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Moving closer to mind control
Brain scientists are on a roll. Concern about rising levels of mental distress have resulted in unprecedented levels of funding in the US and Europe. And a range of new technologies, from genetics to brain imaging, are offering extraordinary insights into the molecular and cellular processes underlying how we see, how we remember, why we become emotional.
Brain imaging has become familiar. Scanners, known by their initials — CAT, PET, MRI — began as clinical tools, enabling surgeons to identify potential tumours, the damage following a stroke or the diagnostic signs of incipient dementia. But neuroscientists quickly seized on their wider potential.
The images of regions of the brain “lighting up” when a person is thinking of their lover, imagining travelling from home to the shops, or solving a mathematical problem, have captured the imagination of researchers and public alike. What if they could do more?
Recently I published the results of an experiment in which we looked at the regions of the brain that became active when people chose between competing products in supermarkets. Major companies are starting to image the brains of potential customers to study how they respond to new designs or brands. They are beginning to speak of “neuromarketing” and “neuroeconomics”.
Such trends may be relatively innocuous, but the increasing state interest in what the images might reveal is less so. Specifically, what if brain imaging could predict future behaviour, or indicate guilt or innocence of a crime? There are claims, for example, that it could reveal potential “psychopathy”, that the brains of men convicted of brutal murders show significantly abnormal patterns.
In the current legislative climate, where there have been attempts to introduce pre-emptive detention for “psychopaths” who have not yet been convicted of any crime, such claims need to be addressed critically. They are and will be resisted by the judiciary, but recent developments suggest that this may be a frail defence against an increasingly authoritarian state.
More seriously, there is increasing military interest in the development of techniques that can survey and possibly manipulate the mental processes of potential enemies, or enhance the potential of one’s own troops. There is nothing new about such an interest.
In the US, it stretches back at least half a century. Impressed by claims that the Soviet Union was developing psychological warfare, the CIA and the Defence Advanced Projects Agency (Darpa) began their own programmes.
Early experiments included the clandestine feeding of LSD to their own operatives and attempts at “brain-washing”. These were the forerunners of the hoods and white noise used by the British in Northern Ireland — until judged illegal — and more recently in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, where they inhabit an uncertain borderline between what the US government regards as an acceptable level of violence and the torture that it denies committing.
By the 1960s, Darpa, along with the US Navy, was funding almost all US research into “artificial intelligence”, in order to develop methods and technologies for the “automated battlefield” and the “intelligent soldier”. Contracts were let and patents taken out on techniques aimed at recording signals from the brains of enemy personnel at a distance, in order to “read their minds”.
These efforts have burgeoned in the aftermath of the so-called “war on terror”. One US company claims to have developed a technique called “brain-fingerprinting”, which can “determine the truth regarding a crime, terrorist activities or terrorist training by detecting information stored in the brain”.
Civil society should see to it that people who oppose mind control get a good hearing through the cacophony of slogans about “better brains” and the power of the military as well as the market
The stress of lying under interrogation is supposed to result in a specific wave form which electrodes measuring the brain’s fluctuating electrical signals can detect. We may be sceptical about the validity of such methods, but they indicate the direction in which research is heading. The company claims its procedures have been accepted in evidence in court in the US.
The step beyond reading thoughts is to attempt to control them directly. A new technique — transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) — has begun to generate interest. This focuses an intense magnetic field on specific brain regions, and has been shown to affect thoughts, perceptions and behaviour.
There are suggestions it could be used to control obsessive-compulsive behaviour, while some even take seriously the scenario envisaged in the film Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, in which TMS was used to erase unwanted memories of a love affair gone wrong.
Currently only possible if a subject’s head is put inside the relevant machine, TMS at a distance is now under active military investigation. So is chip technology, which might provide implanted prostheses to overcome sensory deficits or control behaviour, and whose potential bioethics committees around Europe have been scrutinizing.
It is tempting to dismiss all these as technological fantasies and their proponents as sellers of snake oil, but the fact that a technology is faulty doesn’t mean it won’t be used. One only has to think of the tens of thousands of lobotomies carried out on schizophrenic patients in the past century.
Britain is one of the world’s leading examples of a surveillance society, observing its citizens through CCTV cameras and controlling their behaviour with Asbos and Ritalin. The potential for surveillance of citizen’s thoughts has moved far beyond the visions of 1984.
Science cannot happen without major public or private expenditure but its goals are set at least as much by the market and the military as by the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.
This is why neuroscientists have a responsibility to make their subject and its potentials as transparent as possible, and why the voices of concerned citizens should be heard not ‘downstream’ when the technologies are already fully formed, but ‘upstream’ while the science is still in progress. We have to find ways of ensuring that such voices are listened through the cacophony of slogans about “better brains” — and the power of the military and the market. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
This is an edited extract from Better humans? The politics of human enhancement and life extension, a collection of essays. Steven Rose is professor of biology at the Open University in the United Kingdom
What about the middle-aged brain?
On the pages of medical journals and the cover of Time magazine, in feature stories on network news and nightly jokes in Jay Leno’s monologue, there’s been a swell of media coverage this past year concerning “the teenage brain”. Despite sounding like the title of Hollywood’s latest horror-movie blockbuster, the phrase actually refers to recent neurological research on adolescent brain chemistry.
It’s finally been demonstrated empirically (to the surprise of practically no one not wearing a lab coat) that the teenage brain is different from that of a mature adult. According to the data, these differences explain the average teen’s inclination to stay up late, sleep until noon and exhibit extreme mood swings.
Some researchers have even blamed these brain differences for the adolescent’s inexplicable devotion to high-decibel music, low-decibel mumbling and the piercing of unlikely body parts. As soon as these results made national headlines, the usual social pundits — bored with Iraq, the Supreme Court nominee and Jessica Simpson’s divorce — began hitting the TV talk-show circuit.
This new research, they claimed, clearly suggested that we should ban teen driving and even raise the voting age. After all, we now had proof positive that today’s teens are simply too erratic to be entrusted with such responsibilities.
This may be so. But what about the midlife brain? Perhaps the next time we embark on exhaustive, heavily funded research into what’s in the human skull, we should focus our efforts on the average middle-aged person — because if my friends and I are at all representative, I’d argue that whatever’s going on in our collective brains is equally suspect.
Though not without good reason. Most adults I know are overworked, over-stressed and generally overwhelmed from their daily struggles with careers, child-rearing and relationships. They’re forgetful, continually on a diet, obsessed with their health (popping pills to an extent no teenager would even contemplate), envious of their neighbours and co-workers, and always sleep-deprived.
Frankly, even on a good day, our brains are nothing to write home about. It’s everything we can do to keep our complicated, must-have Starbucks coffee orders straight in our heads. I think it’s too easy to blame all this on brain chemistry. The truth is, life is hard, no matter how old you are.
Whether you’re worried about making the track team or paying the mortgage, about fitting in with the cool kids or impressing your new boss, it’s about trying to cope. Granted, your average teen’s coping mechanisms may rarely extend beyond junk food and video games. But are adults’ choices any better?
Addicted to Desperate housewives, Tom Clancy novels and golf. Running from their yoga class to a Parents Without Partners meeting to the latest Donald Trump get-rich-quick seminar. And, between all this, compulsively checking e-mails and sending text messages on their cellphones.
Let us face it, teens have just two basic goals: finding love and getting into a good college. Both are pretty laudable aims, especially when compared with the confusing and relentless demands of contemporary life with which grown-ups have to contend. It’s no wonder that at the end of the day, most adults just want to collapse on the sofa and channel-surf.
Sartre once said that the state of modern man is incomprehension and rage. OK, maybe he was a bit of a Gloomy Gus. But isn’t the bewilderment and struggle to which he alludes true at times for all of us, particularly at certain crucial stages in our life?
As a psychotherapist, I see daily the unfortunate consequences of assigning a diagnostic label to practically every kind of behaviour under the sun. We need to remember that people are too complex to fit neatly into categories. Otherwise, we risk turning every character trait, coping mechanism and idiosyncrasy into a pathology.
Let’s not use these latest clinical data on adolescent brain chemistry, no matter how compelling, to do the same to teens — to reduce to a syndrome the myriad ways they struggle to cope with a very difficult developmental stage in a complex world. — Dennis Palumbo/The Los Angeles Times
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