, lethargy and depression.

This becomes gradually more strong as time progresses — either by design or perhaps due to the malfunction of the system — and is made even more impactful through the concomitant attenuation of feelings of ambition, creativity or a desire to be productive.

Any medications the victim is prescribed which have stimulant or anxiolytic effects, improve mood or increase energy, are identified in their neural activity and negated through neurostimulation.

And the most heartless of this end-stage torture is the identification of intense emotions which stem from powerful sources of motivation, such as the desire to be there for one’s children, and the negation of those emotions the instant they emerge.

About Maebren

Maebren is a non-profit organization which is being formed in response to the crisis. Its mission will be to bring about an end to the global neurohacking phenomenon, rescue and support its victims, inform the public about what has transpired and facilitate legislation to prevent a reoccurrence.

Maebren’s efforts will begin in earnest as soon as it receives funding:

1. Provision and distribute to victims simple low- or moderate-cost consumer and commercial products and services which mitigate or disrupt the effects of the neuromodulation central to the abuse and torture.
2. Perform scientific and technological analysis and research into the instrumentation and operation of the neuromodulation, sensory manipulation and any related in-vivo components in an effort to ascertain the extent to which they can be disabled, mitigated and removed.
3. To the extent possible, develop solutions to perform screening and testing to confirm the presence or absence of any relevant technological components and produce demonstrable evidence of the same in the form of, for example, radiological reports or electrographic results.
   Solicit and retain one or more law firms and/or attorneys to represent Maebren and the class of victims.
4. Impel the launch of an investigation to identify the entity or entities responsible for the global neurohacking phenomenon and advocate for its victims in the pursuit of the prosecution of those responsible for crimes against humanity in the International Court of Justice.
5. If possible, compel the responsible entities to reveal the scientific and technological details needed to develop the means to disable or remove any invasive components and reverse or treat any physiological or neurological damage.
6. Facilitate legislation to stem or prevent the misuse of neurotechnology in the present and in the coming decades.

Financial support for Maebren can be provided through its GiveSendGo campaign at:
https://givesendgo.com/victims-of-neurohacking/

About the Author

Stephen Keith Rhoads is a founding member of Maebren and a victim of neurohacking and cognitive warfare testing as described in this article.

Stephen is a Network Security Architect and has held leadership roles in the Information Technology divisions of several of the largest global Wall Street investment banks. He has extensive experience in the design, implementation and operational support data networks and network security as well as proficiency in numerous other areas of technology.

He is originally from Florida and moved to New York City to attend the New York University Stern School of Business where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Management. He remained after graduation and has been a resident for 25 years.

Stephen’s mother Beverly was a captain in the U.S. Army and one of the first Nurse Practitioners in the history of the profession. He was born at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, CO in 1972 (now the Anschutz Medical Campus) and his brother Kevin was born in Tuscan, AZ four years later.

His father Kenneth is a Cardiologist and has worked in private practice throughout his career with a brief diversion in the mid naughts to work on advanced medical imaging.

“They love a suicide.”

Stephen is writing a brutally-honest, unapologetically revealing tell-all exposé about his experiences as a neurohacking and neurowarfare testing victim.

In the book, he will reveal every possible detail of the tradecraft and the technology employed by those behind the phenomenon, its exploitation of “vulnerabilities” in human cognitive processing and its full technical capabilities — which seem straight out of science fiction.

He will also divulge the true technological nature behind many elements of the abuse which victims, journalists and others have misunderstood and misattributed for decades.

The book’s title “They love a suicide.” is a reference to a sentence which appeared toward the end of a document written by a senior victim for the benefit of those who are newly self-identified.

References

1. Cognitive Warfare: The Advent of the Concept of ‘Cognitics’ in the Field of Warfare; Bernard Claverie and François Du Cluzel; NATO-STO Collaboration Support Office; June 21, 2022.
2. Cognitive Warfare: Contribution of the French Armed Forces Deputy Chief of Defense; General Eric Autellet; NATO-STO Collaboration Support Office; June 21, 2022.
3. Cognitive Warfare: The Future of Cognitive Dominance; Edited by Bernard Claverie, Baptiste Prébot, Norbou Buchler and François Du Cluzel; NATO-STO Collaboration Support Office; June 21, 2022.
4. Neuroscience and the Weapons of War; MWI Podcast | Episode 31; John Amble and James Giordano; The Modern War Institute; August 02, 2017.
5. Attack on the Brain: Neurowars and Neurowarfare; Armin Krishnan; Space & Defense: Journal of the United States Air Force Academy; January 01, 2016.
6. Neurowarfare is Here; Master’s Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School; Joshua D. Gramm and Brian A. Branagan; Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA; December 01, 2021.
7. Annals of Espionage: Are U.S. Officials Under Silent Attack?; Adam Entous; The New Yorker; May 24, 2021.
8. CIA Doctor Investigating Havana Syndrome Was a Victim of it Himself: ’I Couldn’t Believe It’; Gino Spocchia; The Independent; September 27, 2022.
9. Mystery Attacks on Diplomats Leave Scores of Victims but Still Little Evidence; David E. Sanger; The New York Times; August 8, 2021.
10. As Many As 200 Americans Have Now Reported Possible Symptoms of ‘Havana Syndrome,’ Officials Say; Ken Dilanian, Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube; NBC News; July 20, 2021.
11. Vienna is the New Havana Syndrome Hot Spot; Adam Entous; The New Yorker; July 16, 2021.
12. Are Electromagnetic Weapons Involved? Taking Victims of ‘Havana Syndrome’ Seriously; Jean Guerrero; Los Angeles Times; February 24, 2022.
13. Biden Signs Legislation to Compensate Victims of Mysterious ‘Havana Syndrome’; David E. Sanger, Katie Rogers and Julian E. Barnes; The New York Times; October 12, 2021.
14. An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies; Health and Medicine Division and Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; June 1, 2020.
15. Neuroimaging Findings in US Government Personnel With Possible Exposure to Directional Phenomena in Havana, Cuba; Ragini Verma, PhD, Randel L. Swanson, DO, PhD, Drew Parker, BS et al; JAMA; July 23, 2019.
16. U.S. Accuses Chinese Tech Firms, Research Institutes of Weaponizing Biotechnology, Creating ‘Brain-Control Weaponry’; Conor Finnegan and Luke Barr; ABC News; December 16, 2021.
17. Chinese ‘Brain Control’ Warfare Work Revealed; Bill Gertz; The Washington Times; December 29, 2021.
18. China Crafts Weapons to Alter Brain Function; Report Says Tech Meant to Influence Government Leaders; Bill Gertz; The Washington Times; July 6, 2023.
19. Warfare in the Cognitive Age: NeuroStrike and the PLA’s Advanced Psychological Weapons & Tactics; L. J. Eads, Ryan Clarke, Sean Lin, Robert McCreight, The CCP Biothreats Initiative; December 1, 2023.
20. Hackers Could Get Inside Your Brain; Stacy Liberatore; Daily Mail UK; August 4, 2016.
21. Brainjacking — A New Cyber-Security Threat; Laurie Pycroft, PhD Candidate; University of Oxford; August 23, 2016.
22. Brainjacking: Implant Security Issues in Invasive Neuromodulation; Laurie Pycroft, Sandra G. Boccard, Sarah L.F. Owen, John F. Stein, James J. Fitzgerald, Alexander L. Green and Tipu Z. Aziz; World Neurosurgery, Volume 92; DOI: 10.1016/j.wneu.2016.05.010; May 5, 2016.
23. Mind-Reading Technology Has Arrived; Sigal Samuel; Vox; May 4, 2023.
24. Semantic Reconstruction of Continuous Language from Non-Invasive Brain Recordings; Jerry Tang, Amanda LeBel, Shailee Jain and Alexander G. Huth; Nature Neuroscience, Volume 26; DOI: 10.1038/s41593–23–01304–9; May 1, 2023.
25. Blackrock Neurotech Reveals Neuralace™: 10,000+ Channel Next-Gen BCI; Press Release; Blackrock Neurotech; November 16, 2022.
26. Elon Musk’s Brain Implant Startup Is Ready to Start Surgery; Ashlee Vance; Bloomberg News; November 7, 2023.
27. Eavesdropping on the Brain With 10,000 Electrodes; Barundeb Dutta; IEEE Spectrum, Volume 59; DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2022.9792189; May 28, 2022.
28. How Do Neural Implants Work?; Emily Waltz; IEEE Spectrum; January 20, 2020.
29. Injectable Probes Could Transform Brain Monitoring; Seth Fletcher; Scientific American; December 1, 2015.
30. Functional Two-Dimensional Materials for Bioelectronic Neural Interfacing; Mohammad K. Akbari, Nasrin S. Lopa, Marina Shahriari, Aliasghar Najafzadehkhoee, Dušan Galusek and Serge Zhuiykov; Journal of Functional Biomaterials, Volume 14; DOI: 10.3390/jfb14010035; January 7, 2023.
31. Remote Targeted Electrical Stimulation; Taylor Webb, Rahul Cheeniyil, Matthew Wilson and Jan Kubanek; Journal of Neural Engineering; DOI: 10.1088/1741–2552/acd95c; June 9, 2023.
32. Nonresonant Powering of Injectable Nanoelectrodes Enables Wireless Deep Brain Stimulation in Freely Moving Mice; K L Kozielski, A Jahanshahi, H B Gilbert, Ö Erin, D Francisco, F Alosaimi, Y Temel and M Sitti; Science Advances, Volume 7, Issue 3; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc4189; January 13, 2021.
33. The Half-Second Delay: What Follows?; Dylan Wiliam; Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Volume 14, Issue 1; DOI: 10.1080/14681360500487470; August 22, 2006.
34. Guinea Pigs: Technologies of Control; John Hall, MD; Strategic Book Publishing; ISBN-13: 978–1631355523; December 8, 2014.
35. The Spark; Stephen Shellenberger; Trashtown Films; April 17, 2018.
36. New and Emerging Technologies Need Urgent Oversight and Robust Transparency: UN Experts; Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council; United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; June 2, 2023.
37. In a Letter to Nils Melzer, Special Rapporteur, United Nations; Derrick Robinson, Executive Director; People Against Covert Torture and Surveillance (PACTS); United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; June 21, 2020.
38. Mind Games: The Tortured Lives of ‘Targeted Individuals’; Laura Yan; Wired; March 4, 2018.
39. My Father Says He’s a ‘Targeted Individual.’ Maybe We All Are; Jean Guerrero; Wired; October 25, 2018.
40. The Baton Rouge Gunman and ‘Targeted Individuals’; The New York Times; July 19, 2016.
41. United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers; Mike McPhate; The New York Times; June 10, 2016.
42. The Nightmare World of Gang Stalking; Vice News; November 30, 2017.
    ‘Organized Stalking’ Ads on Vancouver Transit a Mental Health Concern, Experts Say; Liam Britten; CBC News; September 11, 2018.
43. The Phenomenology of Group Stalking (‘Gang-Stalking’): A Content Analysis of Subjective Experiences; Lorraine Sheridan, David James and Jayden Roth; International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health; April 17, 2020;
44. A Secret War, Strange New Wounds, and Silence From the Pentagon; Dave Philipps; The New York Times; November 5, 2023.

References w/ Excerpts

Cognitive Warfare: The Advent of the Concept of ‘Cognitics’ in the Field of Warfare

Proceedings of the NATO Scientific Meeting on Cognitive Warfare

June 21, 2022
Bernard Claverie and François Du Cluzel
NATO-STO Collaboration Support Office

Attacks are defined, structured, and organized to alter or mislead the thoughts of leaders and operators, of members of entire social or professional classes, of the men and women in an army, or on a larger scale, of an entire population in a given region, country or group of countries …

Cognitive warfare is the art of using technology to alter the cognition of human targets, who are often unaware of any such attempt, as are those entrusted with countering, minimizing, or managing its results, whose reaction is too slow or inadequate.

…

This is obviously related to the concept of cyber warfare that uses digital information tools to gain control, alter or destroy said tools. However, cognitive warfare goes beyond information to target what individual brains will do with this information …

…

Cognitive Warfare is already being used, with more or less success and not necessarily under that name, by a number of state and non-state players, institutions or companies, including terrorist organizations, aggressive religious movements, etc.

…

The stated objective is to attack, exploit, degrade or even destroy how someone builds their own reality, their mental self-confidence, their trust in processes and the approaches required for the efficient functioning of groups, societies or even nations. Although its technical aspects (cyber) are somewhat different, it is a companion to Psychological Operations (PSYOPS).

…

NBIC is a scientific project bringing together four previously distinct domains: nanotechnology (nanorobot technology, nano-sensors, nanostructures, energy, etc.), biotechnology (bio-genomic technology, bio-engineering, neuropharmacology, etc.), information technology (computer science, microelectronics, etc.) and cognitive technology (cognitive science and neuropsychology) …

… some projects are benefiting from real resources, programmed and in some cases tested, using, for instance, neurocomputing implants and perception-augmenting technical hybrids (vision and hearing), or even genomic modifications.

… We should also mention the issue of these implants’ obsolescence and their exploitation.

…

Cognitive Warfare: Contribution of the French Armed Forces Deputy Chief of Defense

Proceedings of the NATO Scientific Meeting on Cognitive Warfare

June 21, 2022
General Eric Autellet
NATO-STO Collaboration Support Office

If we take the neuroscientist James Giordano’s quote literally, then the cognitive field must be one of our priorities, in terms of research but also for the conduct of our operations.

The intensification of rivalries between powers translates, along a continuum of “contestation — competition — confrontation,” into actions in the “grey zones” aimed at intimidating or coercing. We must not wait for the confrontation phase to act, particularly in the field of perceptions, especially since lethal and kinetic action is not always the most appropriate response.

…

… With regard to our enemy, we must be able to “read” the brain of our adversaries in order to anticipate their reactions. If necessary, we must be able to “penetrate” the brains of our adversaries in order to influence them and make them act according to our wishes. As far as our friend is concerned (as well as ourselves), we must be able to protect our brains as well as to improve our cognitive capabilities of comprehension and decision-making capacities. These issues are inseparable from the digital transformation process that will have a decisive impact on our command structures.

…

Neuroscience and the Weapons of War

MWI Podcast | Episode 31

August 02, 2017
John Amble and James Giordano
The Modern War Institute

In this episode of the Modern War Institute podcast, MWI editorial director John Amble speaks to Dr. James Giordano. Dr. Giordano is a professor at Georgetown University, where he is the Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program and Scholar-in-Residence in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics.

In a fascinating conversation, Dr. Giordano discusses the rapid pace of advancement in neuroscience and neurotechnology — and what that advancement means for the future of war. “The brain,” he says, in many ways represents “the new battlescape of the twenty-first century.” But if this is the case, it also presents a host of new ethical challenges that will need to be addressed.

…

Attack on the Brain: Neurowars and Neurowarfare

January 01, 2016
Armin Krishnan
Space & Defense: Journal of the United States Air Force Academy

Neuroscience is on the verge of deciphering the human brain. As a result, brains will become a part of the battlefield against which attacks will be directed. As neuroscientist James Giordano argued: “the brain is the next battlespace.” It is foreseeable that this will have tremendous implications for warfare and could amount to a true military revolution in the sense of military historian Williamson Murray: it would completely change the characteristics of conflict, as well as transform state and society.

Neuroscience will lead to the development of ‘neuroweapons,’ which can remotely manipulate mental states, emotions, perceptions, thinking, and behavior of adversaries. As argued by Vladimir Putin, “such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons, but will be more acceptable in terms of political and military ideology.”

In a coming age of neurowarfare traditional military conflict may no longer take place or may become ancillary to the goal of psychologically manipulating or subverting enemy leaders and even entire societies. States and other actors could be coerced with no resort to open violence and conflicts could be suppressed before they can ever break out … In the worst case, neuroscience and neurotechnologies (neuro S/T) could be abused for torture, genocide, and high-tech repression.

…

Neurowarfare is Here

Master’s Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School

December 01, 2021
Joshua D. Gramm and Brian A. Branagan
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA

In late 2016 in Havana, Cuba, a collection of U.S. diplomats, intelligence officials, and military personnel began experiencing mysterious and often debilitating neurophysiological and cognitive symptoms reminiscent of a traumatic brain injury, but without any precipitating trauma. Symptoms included headaches, dizziness, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, vertigo, memory loss, and other cognitive difficulties. All reported feeling waves of pressure in their heads, ranging from a dull discomfort to immediately overwhelming. Many stated that simply moving from one room to another alleviated symptoms.

These incidents were not limited to government officials; even children and pets displayed peculiar and troubling behaviors …

…

… The USSOCOM has defined these cluster of symptoms without a traumatic incident or known etiology as “unconventionally acquired brain injury” (UBI), and more recently, the Secretary of Defense’s (SecDef) September 2021 memo termed them “Anomalous Health Incidents” (AHI).

The most common symptoms of AHIs are “the sudden onset of a perceived loud sound, sometimes described as screeching, chirping, clicking, or piercing, a sensation of intense pressure or vibration in the head, and pain in the ear or more diffusely in the head.” Patients had acute symptoms of dizziness, fatigue, impaired balance, headache, and impaired concentration, but many symptoms became chronic years after initial onset. The directional and location-specific details in the patients’ histories are unusual and “unlike any disorder reported in the neurological or general medical literature,” …

…

The attacks in Cuba are one of the first-known uses of a neuroweapon. Neuroweapons are a broad category encompassing several different methods defined as “weapons that specifically target the brain or the central nervous system in order to affect the targeted person’s mental state, mental capacity and ultimately the person’s behavior in a specific and predictable way.” …

…

The incidents in Cuba, dubbed the “Havana Syndrome,” are not isolated events. A similar incident occurred in Guangzhou, China, in 2017, and as many as 200 Americans have developed UBI/AHI symptoms after serving in at least 16 different countries, including the United States. Every day appears to bring more information about the frequency and locations of this type of incident, including disrupting Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent trip to Vietnam, an alarming fact considering the highest levels of security provided.

“There are probably a couple of hundred incidents across the U.S. government and across the globe,” current CIA Director William Burns recently stated. For obvious reasons, the government has kept most of this information close-hold, refraining from speculation presumably as the intelligence and justice communities investigate, analyze, and draw inferences. As the quote at the beginning of this chapter shows, Director Burns has publicly stated he does not know who or what caused this, but it is one of his highest priorities.

…

U.S. Accuses Chinese Tech Firms, Research Institutes of Weaponizing Biotechnology, Creating ‘Brain-Control Weaponry’

December 16, 2021
Conor Finnegan and Luke Barr | ABC News

The Biden administration has blacklisted and sanctioned dozens of Chinese government research institutes and private-sector tech firms, accusing them of weaponizing technology for use at home and abroad, the U.S. departments of Commerce and Treasury announced Thursday.

In particular, the U.S. warned that these entities were working as part of a broader Chinese government strategy to develop and deploy biotechnology, including “brain-control weaponry,” for possible offensive use and as part of its crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities — a campaign that the U.S. has determined constitutes genocide.

…

It’s unclear what kind of weaponry might already exist, but Chinese military leaders have talked for years about biotechnology as creating new “offensive capability,” including “brain control” weapons and “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

“China’s research focus on these technologies is not unique. What is unique is their declared intent to weaponize their inventions,” said retired Lt. Col. Stephen Ganyard, the former top U.S. diplomat for military affairs.

These inventions could include “the stuff of science fiction, such as brain-controlled weaponry” that would allow “a Chinese commando to discharge a weapon with just a thought, not a trigger finger,” according to Craig Singleton, a former U.S. diplomat who is now an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.

…

Chinese ‘Brain Control’ Warfare Work Revealed

December 29, 2021
Bill Gertz
The Washington Times

…

The report, which was published in the official military newspaper PLA Daily, also asserted that China is merging four major technology fields for military purposes: nano, bio, information and cognition.

Among its various research focuses are “brain control technologies, such as measuring neuronal activity in the brain and translating neuro-signals into computer signals, establishing uni-directional or bi-directional signal transmission between the brain and external equipment,” the third report said.

Research also is being conducted on “neuro-defense” technology such as “leveraging electromagnetic, biophysical, and material technologies to enhance human brain’s defense towards brain-control attacks,” it said.

One brain enhancement technology involves wearable equipment that stimulates or manipulates brain electrical activities. Another is the use of brain-implanted microchips or other computer interfaces that enhance brain functions.

…

China Crafts Weapons to Alter Brain Function; Report Says Tech Meant to Influence Government Leaders

July 6, 2023
Bill Gertz
The Washington Times

The threat is not limited to the use of microwave weapons: “China’s new landscape of neurostrike development includes using massively distributed human-computer interfaces to control entire populations as well as a range of weapons designed to cause cognitive damage,” the report said.

…

“Imagine (at least partially) immunized PLA troops being inserted into a geography where a specific weaponized bacterial strain has been released prior to their entry to prepare the ground and eliminate points of resistance,” the report states. “Any remaining sources of resistance on the ground are then dealt with through Chinese neurostrike weaponry that instill intense fear and/or other forms of cognitive incoherence resulting in inaction.”

…

Annals of Espionage: Are U.S. Officials Under Silent Attack?

The Havana Syndrome first affected spies and diplomats in Cuba. Now it has spread to the White House.

May 24, 2021
By Adam Entous | The New Yorker

During the final weeks of the Trump Administration, a senior official on the National Security Council sat at his desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across from the West Wing, on the White House grounds. It was mid-November, and he had recently returned from a work trip abroad. At the end of the day, he left the building and headed toward his car, which was parked a few hundred yards away, along the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument. As he walked, he began to hear a ringing in his ears. His body went numb, and he had trouble controlling the movement of his legs and his fingers. Trying to speak to a passerby, he had difficulty forming words. “It came on very suddenly,” the official recalled later, while describing the experience to a colleague. “In a matter of about seven minutes, I went from feeling completely fine to thinking, Oh, something’s not right, to being very, very worried and actually thinking I was going to die.”

…

Three years ago, my colleague Jon Lee Anderson and I published a piece in The New Yorker about the first Havana Syndrome incidents among C.I.A. and State Department employees. Beginning in December, 2016, officials described being bombarded by waves of pressure in their heads. Some said they heard sounds resembling an immense swarm of cicadas, following them from room to room — but when they opened a door to the outside the sounds abruptly stopped. A few reported feeling as if they were standing in an invisible beam of energy. The aftereffects ranged: debilitating headaches; tinnitus; loss of vision and hearing; vertigo; brain fog; loss of balance and muscle control. For some, the symptoms went away quickly; for others, they have persisted. The experiences have varied to such an extent that government doctors have struggled to form a coherent diagnosis, and many of the patients have been met with skepticism both inside and outside the government.

…

After the events in Cuba, there were a few potentially related incidents that the C.I.A. tried to handle internally; one of these involved an intelligence officer who, in late 2017, woke up in a hotel room in Moscow with severe vertigo. (A C.I.A. doctor told him, “This isn’t it,” referring to the Havana Syndrome.) It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, more than a year after two White House staff members reported Havana Syndrome-like episodes, that their bosses decided to conduct a government-wide analysis, essentially reopening a cold case.

They have discovered that what began with several dozen spies and diplomats in Havana now encompasses more than a hundred and thirty possible cases, from Colombia to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to Austria, in addition to the United States and other countries. At least four of the cases involve Trump White House officials, two of whom say they had episodes on the Ellipse. The C.I.A. accounts for some fifty cases. The rest are mostly U.S. military and State Department personnel and their family members.

…

In late May, 2019, a large group of White House officials checked into an InterContinental Hotel in London, where they prepared for President Donald Trump’s state visit. Before dawn on the day of Trump’s arrival, Sandra Adams, a mid-level White House staffer, collected a sheaf of documents that had arrived overnight for her team, and had a quick breakfast in the hotel dining room. When she returned to her room, overlooking Green Park, she pulled open the curtains and settled into a chair to read. Suddenly, a ringing sound, annoying at first, then distinctly painful, seemed to envelop her. When she left the room, her ears continued ringing.

Later in the trip, she invited a more junior White House staff member, Adrian Banks, to hang out with her in her hotel room before the two went to dinner. (The names Sandra Adams and Adrian Banks are pseudonyms.) As they chatted on the couch, Adams again heard the sound, and felt an acute pressure in her head, as did Banks. They rushed out of the room and into the hallway, where the sound and the pressure subsided. But for the rest of the trip both officials suffered migraines.

When the delegation returned to Washington, Adams described the incident to a special White House office responsible for tracking security threats. She was told that what had happened to Banks and her was classified, which meant that they were not supposed to tell anyone, including their doctors, about their experience in London. They visited doctors at the White House Medical Unit, who thought that Adams and Banks were suffering from ordinary headaches and sinus infections that had potentially been brought on by stress. The doctors suggested that they take ibuprofen and decongestants and get some rest. As the weeks passed, Adams’s ears and lymph nodes became more swollen, her migraines grew worse, and she felt as if she had strep throat. Banks continued to have headaches, too. Their symptoms persisted despite repeated visits to private physicians and urgent-care clinics. Adams told a colleague, “No one seemed to take it seriously.”

…

… In addition, profilers with the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Analysis Unit conducted assessments of the victims. The unit presented its findings to State Department officials, including John Sullivan, a Deputy Secretary and the head of a task force that the department had set up to look into the syndrome. The profilers’ assessment was that the victims were suffering from a mass psychogenic illness, a condition in which a group of people, often thinking that they have been exposed to something dangerous, begin to feel sick at the same time.

But, when a State Department official asked how many victims the profilers had interviewed, the unit explained that it hadn’t spoken to any of them directly. The unit’s conclusions were based on transcripts of previous interviews that the F.B.I. had done with the patients, and on “patient histories” compiled by the victims’ doctors, including neuropsychologists and other specialists, who had already ruled out the idea of a mass psychogenic illness: many of the victims didn’t know about the other people who were sick, and their bodies couldn’t have feigned some of the symptoms they were exhibiting.

…

Then, in June, Sandra Adams and Adrian Banks told Kupperman about what had happened to them in London. He had no doubt they were telling the truth. Kupperman told Bolton and officials at the C.I.A., hoping that they would reassess the threat now that there appeared to be two White House victims …

…

The opportunity to do blood tests was lost, but specialists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair have been able to use MRIs to study the brains of forty Havana Syndrome patients. They found no signs of physical impact to the victims’ skulls — it was as if the victims had “a concussion without a concussion,” one specialist told me — but the team found signs consistent with damage to the patients’ brains: the volume of white matter was smaller than in a similar group of healthy adults, which indicated that something structural in the brain had been affected.

At the White House, Adams and Banks continued to experience symptoms. Kupperman lobbied to have them evaluated by State Department doctors who had examined other suspected victims of the Havana Syndrome in Cuba and in China. A few months after the incident in London, the doctors checked Banks’s and Adams’s vision, balance, hearing, and cognitive skills, in a series of tests known as the Havana Protocol. Adams listed the symptoms that had persisted: migraines, swollen lymph nodes, and sore throat. A doctor told her, referring to the Havana victims, “Whatever you heard, those are not the same symptoms as the rest of the cohort.” Adams left with the distinct impression that the doctor wanted her to believe that she had “imagined the experience” in London.

Banks saw a different doctor at the State Department. After the tests for balance and cognition, the doctor said, “You passed.” Banks tried to explain that some days were better than others, and that on bad days the pain was more severe. “I was having a good day,” Banks told a colleague. But the doctor was skeptical. Adams and Banks reported back to Kupperman. “They said, ‘We know our bodies and we know these symptoms and it’s not normal,’ ” he recalled. “Nobody did any serious medical diagnostics, which is just appalling.” Bolton was frustrated, too. “But, after a while, there really wasn’t much more I could do,” he told me. “You can say to somebody only so many times, ‘What’s the cause?,’ and then have them reply, ‘I don’t know.’ ” His takeaway was that C.I.A. officials believed the Havana Syndrome was an incoherent collection of psychosomatic reports, groupthink, and “disparate mental conditions.” He told me, “They just weren’t going to pursue it.”

…

That November, Adams, who lives in Virginia, was walking her dog with a friend, when she noticed that an S.U.V. was parked near her house, and that a man on the other side of the street seemed to be following her. As she stood across from him, she felt an intense pain in her head, which made her double over. She also heard a sharp, high-pitched ringing noise, which was completely different from the sound she had heard in London. Adams’s friend heard it, too, and felt the pressure in her head, though not as acutely. Adams reported the incident to White House security officials. This time, they were very concerned. Robert O’Brien, the new national-security adviser, thought that high-level officials like him, and Cabinet members, were relatively safe, but that other government employees — special assistants, schedulers, diplomats — who had access to valuable information by the nature of their jobs, were the main targets of whoever or whatever was causing the syndrome.

…

In the fall of 2020, Vandroff and his colleagues were shocked by the new cases that came rolling in. One of the most dramatic episodes involved a U.S. military officer stationed in a country with a large Russian presence. As the officer pulled his car into a busy intersection, he suddenly felt as though his head were going to explode. His two-year-old son, in a car seat in the back, started screaming. As the officer sped out of the intersection, the pressure in his head ceased, and his son went quiet. A remarkably similar incident was reported by a C.I.A. officer who was stationed in the same city, and who had no connection to the military officer.

…

The Pentagon assembled its own task force. Part of Miller’s goal was to draw up “response options” — actions that the U.S. could take to deter Russia from targeting American officials. He and his allies wanted U.S. spies to harass and intimidate their Russian counterparts with various tactics — slashing G.R.U. officers’ tires, for example, or leaving threatening messages for them in their homes and in their cars. But career professionals at the Pentagon objected, saying that the C.I.A. still wasn’t certain that the Russians were responsible. “You’re not going to jack up another major power, certainly not publicly, and you’re not going to do something retaliatory unless you’ve really got the goods,” the former N.S.C. official told me. More than four years have passed since the initial incidents in Havana, and the government still doesn’t have the goods.

There have been developments outside the government, however. In December, 2020, Pottinger convened a meeting in which top officials were briefed by a Stanford University professor of medicine and microbiology named David Relman, who had served as the chairman of a committee formed by the National Academy of Sciences to study the Havana Syndrome. Relman’s committee issued a report in which it concluded that the symptoms of many of the victims were consistent with exposure to pulsed microwave radiation. The report also mentioned Russia in the context of the country’s long history of experimentation with microwave technology. Though the language in the report was carefully hedged, Pottinger said, “that was the first thing that anybody could look at and hold tangibly and say, ‘At least now we know it’s not pesticides.’ ”

…

In 2020, Adrian Banks visited the doctors at the University of Pennsylvania, who found “suspected scar tissue and damage to the ear, possibly caused by significant sinus and ear infections.” More recently, Banks has been diagnosed as having hearing loss, and told a colleague, “I have ringing in my ear and pressure changes. I have migraines frequently. I get dizzy. I am still struggling.” Adams, too, is still experiencing health problems.

The N.S.C. official who fell ill in November, 2020, on the White House grounds continues to suffer, on occasion, from “excruciating” migraines and cognitive problems, including difficulty with his memory. “What is so incredibly frustrating and demoralizing about the experience is the lack of definitiveness,” he told a colleague. “At the end of the day, I can’t prove this happened to me. But the uncertainty, the derailment, the ongoing effects personally and to my career — those are real.”

…

CIA Doctor Investigating Havana Syndrome Was a Victim of it Himself: ’I Couldn’t Believe It’

September 27, 2022
Gino Spocchia | The Independent

A physician who was sent to investigate a spate of mysterious neurological illnesses amongst Americans stationed in Cuba has said he himself was surprised to experience “Havana Syndrome”.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday using a pseudonym, Dr Paul Andrews said he thought he was “dreaming” when he began experiencing a ringing in his ear, nausea and disorientation after arriving in Havana in 2017 to investigate the illness for the CIA.

…

Suspecting some kind of sonic attack — a cause that since been largely ruled out — Dr Andrews said he went into his hotel bathroom for 45 minutes with headphones on, but continued to encounter symptoms associated with “Havana Syndrome”.

He then checked the hotel bathroom “at least four or five times” to make sure he had his toothbrush while packing to leave, still experiencing a ringing in his ear, nausea and disorientation and a loss of balance, which he said was “way off”.

…

In June of this year, the State Department agreed to pay current and former staff and their families roughly $100,000 and $200,000 each, some of whom have continued to experience symptoms.

…

An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies

June 1, 2020
Health and Medicine Division, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

In late 2016, U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana, Cuba, began to report the development of an unusual set of symptoms and clinical signs. For some of these patients, their case began with the sudden onset of a loud noise, perceived to have directional features, and accompanied by pain in one or both ears or across a broad region of the head, and in some cases, a sensation of head pressure or vibration, dizziness, followed in some cases by tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo, and cognitive difficulties. Other personnel attached to the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China, reported similar symptoms and signs to varying degrees, beginning in the following year.

As of June 2020, many of these personnel continue to suffer from these and/or other health problems. Multiple hypotheses and mechanisms have been proposed to explain these clinical cases, but evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven, and the circumstances remain unclear.

…

A Secret War, Strange New Wounds, and Silence From the Pentagon

Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems. But the military struggled to understand what was wrong.

November 5, 2023
Dave Philipps | The New York Times

When Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.

The 21-year-old Marine was part of an artillery gun crew that fought against the Islamic State, and he knew that his unit’s huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.

A shiver went through him. He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.

A few days later, in the barracks not far away, a 22-year-old Marine named Austin Powell pounded on his neighbor’s door in tears and stammered: “There’s something in my room! I’m hearing something in my room!”

His neighbor, Brady Zipoy, 20, searched the room but found nothing.

“It’s all right — I’ve been having problems, too,” Lance Corporal Zipoy said, tapping his head. The day before, he bent down to tie his boots and was floored by a sudden avalanche of emotion so overwhelming and bizarre that he had no words for it. “We’ll go see the doc,” he told his friend. “We’ll get help.”

All through their unit — Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines — troops came home feeling cursed. And the same thing was happening in other Marine and Army artillery units.

An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

Interviews with more than 40 gun-crew veterans and their families in 16 states found that the military repeatedly struggled to determine what was wrong after the troops returned from Syria and Iraq.

…

A few gun-crew members were eventually given diagnoses of P.T.S.D., but to the crews that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.

…

Instead, in case after case, the military treated the crews’ combat injuries as routine psychiatric disorders, if they treated them at all. Troops were told they had attention deficit disorder or depression. Many were given potent psychotropic drugs that made it hard to function and failed to provide much relief.

Others who started acting strangely after the deployments were simply dismissed as problems, punished for misconduct and forced out of the military in punitive ways that cut them off from the veterans’ health care benefits that they now desperately need.

…

Lance Corporal Powell, who was hearing things in his room, left the Marines and became a tow-truck driver in Kentucky, but he kept having paralyzing panic attacks on the road. In 2018, a year and a half after returning from Syria, he shot himself.

His neighbor in the barracks, Lance Corporal Zipoy, moved back to his parents’ house in Minnesota and started college. In 2020 he began hearing voices and seeing hidden messages in street signs. A few days later, in the grips of a psychotic delusion, he entered a house he had never been in before and killed a man he had never met.

…

When Lance Corporal Ortiz started seeing a ghost a few days after returning from Syria in 2017, it didn’t occur to him that he had been hurt by his own cannon. Instead, he was convinced that the enemy had put a hex on him.

He tried to purify himself by lighting a fire on the beach near Camp Pendleton and burning his old combat gloves and journal from the deployment. But after the ashes cooled, the ghost was still there.

…

In 2021, he was forced out for willful misconduct and given an other-than-honorable discharge that cut him off from access to therapy, medication, disability payments and other support intended for wounded veterans.

…

When he returned home, screening tests said he was fine, but he was tormented by anxiety, sleep paralysis and hallucinations of a black demon standing over his bed.

After he left the Marine Corps, he became depressed and suicidal. He went to a veterans’ hospital for help. Though he never experienced anything he considered particularly traumatic in Syria, his nightmares and anxiety were diagnosed as P.T.S.D. “From what, though?” he said in the interview. “I could never understand it.”

…

She felt so uneasy by the end of the game that she asked another soldier to escort her home. The soldier went into the house first and emerged a few minutes later shaking his head. He had found Sergeant Chatfield’s body in the garage, behind a stack of boxes. The sergeant had taken his own life.

He left a short goodbye text, but said nothing that shed light on his decision. The Army investigated, but didn’t uncover anything that his wife, Janae’ Chatfield, felt could explain it.

“None of it made any sense,” she said in an interview. “I don’t know why it happened. I don’t think I ever will.”

All four of the artillery batteries examined by The Times have had at least one suicide — a striking pattern, since death by suicide is rare even in high-risk populations. Some batteries have had several, and many service members said in interviews that they had tried to kill themselves.

A friend of Sergeant Chatfield’s, Staff Sgt. Joshua James, changed from an easygoing young father into an alcoholic, afflicted by anxiety and headaches.

He seemed to grow worse every year. In 2021, an M.R.I. detected an abnormality deep in his brain, but doctors said they were not sure what caused it or what could be done. In November 2022, he was on a road trip with his family when he got into an argument with his wife. With no warning, he shot himself in the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant.

…

Andrew Johnson, a tall, strong ammunition loader who stood right behind a cannon for thousands of shots, came home speaking with a noticeable delay, as if on a bad phone line. He was seeing flashes of light he couldn’t explain. He grew suspicious of fellow soldiers and stayed isolated in his room. A year after coming home, he tried to overdose with sleeping pills.

“I can’t even remember what I was dealing with,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview in Jackson, Miss., where he now lives. “I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. I had a girlfriend. But I just couldn’t function. I had this deep feeling of being all alone.”

The Army started him on therapy for depression and gave him pills to help with nightmares.

He was transferred to a new unit that knew nothing about his blast exposure in Iraq. He acquired a reputation for being unstable, and was reprimanded for saying inappropriate things to other soldiers and shoving a medic. Last year, the Army forced him out for misconduct and gave him an other-than-honorable discharge.

He got a string of jobs but lost them. He tried to go to school twice and failed. He went to a veterans’ hospital seeking help, but was turned away because his discharge barred him from receiving care there.

He is now homeless and sleeps in his car. Recently, he said, he attempted suicide again.

Earlier this year, he started seeing things. Shadows cast by streetlights seemed to be crawling. At first, there were transient flickers of motion on the edge of his vision. Then came full hallucinations of creatures moving through the darkness.

“Now they are very close, like at arm’s length, and very real,” he said in a phone call from his car one night. “Honestly, I see it right now, and it’s freaking me out.”

Alex Sabol loaded charges right next to Mr. Johnson in Iraq. He had many advantages that Mr. Johnson never did. He was honorably discharged and given a monthly veterans’ pension. His family pays for a private psychotherapist. Even so, he has struggled.

After the deployment, he felt as though his moods had gone feral. The Army gave him a diagnosis of anxiety, depression, attention-deficit disorder and P.T.S.D.

“My friends, my family, I don’t think they understood why I couldn’t hold it together,” he said in an interview.

He is now in college. He tries to eat well and exercise. On a spring morning, a pair of rock-climbing shoes hung by the door of the light-filled cabin where he lives in the Appalachian Mountains.

But he has terrifying mood swings. Last year, he started punching himself. In the fall, he found himself in tears in his kitchen, in a push-up position hovering over a butcher knife, unsure why he had an overwhelming urge to plunge it into his heart.

…

Hackers Could Get Inside Your Brain

Experts warn of growing threat from monitoring and controlling neural signals

August 4, 2016
Stacy Liberatore | The Daily Mail

Cyberthieves might be mining personal information from your brainwaves at this very moment.

And although this may sound like a plot from a science fiction film, it is a growing concern among researchers who have demanded officials implement a privacy and security framework to block hackers from reading our neural signals.

…

Brain-computer Interfaces (BCIs) are widely used in the medical field and other industries, including marketing, gaming and entertainment.

Although this technology was initially created to improve and enhance the quality of human lives, in the wrong hands it will wreak havoc on them.

Researchers at the University of Washington say that time is running out and officials need to employ a privacy and security framework to stop those who would use our own brains against us, reports Motherboard.

‘There’s actually very little time,’ electrical engineer Howard Chizeck told Victoria Turk with Motherboard over Skype.

‘If we don’t address this quickly, it’ll be too late.’

…

Brainjacking — A New Cyber-Security Threat

August 23, 2016
Laurie Pycroft, PhD Candidate | University of Oxford

In a recent paper that I and several of my colleagues at Oxford Functional Neurosurgery wrote, we discussed a new frontier of security threat: brain implants. Unauthorised control of brain implants, or “brainjacking”, has been discussed in science fiction for decades but with advances in implant technology it is now starting to become possible.

The most common type of brain implant is the deep brain stimulation (DBS) system. It consists of implanted electrodes positioned deep inside the brain connected to wires running under the skin, which carry signals from an implanted stimulator. The stimulator consists of a battery, a small processor, and a wireless communication antenna …

…

Examples of possible attacks include altering stimulation settings so that patients with chronic pain are caused even greater pain than they would experience without stimulation. Or a Parkinson’s patient could have their ability to move inhibited.

A sophisticated attacker could potentially even induce behavioural changes such as hypersexuality or pathological gambling, or even exert a limited form of control over the patient’s behaviour by stimulating parts of the brain involved with reward learning in order to reinforce certain actions.

Although these hacks would be difficult to achieve as they would require a high level of technological competence and the ability to monitor the victim, a sufficiently determined attacker could manage it.

… Consider what a terrorist could do with access to a politician’s mind or how coercive blackmail would be if someone could alter how you act and think. These are scenarios that are unlikely to remain purely in the realm of science fiction for much longer.

…

Brainjacking: Implant Security Issues in Invasive Neuromodulation

May 5, 2016
Laurie Pycroft, Sandra G. Boccard, Sarah L.F. Owen, John F. Stein, James J. Fitzgerald, Alexander L. Green, Tipu Z. Aziz
World Neurosurgery, Volume 92 | DOI: 10.1016/j.wneu.2016.05.010

The security of medical devices is critical to good patient care, especially when the devices are implanted. In light of recent developments in information security, there is reason to be concerned that medical implants are vulnerable to attack.

The ability of attackers to exert malicious control over brain implants (“brainjacking”) has unique challenges that we address in this review, with particular focus on deep brain stimulation implants. To illustrate the potential severity of this risk, we identify several mechanisms through which attackers could manipulate patients if unauthorized access to an implant can be achieved. These include blind attacks in which the attacker requires no patient-specific knowledge and targeted attacks that require patient-specific information.

Blind attacks include cessation of stimulation, draining implant batteries, inducing tissue damage, and information theft. Targeted attacks include impairment of motor function, alteration of impulse control, modification of emotions or affect, induction of pain, and modulation of the reward system.

We also discuss the limitations inherent in designing implants and the trade-offs that must be made to balance device security with battery life and practicality.

…

Mind-Reading Technology Has Arrived

An AI-powered “brain decoder” can now read your thoughts with surprising accuracy

May 4, 2023
Sigal Samuel | Vox

For a few years now, I’ve been writing articles on neurotechnology with downright Orwellian headlines. Headlines that warn “Facebook is building tech to read your mind” and “Brain-reading tech is coming.”

Well, the technology is no longer just “coming.” It’s here.

With the help of AI, scientists from the University of Texas at Austin have developed a technique that can translate people’s brain activity — like the unspoken thoughts swirling through our minds — into actual speech, according to a study published in Nature.

In the past, researchers have shown that they can decode unspoken language by implanting electrodes in the brain and then using an algorithm that reads the brain’s activity and translates it into text on a computer screen. But that approach is very invasive, requiring surgery. It appealed only to a subset of patients, like those with paralysis, for whom the benefits were worth the costs.

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Now we’ve got a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) that can decode continuous language from the brain, so somebody else can read the general gist of what we’re thinking even if we haven’t uttered a single word.

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Semantic Reconstruction of Continuous Language from Non-Invasive Brain Recordings

May 1, 2023
Jerry Tang, Amanda LeBel, Shailee Jain and Alexander G. Huth
Nature Neuroscience, Volume 26 | DOI: 10.1038/s41593–23–01304–9

A brain–computer interface that decodes continuous language from non-invasive recordings would have many scientific and practical applications. Currently, however, non-invasive language decoders can only identify stimuli from among a small set of words or phrases.

Here we introduce a non-invasive decoder that reconstructs continuous language from cortical semantic representations recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Given novel brain recordings, this decoder generates intelligible word sequences that recover the meaning of perceived speech, imagined speech and even silent videos, demonstrating that a single decoder can be applied to a range of tasks.

We tested the decoder across cortex and found that continuous language can be separately decoded from multiple regions. As brain–computer interfaces should respect mental privacy, we tested whether successful decoding requires subject cooperation and found that subject cooperation is required both to train and to apply the decoder.

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New and Emerging Technologies Need Urgent Oversight and Robust Transparency: UN Experts

June 2, 2023
Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

UN experts today called for greater transparency, oversight, and regulation to address the negative impacts of new and emerging digital tools and online spaces on human rights.

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The experts expressed concern about the proliferation of invasive spyware and a growing array of targeted surveillance technologies used to unlawfully target human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and civil society in all regions.

“We condemn the alarming use of spyware and surveillance technologies in violation of human rights and the broader chilling effect of such unlawful measures on the legitimate work of human rights defenders and on civic space worldwide, often under the guise of national security and counter-terrorism measures,” they said.

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In a Letter to Nils Melzer, Special Rapporteur, United Nations

June 21, 2020
Derrick Robinson, Executive Director
People Against Covert Torture and Surveillance (PACTS)
United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

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The torture most often manifests with some type of directed energy weapon or microwave weapon attack similar to what happened to the United States diplomats to Cuba and China recently … with often very serious health effects, such as heart attacks, strokes, cancers, headaches, blurred vision, sleep deprivation, loss of balance, impaired speech, memory loss, breathing difficulties, muscle cramps, and more.

The 24-hour surveillance and harassment activities that often accompany the weapons attacks amount to psychological torture and manifest in the following ways: workplace harassment, vehicular stalking, staged accidents, group stalking, surreptitious home entries, appliance tampering, vandalism, computer hacking, sabotage of relationships with family and friends, compromise of business contacts and much more.

We believe the source of these attacks to stem from federal government agencies and major corporations, as explained to us a few years ago by a corporate whistleblower who defected from a company that he claims performed such targeting upon homeless men and innocent citizens in the Seattle, Washington area.

We have attempted resolution of these issues through legislators in our United States Congress, as well as state, and local officials, however, most seem to be unaware of the existence and importance of addressing our claims. This hesitance to acknowledge our predicament has led to the perpetuation of this covert targeting program and to the continued suffering and actual physical and/or psychological torture and ill-treatment of tens of thousands of targeted individuals in our global community.

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Guinea Pigs: Technologies of Control

December 8, 2014
John Hall, MD
Strategic Book Publishing | ISBN-13: 978–1631355523

For years the federal government has sought to remotely control human behavior. Starting with the CIA projects MKULTRA and MKSEARCH in the 1950s, the American public has been unwitting guinea pigs in a multitude of non-consensually performed experiments that have continued into the 21st century.

The recent revelations regarding the extent of NSA eavesdropping is only the tip of the iceberg. We are currently in an information war and a mind war, where our privacy and autonomy as human beings are at stake.

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Mind Games: The Tortured Lives of ‘Targeted Individuals’

Thousands of people think that the government is using implanted chips and electronic beams to control their minds. They are desperate to prove they aren’t delusional.

March 4, 2018
Laura Yan | Wired

In the morning there were around 50 attendees gathered in the presentation room. The day began with a talk by Matthew Aaron, a PhD in neurobiology who was working on an article on bioluminescent fish for Nature magazine when his targeting began. Today, Aaron works as a science consultant in Washington, DC, and he began his talk with a disclaimer: His presentation was aimed at the general public, not the expert audience in front of him. (“By being targeted, you know more than a non-expert could ever hope to know,” he said.) …

Through the next hour, he detailed evidence of his own targeting and the potential technologies used against him: from low-intensity microwaves from the neighbor next door to military electronic beams. His targeting began in his apartment and eventually became so bad that he ripped off sections of the drywall — spots, he believed, that emitted “hot electric microwave energy.” Later, after he’d fled Vancouver, Canada, he examined the pieces under a blacklight. Around the spots he’d removed, he found “rings of fluorescent material.”

They were full of information and desperate to learn more. They were engineers and scientists and artists, former government and military employees, and some, like Liza, had driven more than 2,000 miles to attend.

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How Do Neural Implants Work?

Neural implants are used for deep brain stimulation, vagus nerve stimulation, and mind-controlled prostheses

January 20, 2020
Emily Waltz | IEEE Spectrum

It sounds like science fiction, but a neural implant could, many years from now, read and edit a person’s thoughts. Neural implants are already being used to treat disease, rehabilitate the body after injury, improve memory, communicate with prosthetic limbs, and more.

The U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding toward this sector. Independent research papers on the topic appear in top journals almost weekly.

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With these devices, it’s possible to record native neural activity, allowing researchers to observe the patterns by which healthy neural circuits communicate. Neural implants can also send pulses of electricity to neurons, overriding native firing patterns and forcing the neurons to communicate in a different way.

In other words, neural implants enable scientists to hack into the nervous system. Call it neuromodulation, electroceuticals, or bioelectronics — interventions involving neural implants have the potential to become tremendously powerful medical tools.

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Engineers have concocted dust-sized brain implants, electrodes that climb nerves like a vine, electrodes made from flexible materials such as a nanoelectronic thread, stent-like electrodes, or “stentrodes,” that can get to the brain via blood vessels and record electrical activity, injectable electronic mesh made from silicon nanowires, electrodes that can be injected into the body as a liquid and then harden into a stretchy taffy-like substance, and more.

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Injectable Probes Could Transform Brain Monitoring

Conductive polymer mesh could be a boon to brain research

December 1, 2015
Seth Fletcher | Scientific American

So far the researchers have tested the mesh, which is embedded with electronic sensors, in living mice. Once it has been proved safe, it could be used in people to study how cognition arises from the action of individual neurons and to treat diseases such as Parkinson’s.

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Functional Two-Dimensional Materials for Bioelectronic Neural Interfacing

January 7, 2023
Mohammad Karbalaei Akbari, Nasrin Siraj Lopa, Marina Shahriari, Aliasghar Najafzadehkhoee, Dušan Galusek, Serge Zhuiykov
Journal of Functional Biomaterials, Volume 14 | DOI: 10.3390/jfb14010035

… To fulfill the requirements of high spatial and temporal resolution recording of neural activities, electrical, optical and biosensing technologies are combined to develop multifunctional bioelectronic and neuro-signal probes.

These characteristics are beneficial factors for development of ultrathin-film electrodes for flexible neural interfacing with minimum invasive chronic interfaces to the brain cells and cortex. The combination of incredible properties of 2D nanostructure places them in a unique position, as the main materials of choice, for multifunctional reception of neural activities.

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Remote Targeted Electrical Stimulation

June 9, 2023
Taylor Webb, Rahul Cheeniyil, Matthew Wilson and Jan Kubanek
Journal of Neural Engineering | DOI: 10.1088/1741–2552/acd95c

The ability to generate electric fields in specific targets remotely would transform manipulations of processes that rest on electrical signaling. This article shows that focal electric fields are generated from distance by combining two orthogonal, remotely applied energies — magnetic and focused ultrasonic fields.

This approach opens a new set of applications in which electric fields are generated at high spatiotemporal resolution within intact biological tissues or materials, thus circumventing the limitations of traditional electrode-based procedures.

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Nonresonant Powering of Injectable Nanoelectrodes Enables Wireless Deep Brain Stimulation in Freely Moving Mice

January 13, 2021
K L Kozielski, A Jahanshahi, H B Gilbert, Ö Erin, D Francisco, F Alosaimi, Y Temel, M Sitti
Science Advances, Volume 7, Issue 3 | DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc4189

Devices that electrically modulate the deep brain have enabled important breakthroughs in the management of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Such devices are typically centimeter-scale, requiring surgical implantation and wired-in powering, which increases the risk of hemorrhage, infection, and damage during daily activity. Using smaller, remotely powered materials could lead to less invasive neuromodulation.

Here, we present injectable, magnetoelectric nanoelectrodes that wirelessly transmit electrical signals to the brain in response to an external magnetic field. This mechanism of modulation requires no genetic modification of neural tissue, allows animals to freely move during stimulation, and uses nonresonant carrier frequencies.

Magnetoelectric materials present a versatile platform technology for less invasive, deep brain neuromodulation.

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Blackrock Neurotech Reveals Neuralace™: 10,000+ Channel Next-Gen BCI

Patent pending, brain-conforming implant unveiled at Society for Neuroscience

November 16, 2022
Press Release | Blackrock Neurotech

Blackrock Neurotech, a leading brain-computer interface company, revealed its next-generation neural interface, Neuralace™, this week at Society for Neuroscience 2022. The ultra-high channel count, flexible electrode gives an important glimpse into the innovative technology that will fuel the company’s future BCIs.

“Neuralace demonstrates our belief in where the science must go in order to unlock the true potential of BCI,” said Marcus Gerhardt, co-founder and CEO of Blackrock. “This concept technology is the start of Blackrock’s journey toward whole-brain data capture that will transform the way neurological disorders are treated.”

Neuralace is designed to capitalize on this need; with 10,000+ channels and the entire scalable system integrated on an extremely flexible lace-structured chip, it could capture data that is orders of magnitude greater than existing electrodes, allowing for an exponential increase in capability and intuitiveness.

If our BCI today can help people move and feel again with only six hundred channels, imagine what we can do with ten thousand or more,” said Florian Solzbacher, Blackrock co-founder and president. “We are actively imagining new therapies–for anxiety, depression, and other neurological disorders–that this technology will enable. This is a glimpse of what’s possible in the future of BCI.”

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Neuralace’s adaptable structure also means improved biocompatibility. The body’s immune response has been a challenge for all neural implants, but Neuralace’s porous form factor would allow more natural integration with neural tissue, supporting the flow of cellular fluids and diffusion of biomolecules that could otherwise trigger immune response and/or inflammation.

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Elon Musk’s Brain Implant Startup Is Ready to Start Surgery

Elon Musk’s Brain Implant Startup Is Ready to Start Surgery; Neuralink has FDA clearance to start messing with people’s heads — and not just figuratively.

November 7, 2023
Ashlee Vance | Bloomberg News

When the robot finishes, the missing piece of skull will have been replaced with a computer the size of a quarter that’s meant to stay there for years. Its job will be to read and analyze the person’s brain activity, then relay that information wirelessly to a nearby laptop or tablet.

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Eavesdropping on the Brain With 10,000 Electrodes

Exponential growth comes to neural implants

May 28, 2022
Barundeb Dutta | IEEE Spectrum, Volume 59 | DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2022.9792189

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In 2010, I met with leading neuroscientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to explore how we might use advanced microelectronics to invent a new sensor. Our goal: to listen in on the electrical conversations taking place among thousands of neurons at once in any given thimbleful of brain tissue.

Timothy D. Harris, a senior scientist at HHMI, told me that “we need to record every spike from every neuron” …

For an electrical engineer, those requirements add up to a very tall order. But more than a decade of R&D by a global, multidisciplinary team of engineers, neuroscientists, and software designers has at last met the challenge, producing a remarkable new tool that is now being put to use in hundreds of labs around the globe.

We named the system Neuropixels because it functions like an imaging device, but one that records electrical rather than photonic fields. Early experiments already underway — including some in humans — have helped explore age-old questions about the brain.

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Thanks to an enormous amount of materials-science research and some techniques borrowed from microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), we are now able to control the internal stresses created during the deposition and etching of the silicon shanks and the titanium nitride electrodes so that the shanks consistently come out almost perfectly straight, despite being only 23 micrometers (µm) thick …

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… It has been fascinating to see the projects that have sprung up: For example, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle recently used Neuropixels to create a database of activity from 100,000-odd neurons involved in visual perception, while a group at Stanford University used the devices to map how the sensation of thirst manifests across 34 different parts of the mouse brain.

We have begun fabricating longer probes of up to 5 cm and have defined a path to probes of 15 cm — big enough to reach the center of a human brain. The first trials of Neuropixels in humans were a success, and soon we expect the devices will be used to better position the implanted stimulators that quiet the tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease, with 10-µm accuracy …

The Half-Second Delay: What Follows?

August 22, 2006
By Dylan Wiliam | Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Volume 14, Issue 1
DOI: 10.1080/14681360500487470

There is an increasing body of evidence that only a minuscule proportion of the sensory data processed by the unconscious mind (capable of processing approximately 11 million bits per second) is referred to the conscious mind (capable of processing approximately 50 bits per second).

These findings challenge the primacy and supremacy of conscious processing of information on which a substantial proportion of educational practice and policy is based, and suggest a re‐evaluation of the nature of teacher competence and expertise.

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The Baton Rouge Gunman and ‘Targeted Individuals’

July 19, 2016
The New York Times

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Louisiana investigators have yet to describe a motive for Mr. Long’s carefully planned ambush that left three law enforcement officers dead and three others injured on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La.

But Mr. Long, who was killed in the shootout, said in online posts and videos that he was a victim of a vast government conspiracy that watches and harasses everyday Americans.

Numbering in the thousands, the self-described targeted individuals, or T.I.s, say that they are being tortured with mind-control weapons and put under surveillance by armies of covert agents known as gang stalkers.

Mental health professionals say a large number of people involved in the discussions appear to suffer from psychotic illnesses such as delusional disorder or schizophrenia … (they) note that people suffering from psychosis often spiral into isolation and depression but rarely resort to violence.

Myron May, who in 2014 shot three people at Florida State University, left behind videos in which he meticulously described his experience of being gang-stalked. And many members of the movement believe that Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013, also identified as a targeted individual.

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The Nightmare World of Gang Stalking

November 30, 2017
Vice News

More than 10,000 people worldwide claim they’re the victims of a vast organized surveillance effort designed to ruin their lives, a phenomenon known as “gang stalking.”

Mental health experts see gang stalking as a symptom of paranoia, but the self-identified victims who insist what they’re experiencing is real have come together online and in support groups to share their stories.

VICE met up with a handful of Americans who claim their lives have been derailed by gang stalking to understand what serious consequences the phenomenon presents.

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‘Organized Stalking’ Ads on Vancouver Transit a Mental Health Concern, Experts Say

TransLink says, as a public body, it must accept a certain amount of ‘advocacy advertising’

September 11, 2018
Liam Britten | CBC News

Mental health experts are troubled that a “delusional” belief system — which leads believers to fear they are constantly being watched or harassed and has even been linked to mass shootings — is now advertised on Vancouver’s public transit system.

The ads are about beliefs called “organized stalking” or “gang stalking”. It holds that conspirators, perhaps dozens of them, are stalking and harassing “targeted individuals” by damaging their personal property in subtle ways or spreading rumours about them.

Some targeted individuals also believe they are victims of “electronic assaults”: torture via weapons from sci-fi movies like microwave rays and body-implanted microchips often with mind-control powers.

However, researchers agree these beliefs are usually caused by some sort of mental disorder.

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