Is the Military Developing Mind Reading Tech?

No, but It is Pushing Tech that Can F^*k with your Brain

In James Corbett’s recent article, “The Battle for Your Brain is ALREADY Underway,” he lists various DARPA-funded projects developing technologies that, allegedly, will soon be able to read and control your thoughts. Researchers working in this field have been making such claims for decades now. Near the end of the article, Corbett poses the question of whether or not various DARPA press releases and research project publications might be part of a massive propaganda campaign: “It's enough to make one wonder if the trumpeting of these neuroweapons is itself part of the infowar.”

That is an important point to consider. Why would the military and tech developers want the public to believe that scientists are already able to implant false memories and to read minds? To get funding? Is the DARPA brain initiative just a giant grift project sucking up many billions of taxpayer dollars?

That’s very likely a big part of it. Corbett mentions the infamous Dr. James Giordano, whose job it is to secure funding for “mind control” projects. He comes off as a carnival hawker, trying to draw you into his freak show. And if you go into the tent, you will find none of what is promised. Corbett notices that Giordano’s presentations are “well-rehearsed patter” (what magicians say to distract you while they perform a sleight of hand) and that seems exactly right.

James Giodano, PhD

But other than financial greed, a more nefarious intention might be at play as well. Some folks over at DARPA seem to want soldiers, and civilians too, to be willing to submit themselves to neural experiments, so that the researchers can learn how to better confuse, disorient, disable, and maim people. It’s the military, after all. The raison d’être of a military is to destroy things. It does not seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge nor for the purpose of improving life.

Think about how the military handled the Covid epidemic. Lock down the people. Contain, fight, or go to war with the virus. No talk of treatments or cures or improving health.

I see no reason to believe that this DARPA-funded research does anything but extend the psychological torture and conditioning methods pioneered by Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner.

The Military Cannot Produce Mind Reading Technology

Although brainwashing techniques can be improved and perfected with new technologies, there are no technologies that can be used to transfer digitized thoughts into or out of our heads. Although unethical researchers can lie to subjects and they can manipulate their feelings about memories, they will never be able to download or upload thoughts.

Even if researchers were seeking a better understanding of cognitive processes in order to covertly “read” terrorists’ minds, they won’t be able to do it. Even if researchers were interested in figuring out how to artificially put nice thoughts into people’s head, they can’t do it.

How can you be so sure? a number of my stack readers have asked. Isn’t most of the DARPA research classified?

1. I have read a lot of the unclassified DARPA “mind control/reading” research, and the assumptions about what a thought process is and how to model it are wrong. We can assume that the classified research also works with the same incorrect model. According to DARPA, their Neural Engineering System Design seeks to translate the “electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain [into] the ones and zeroes that constitute information technology.” They are assuming that neural “language” is a linear sequence of neurons switching on and off. Neurons are not like computer switches. Neurons have multiple states and the language of neurons is more likely expressed by the dynamic shapes of emergent brains waves.

2. Thoughts are semiotic processes. I work in Biosemiotics, the only field that formally investigates biological sign processes. Cognitive science doesn’t have a theory of semiosis. Neurology doesn’t have a theory about what a biological sign is or how meaning emerges from signs. Biology doesn’t even have a theory of signs and most biologists believe that their use of terms such as “chemical signal” and “cellular communication” are just metaphors for chemical processes that can be described reductively without appealing to concepts such as the “meaning” of a molecule in a signal pathway. In this issue of the Journal of Physiology, you can read about my biosemiotic approach to understanding how new meaning emerges in biological systems.

3. The DARPA-funded “mind control” researchers adopt a computer science view of semiotics, assuming that it only involves symbols or codes, which are encrypted signs. The process of encryption is to arbitrarily connect one pattern to another. For example, in Morse code -.-- . ... stands for “yes.” Encrypted signs are artificially created by an external encryptor. Signs in biological processes are not artificial. They are created as relations within contexts given self-reinforcing selective effects. Biological signs emerge out of biological processes. Those who are trying to “decode” thoughts are working with a very simplistic and woefully incorrect conception of biological sign processes.

If it Could be Done, What Would Mind Reading Tech Involve?

If thoughts were codes or symbols (and they are not), in order to decrypt them, researchers would have to invent new safe technology (fMRIs are not safe for extended use) to get access to detailed 3-D maps of brain processes and be able to observe them in real time. Then they would have to correlate those emergent patterns with individuals thoughts. This would require a computer-assisted training period, during which the subject tells the researcher what he is thinking while the researcher is recording the activity, digitizing the pattern and feeding it to a computer, which, theoretically, would then be able to categorize the different patterns according to what the subject described.

Alternatively, the researchers would present sensory information to the subject in order to try correlate the inputs with observed brain activity. The training for each kind of thought would have to be done over and over, so that the AI-assisted computer could form a map of the essential shape of that bioelectric pattern and identify it later. This lengthy process would have to be done with every different thought.

If researchers were to learn what kinds of thoughts correlate with specific brain wave activity in one individual, they would not be able generalize this information to other individuals. There is no universal brain wave code that is the same in all people. Furthermore, the brain is a very dynamic organ whose neurons are moving around and forming different connections all the time, such that the pattern learned one week one might change significantly a week later. This is what happened with the Neuralink experiments on primates. The primate’s motor cortex pattern that was identified and linked to drawing a specific letter or number changed significantly after about five days. I reckon the human subjects with Neuralink implants have to continually retrain the AI assistant, which allows them to click and swipe, to keep it current.

What Can Current Technologies Do?

Most of the “mind-reading” technology projects involve procedures that insert some tools into the brain to pick up (a very limited amount of) neural activity. These tools are designed to detect when a neuron or a group of neurons has an electrical discharge. The tools then have to be able to amplify the discharge they’ve detected so that the researchers can receive that information. Even though the emergent pattern created at another level by groups of cells cannot be inferred from the limited sample, researchers call this “reading the mind.”

In order for the researchers to “control the mind,” they have to be able to get the tool implanted in the brain to discharge electrical activity. This has been accomplished in several animal experiments. However, this procedure is only useful for getting subjects to feel fear, confusion, or pleasure. This procedure would not useful for getting subjects to think certain thoughts that are not their own.

The field of optogenetics which uses light to detect and to affect neural activity is probably the most advanced method in the area of “mind reading” and “mind control” research. In his article, Corbett mentions optogenetics as well as “neural dust” technology that is activated by ultrasound. These technologies are concerning insofar as they seem like they could be deployed using stealth methods, through aerosols or injections and activated by remote sensors and emitters. The worry is that enemy forces could implant these mind reading and mind controlling devices without our consent or even knowledge.

And it is true that some DARPA contractors talk about doing this to the enemy du jour.

Using Light to Beam in Thoughts

But let’s briefly look at a paper on optogenetics scarily entitled, “Inception of a false memory by optogenetic manipulation of a hippocampal memory engram” by Liu et al. The authors claim to have been able to insert a false memory into a mouse brain. This was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Biology. That’s pretty much the top tier biology publication.

In this experiment, they first performed a new, rather elaborate, and really interesting, procedure to identify and tag the groups of neurons that are activated during an activity, and then they figured out how to stimulate those neurons with light. That’s what “optogenetic manipulation” in the title means. An “engram” just means the identified group of neurons associated with a memory.

They used a virus to selectively infect neurons with DNA from bacteria that produces a protein that is affected by light. Then they implanted fiber optics in order to get light into the brain to affect those genetically-altered cells that express the bacteria protein.

After getting these light-sensitive and light-making tools into the mouse brain, they then put the mouse in Cage A and it searched the cage. They were able to identify and tag the parts of the brain that were active during searching of Cage A. Then they put the mouse in a different kind of cage, Cage B, and they applied shock to the mouse’s feet, while at the same time activating the fiber optics to produce light to stimulate the area of its brain that was associated with the memory of Cage A.

Later, after they let the mouse rest, they put it back in Cage A, and it was fearful that it was going to be shocked. It froze. Even though it had never been shocked in Cage A, it had come to associate its memory of Cage A with being shocked in Cage B.

Despite what is claimed in the title, this isn’t implanting a false memory. The mouse has a real memory of being in Cage A. The researchers have simply caused a false association of that memory with something painful. This is classical conditioning. Extending Ivan Pavlov’s methods, they induced post traumatic stress disorder in the poor mouse.

But they could have traumatized the mouse without performing this elaborate set up. It is not necessary to manually stimulate the area of the brain to trigger a memory, if you have some other way to do that. If the experiment were being done on a person, for example, the researchers could have just mentioned Cage A or shown images of Cage A while shocking the subject to get similar results, perhaps.

Also, I note that the memory of Cage A is a spatial memory for the mouse, formed with the aid of motor skills and by activating motor neurons. I would guess that an “engram,” a physical map of a spatial memory, can be identified fairly easily. On the contrary, if a researcher wanted to create a false negative association about RFK, Jr., say, in a human subject, it would be much more difficult to locate an “engram” of the subject’s memory or idea of RFK, Jr. in order to manually stimulate that memory while shocking the subject. A researcher could, however, do a Clockwork Orange procedure on the subject easily enough to make him associate fear with something else. No genetically modified light sensing cells or implanted fiber optics would be needed.

When you get past the title of the paper or the headline of the article claiming some huge advance has been made toward being able to put thoughts in people’s heads or to read minds or whatever, the actual experimental results invariably report nothing of the sort.

Don’t Inhale the Neural Dust

Corbett mentions “Neural Dust,” a nano-device that can detect electrical discharges from neurons that was developed in 2016. The name makes the product sound, alarmingly, as if one might be able to inhale the technology. But, clicking on the link provided by Corbett, I found the device is not that small and should be called “Neural Rice” instead. The device is designed be surgically implanted in nerve tissue to detect activity

Neural Dust is more the size of Neural Rice

A search of “Neural Dust” on the DARPA website did not return any further updates on the project. But searching elsewhere, I did find an article by K. Patch et al., “Neural dust swept up in latest leap for bioelectronic medicine,” which reports that Iota, the company that developed the technology, was purchased by Astellas, which hopes to use “Neural Dust” and another Iota product called “StimDust” which is “about the size of the date on a US penny” that can stimulate nerves, according to Piech et al., for the “purposes of both disease surveillance and therapeutic intervention” in central nervous system disease.

What makes these devices attractive is the fact they do not need a battery because they are activated by ultrasound. But sonic waves are currently being investigated for contributing to possible organ damage.

Let me say something about the importance of waves in biology. Biological cells communicate with each other by electrical discharge and releasing molecules into the surrounding fluid milieu, which react and diffuse in specific ways that cause specific wave patterns. It is the shape of these wave patterns that appropriately constrain the subsequent behaviors of the cells. For example, it is well known that morphogenetic fields, which are active during development, give the shape and structure to the organism. Body plans are not encoded in the genome as such; they result from the constraining physics of reaction-diffusion processes. After maturity, cells continue to function and organize themselves using such constraints. Anything that disrupts communicating wave patterns—for example sonic waves or EMF waves or having two kinds of metals in the body, one positive, one negative—could potentially throw cellular communication out of whack.

Even without the wave disruption problem, inflammation will plague these grain-of-rice size devices. Any metal devices in the body can create allergies which manifest as brain fog, insomnia, and headaches—a very much under-explored cause of chronic illness. Further miniaturizing detector/stimulator devices probably won’t help. Nano-size particles may be even more of an irritant to biological cells.

Reading Thoughts Versus Reading Signals for Motor Control

In a previous essay, I have already critiqued the notion that tools such as Neuralink and other Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) allow people to control computers with their “thoughts.” In his essay, Corbett mentions “mind controlled” weapons, but technically these should be called “motor control cortex controlled” devices. These devices detect the electrical discharges going to muscles. They do not detect thought processes or the activity of the “mind.” All “mind reading” experiments detect the subject trying to move fingers, vocal cords, or lips etc.

When we use the word “mind,” we usually mean the emergent consciousness of a person, his thoughts; we do not mean electric discharges going to muscles. The researchers working on “mind controlled weapons” are not trying to read soldiers thoughts; they are merely trying to reduce the amount of time it takes for a soldier to fire his weapon. Following Corbett’s link describing this research, I found that, according to Jacob Robinson, at Rice University, this is the problem they are trying to solve:

“There’s this latency, where if I want to communicate with my machine, I have to send a signal from my brain to move my fingers or move my mouth to make a verbal command, and this limits the speed at which I can interact with either a cyber system or physical system. So the thought is maybe we could improve that speed of interaction.”

This is consistent with what Elon Musk frequently says about the ultimate objectives of Neuralink technology. He merely wants to speed up the “download time” of “bits” from the motor cortex to a computer.

Sometimes the superior soldier is the one who is not quite so impulsive.

Defuse the Fear-Mongering

As Corbett notes, perhaps informing “the public about these technologies is itself a ploy, one designed to instill fear and panic in us...to make us afraid of the awesome abilities of the fearsome neurological weapons of the US forces.”

In order to effectively brainwash a subject, you must first make her very afraid. If I were unethical, I might prod your amygdala, get you all worked up with fears so that you would doom scroll to the very end of this article. Would that help me convince people not to believe the hype about mind reading technology? Would it help me convince the Joe Rogans of the world not to get neuralinked in order to keep pace with AI?

Those of us who are watching out for psyops want to warn people of dangers, but I think it’s important that we be clear about what the real dangers are. None of the mind reading tech is able to read minds. It can be used for Pavlovian conditioning (associating one thing arbitrarily with another) and Skinner conditioning (using deprivation and reward to shape behaviors). I do not think it’s helpful to suggest that there is evidence that digitizing thoughts is possible. Accepting this also closes off the frightful possibility of merging AI and the brain.

Prompted by her own fear that the AI singularity is upon us, in her article “Weaponizing Reality: The Dawn of Neurowarfare,” Stavroula Pabst uncritically accepts the claims made in the headlines and thereby promotes the idea that the military will soon be employing this technology in warfare.

I looked through the research cited. My assessment is that DARPA is spending millions of dollars on research projects that shouldn’t have made it into a high school science fair. My guess is that due to a funding frenzy, some bigwigs’ pockets are being lined, while graduate students conduct meaningless research and publish it with provocative titles.

One experiment cited by Pabst is offered as proof that memory/learning of one rat can be directly transferred via a wire to the brain of another rat. “A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information,” by Miguel Pais-Vieira et al. describes how two rats were put into separate Skinner boxes. Detection devices were implanted into M1 cortexes of the rats and connected to each other. When the “encoder” rat pushed the correct lever (one of two) to get a reward, the electric discharge of that motor action was conveyed to the “decoder” rat. If the “decoder” rat subsequently pushed the correct lever, it was be rewarded.

From “A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information,” by Miguel Pais-Vieira et al.

However, the fact that the electrical pattern the “decoder” rat received was based on the pattern of another rat’s brain while it pushed a lever is completely irrelevant. The decoder rat could have received the rhythm of “Mary had a little Lamb” and the rat still would learned to hit the right lever if rewarded.

I have seen this experiment cited so many times as evidence of thought transfer technology.

Conclusions

Fear is used for brainwashing and propaganda. The military may not be able to read our thoughts through new technology, but they can very well train us like Pavlov’s dog and Skinner’s pigeons. The current technology offers new ways to do classical conditioning and associate positive or negative feelings with memories.

Why would they want to read our minds? The parasites at the top who are propagating this nonsense could not care less what we really think. They just want us to shut up and do as we are told.