"Scariest Thing You'll Read All Day": Report Sounds Alarm Over Brain-Reading Technology and Neurocapitalism

Common Dreams

A Vox report that swiftly sparked alarm across the internet Friday outlined how, "in the era of neurocapitalism, your brain needs new rights," following recent revelations that Facebook and Elon Musk's Neuralink are developing technologies to read people's minds.

As Vox's Sigal Samuel reported:

Mark Zuckerberg's company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. The researchers say they've already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time.

And Musk's company has created flexible "threads" that can be implanted into a brain and could one day allow you to control your smartphone or computer with just your thoughts. Musk wants to start testing in humans by the end of next year.

Considering those and other companies' advances and ambitions, Samuel warned that "your brain, the final privacy frontier, may not be private much longer" and laid out how existing laws are not equipped to handle how these emerging technologies could "interfere with rights that are so basic that we may not even think of them as rights, like our ability to determine where our selves end and machines begin."

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Newly discovered organ that senses pain may be lurking under your skin

Catherine Zuckerman
National Geographic

Most people who’ve been jabbed by a needle know the drill: First the pierce, then the sharp, searing pain and an urge to pull away, or at least wince. While the exact circuitry behind this nearly universal reaction is not fully understood, scientists may have just found an important piece of the puzzle: a previously unknown sensory organ inside the skin.

Dubbed the nociceptive glio-neural complex, this structure is not quite like the typical picture of a complex organ like the heart or the spleen. Instead, it’s a simple organ made up of a network of cells called glial cells, which are already known to surround and support the body’s nerve cells. In this case, the glial cells form a mesh-like structure between the skin’s outer and inner layers, with filament-like protrusions that extend into the skin’s outer layer. (Also find out about a type of simple organ recently found in humans, called the interstitium). 

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The New Living Language, Brainwaves & Babel

Truth Stream Media

Elon Musk claims brain microchip has allowed monkey to "control a computer"

Isobel Asher Hamilton
Business Insider

Elon Musk took his colleagues by surprise with an unplanned announcement at a presentation by his secretive neurotechnology company, Neuralink, on Tuesday. 

Musk cofounded Neuralink in 2016. Its goal is to create a chip that could enable a "brain-computer interface." And according to Musk, the company has already had some success — with monkeys.

During the 90-minute event, Musk and various senior staffers at Neuralink presented the company's ambition to design a chip capable of being implanted in the human brain that could receive and transmit signals to the organ. The near-term goal would be to treat various serious brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, although ultimately Musk's ambition is to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence." 

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Zombie Science: Researchers Kept the Brains of Decapitated Pigs Alive For 36 Hours

Dagny Taggart
The Organic Prepper

Scientists seem to be crossing a lot of boundaries as of late, which begs the question: Just because they can do something, does it mean they should?

Advances in brain-related technology are reaching dystopian levels. Scientists recently developed the ability to predict our choices before we are consciously aware of them, and can now translate people’s thoughts into speech. Smart chips that will create super-intelligent humans are in development, and China is mining data from the brains of citizens.

While there are legitimate uses for some of this technology, it doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to realize that much of it could also be used for nefarious purposes. 

Are scientists taking some research too far?

 

Developments in artificial intelligence are both fascinating and terrifying, but they pale in comparison to a recent discovery in neuroscience.

This headline caught my attention a few days ago:

Yale Scientists Kept Decapitated Pigs’ Brains Alive for 36 Hours

That article goes on to explain the study:

In March 2018, Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan shared a remarkable bit of news with his peers at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting: he was able to keep pigs’ brains “alive” outside their bodies for up to 36 hours.
The news quickly made its way from that meeting to the media. And now, more than a year later, the details of the radical study have finally been published in the highly respected journal Nature, confirming that what sounded initially like science-fiction was actually sound science — and raising startling questions about what it really means to be “dead.” (source)

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Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?

Scientific American

In 2015, doctors in Germany reported the extraordinary case of a woman who suffered from what has traditionally been called “multiple personality disorder” and today is known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). The woman exhibited a variety of dissociated personalities (“alters”), some of which claimed to be blind. Using EEGs, the doctors were able to ascertain that the brain activity normally associated with sight wasn’t present while a blind alter was in control of the woman’s body, even though her eyes were open. Remarkably, when a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned.

This was a compelling demonstration of the literally blinding power of extreme forms of dissociation, a condition in which the psyche gives rise to multiple, operationally separate centers of consciousness, each with its own private inner life.

Modern neuroimaging techniques have demonstrated that DID is real: in a 2014 study, doctors performed functional brain scans on both DID patients and actors simulating DID. The scans of the actual patients displayed clear differences when compared to those of the actors, showing that dissociation has an identifiable neural activity fingerprint. In other words, there is something rather particular that dissociative processes look like in the brain.

There is also compelling clinical data showing that different alters can be concurrently conscious and see themselves as distinct identities. One of us has written an extensive treatment of evidence for this distinctness of identity and the complex forms of interactive memory that accompany it, particularly in those extreme cases of DID that are usually referred to as multiple personality disorder.

The history of this condition dates back to the early 19th century, with a flurry of cases in the 1880s through the 1920s, and again from the 1960s to the late 1990s. The massive literature on the subject confirms the consistent and uncompromising sense of separateness experienced by the alter personalities. It also displays compelling evidence that the human psyche is constantly active in producing personal units of perception and action that might be needed to deal with the challenges of life.

Although we may be at a loss to explain precisely how this creative process occurs (because it unfolds almost totally beyond the reach of self-reflective introspection) the clinical evidence nevertheless forces us to acknowledge something is happening that has important implications for our views about what is and is not possible in nature.

Now, a newly published paper by one of us posits that dissociation can offer a solution to a critical problem in our current understanding of the nature of reality. This requires some background, so bear with us.

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‘Jaw-dropping moment’: Scientists discover mysterious new communication mechanism in the brain

RT

Researchers studying the brain have stumbled upon a mysterious, previously unknown form of neural communication that has stunned the scientific community. 

 

Despite major scientific breakthroughs, the brain largely remains a mystery, and the team from Case Western Reserve University have added to it with their latest paper on a self-propagating ‘wireless’ communication they encountered that can jump across different sections of the brain.

While we’re asleep, the cortex and hippocampus in the brain send out mysterious neural ‘waves’. Scientists have previously observed a low-level, slow periodic activity in the brains of decapitated mice by studying slices of their hippocampuses.

“We’ve known about these waves for a long time, but no one knows their exact function and no one believed they could spontaneously propagate,”says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

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Brain hacking: Heavy use of wireless devices changes brain structure in children

Dr. Joseph Mercola
Mercola.com

Most people today live in a sea of radio frequencies emitted from wireless technologies of all kinds, from routers to smartphones, tablets, baby monitors, TVs, appliances, smart meters and many more.

According to many experts, chronic, heavy exposure could have severe repercussions for our health, especially that of children, who are now exposed even before birth. Research also suggests interaction with social media, games and apps online produces a number of effects, both physical and psychological.

In the largest long-term study^1,2,3 of brain development and youth health in the U.S., the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study,⁴ reveals the brains of the most prolific users of electronic devices look different compared to those who use smartphones, tablets and video games less frequently.

In all, more than 11,000 children will be followed for a decade to assess how various childhood experiences and environments affect brain development and psychological health. As noted by the researchers,⁵ "The data will provide a resource of unprecedented scale and depth for studying typical and atypical development." These preliminary findings, based on the brain scans of 4,500 9- to 10-year-olds, reveal children who use electronic devices for seven hours or more each day have premature thinning of the brain cortex, the outer brain layer that processes information from the five physical senses (taste, touch, sight, smell and sound).

The exact ramifications of this anomaly are still unknown. According to Dr. Gaya Dowling, a researcher with the National Institutes of Health, which is sponsoring the $300 million study, thinning of the cortex is thought to be part of the brain maturation process, so what these scans are showing is that this process is being sped up in children who get a lot of screen time6 (7-plus hours a day).  

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The War on Consciousness - Graham Hancock

After Skool

"What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter, materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we’re just our bodies. So when the brain is dead, that’s the end of consciousness, there is no life after death, there is no soul; we just rot and are gone. Actually, many honest scientists should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don’t know exactly how it works. The brain is involved in it some way but we’re not sure how. It could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity, if you hold to that paradigm, then of course you can’t believe in life after death, when the generator’s broken, consciousness is gone. But it’s equally possible that the relationship — and nothing in neuroscience rules it out – that the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set, and in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal continues. 

And this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions, that we are immortal souls temporarily incarnated in these physical forms. If we want to understand consciousness, the last people we should ask are materialist scientists. Instead, we should look at ancient cultures, like the Egyptians, who highly valued dream states. Many ancient cultures around the world used hallucinogenic plants to understand consciousness and expand their minds. However in today's society, visionary plants are highly illegal because they promote a state of consciousness that does not agree with the agenda of profit.

Substances, like coffee, alcohol, sugar and pharmaceuticals, are forced upon the population, but possession of even small quantities of cannabis, Ayahuasca or psilocybin will land you in jail. If we do not recognize the right of adult sovereignty over consciousness, then we can NOT claim to be free. Look at what our moderns state of consciousness has done. We have destroyed the natural gifts of earth in pursuit of short-term, selfish gain. We must reconnect with spirit immediately or else we will encounter disaster. Visionary plants could be the remedy for our current sickness."

Revisiting Time Magazine’s 2016 “Screens in Schools Are a $60B Hoax” by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras. It’s Only Become Worse.

B.N. Frank
Activist Post

Almost 2 years ago, TIME magazine published an opinion piece by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. 

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras didn’t mince words.

Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids, which I will explain shortly, it can also clinically hurt them. I’ve worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus, but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion. Indeed, over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.

Most of us have been witnessing this firsthand in our families and everywhere else.  Today’s young adults and children have more problems – and different problems – than those of us that didn’t grow up with technology 24/7.  We are all suffering because of it.

Dr. Kardaras asked us to follow the money.  You may want to follow up with a shower:

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You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you...

Comment: Simply superb. Click on the image to go to a great visual treat about beliefs.

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The Oatmeal

Neuro-Hacking the Mass Mind

Comment: For those who don't know Lucien Cerise's work (especially French speakers) here is the link to a two-part article I wrote last year on Cerise's book 'Neuro-Hackers: Reflections on Social Engineering'.

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M.K. Styllinski
Infrakshun.wordpress.com

[...]   One man who has explored the many-headed hydra of mass mind control is French author Lucien Cerise his essays of which have appeared predominantly on Alan Soral’s Égalité & Réconciliation website which offers a fusion of left-right politics and activism. (Remember Dieudonne M’bala M’bala?) These essays have been collated, updated and arranged by Cerise into a book Neuro-Hackers: Reflections on Social Engineering (2016) (Neuro-Pirates Reflexions Sur L’Ingenierie Sociale) published by Kontre Kulture.  He notes that “it is not really a collection, but rather a book written over four years [between 2012 and 2015] and in successive layers”. 

Obviously much of the book draws from a French perspective and how social engineering operates in the French culture. The author provides rich and detailed insights, both philosophical and dialectical, into the causes and effects of our mass mind paralysis in the face of a predominantly Western-backed “soft” totalitarianism.  Thus whether you are an American or a European, the revealed dynamics apply across all cultures. In this book you will read about the widespread and systemic use of cognitive infiltration or more appropriately, “neuro-hacking” which describes the institutionalised colonisation of our minds by pathological constructs designed to engineer conformity and compliance to social, cultural and geo-political directives.

I have translated key passages from the foreword  so that readers can gain an introductory flavour of his work.  It might be as well to start with the back cover which provides a synopsis of the contents:

“The first question that runs through this collection of texts is: ‘How to hack a brain?’ The second, essential question then immediately follows: “How to protect it?” This is because brain-hacking through social engineering and other processes is already a reality, and hackers are our brains. This ‘neuro-hacking’ can involve acting on the hardware, that is to say, on the biological and genetic substrate of the brain, but it can also involve acting on the software, that is to say, on the communication code that we learn from society. This code of epigenetic origin – this language, or software – comes to us from the socio-cultural bath into which we are plunged since childhood, imprinting on the brain its neuronal architecture. The study of social groups, their mode of construction and the links which structure them has allowed those who want to control crowds to act on its members, to modify their behaviour or even destroy them as individuals and groups – the ones most dependent on others. For individuals disconnected from any group, hierarchy, representation, or stereotype can only survive by developing symptoms of psychosis. By attacking the natural links, Oedipal ties of the masculine / feminine differentiation, but also of the parent / child hierarchy, by abolishing the notion of limits, whose overcoming in psychology is called perversion, it is society as a whole that is attacked. Destructured and made malleable – one can speak of a ‘liquid society’ – it will then be the plaything of a small oligarchy which will have nothing more to fear from the people whose souls it has appropriated.”

The author takes his inspiration from Neuro-Slaves, by Palo Cioni and Marco Della Luna, a work of cognitive science and social psychology which reviews the various methods of reducing a population to slavery by targeting the brain and bypassing its defence mechanisms.  From a macro-social perspective, one of the most importance principles he believes will counter the present directives of social engineering is the maintenance of a healthy, balanced national self-interest since a national health cannot be secured if we are at the behest of globalist visions, their economic warfare and all that comes with it. In fact, any individual, business or grouping that wishes to maintain a healthy psycho immunological system and to keep alive its spiritual and cultural traditions needs to develop true autonomy, sovereignty and self-determination before it can reach out and engage in the ideal of an “international altruism,” and indeed to allow an emergence of true community at home. In effect, without this independence of mind and natural political pragmatism we are prey to a continual hacking of our neurology, a psycho-virus that seeks to subvert, disinform and hijack constructive forms of perception which would otherwise, quite naturally lead to activities that would denote a rise in public awareness and critical thinking.

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Addictive video games may change children's brains in the same way as drugs and alcohol, study reveals

The Telegraph

ortnite and other addictive video games can have a similar effect on children’s brains as drug abuse or alcoholism, MRI scans reveal.

They show the “reward” system in the brains of young heavy users of social media and video games display the same changes in function and structure as those of alcoholics or drug addicts.

A series of studies by California State University found the impulsive part of the brain, known as the amygdala-striatal system, was not only more sensitive but also smaller in excessive users so that it processed the stimuli of social media or games faster.

The findings come as Britain’s children are gripped by the Fortnite video game, with one nine-year-old reportedly admitted to rehab after becoming so addicted she wet herself rather than leave the screen and primary schools urging parents to ban their children from playing them.

On Monday, the Daily Telegraph launched the Duty of Care campaign calling on ministers to make social media and online gaming companies subject to a statutory duty to protect children from harms such as addiction, bullying and grooming when using their services. 

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Brain implants are happening: Defense Advanced Research Agency is ready to run trials with closed-loop mood control chips linked to AI

The Next Web

 

Brain implants or other types of neural links, such as Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) between the brain, the internet, and the cloud, are quickly entering the realm of science rather than science fiction.

The Defense Advanced Research Agency is ready to run trials with closed-loop mood control chips linked to AI that can deliver an electrical impulse to regulate a soldier’s mood. In the private sector, Elon Musk has announced Neuralink — a neurotechnology venture that will not only focus on fighting diseases but also on augmenting humans so they can better compete with machines.

The technology is advancing in campuses and government-backed labs around the world, attracting serious funding from established technology players, technology institutes, and top universities. For instance, Professor Newton Howard of Oxford University has produced a functional neural implant prototype by combining some of the brightest minds at MIT, Oxford, and Georgetown, and the resources and technical know-how of Intel and Qualcomm.

All of this begs the question: Is the world ready for this kind of human enhancement, and is it a worthy idea to pursue in the first place? Well, I for one wouldn’t be standing in line waiting for my brain implant, as it would take away too much of what makes me who I am.

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Mindless data consumption leads to web-based brain damage

Brendan D. Murphy
Global Freedom Movement

"Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient." ~Daniel J. Levitin, Neuroscientist

Web-Based Brain Damage

Evidence is mounting that our haphazard info-consuming ways on the web are adversely affecting our neurological and cognitive functioning - as well as wasting time by making us far less efficient - and far more distracted - than we think we are. The internet is a wonderful (read: essential) thing for humanity, but the way we use it seems to need some tweaking.

According to a study in the Journal of Digital Information, people who read documents online containing hypertext didn't retain as much information as people reading without hypertext. The temptation to click on hyperlinks caused breaks in focus and attention, interrupting the flow of the material, thus compromising memory retention.[i]

Long-term memory is essential for building models, maps, or schemas - a.k.a. context. When we are poor in context, our ability to make informed assessments of incoming information is crippled. New information may be rejected simply because no groundwork (context) has been laid within which to assimilate it. Learning is stifled.

There is also the issue of "multi-tasking." MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller states that our brains are "not wired to multitask well...When people think they're multitasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there's a cognitive cost in doing so."[ii]

We pay for our broken attention span in mitigated comprehension and recall. Scattered attention on the internet does not conduce to contemplation and the formation of deeper meaning, or broader understanding through dot connecting, a.k.a. context building. The ultimate example, of course, is aimless scrolling through social media feeds, "witnessing" lots of information while learning virtually nothing from it.

Daniel J. Levitin, neuroscientist, warns us that "Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for stimulation," adding that this rapid switching from one task to another "tweaks the novelty-seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks."[iii] 

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Is psychosis an ‘immune disorder’?

Mind Hacks

A fascinating new study has just been published which found evidence for the immune system attacking a neuroreceptor in the brain in a small proportion of people with psychosis. It’s an interesting study that probably reflects what’s going to be a cultural tipping point for the idea of ‘immune system mental health problems’ or ‘madness as inflammation disorder’ but it’s worth being a little wary of the coming hype.

This new study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, did blood tests on people who presented with their first episode of psychosis and looked for antibodies that attack specific receptors in the brain. Receptors are what receive neurotransmitters – the brain’s chemical signals – and allow information to be transferred around the nervous system, so disruption to these can cause brain disturbances.

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Aluminium DOES cause Alzheimer's: Expert says new findings confirm the metal is behind the devastating brain disease

Daily Mail

A link between aluminium and Alzheimer's disease has long existed.

But many scientists says there is not enough evidence to blame the metal, used by thousands for everyday purposes to cook and store food. 

However, Professor Chris Exley, from Keele University, says his latest research confirms it does indeed play a role in cognitive decline.

Here, in a piece for medical-blogging website The Hippocratic Post, he reveals the findings from his latest study. 

Professor Chris Exley, from Keele University, says his latest research confirms aluminium plays a role in cognitive decline

There has been a strong link between human exposure to aluminium and the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease for half a century or more. 

However, without definite proof, there is still no consensus in the scientific community about the role of this known neurotoxin in this devastating brain disease.

The latest research from my group, published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, makes this link even more compelling. 

In my view, the findings are unequivocal in their confirmation of a role for aluminium in some if not all Alzheimer’s disease.

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Hackers could get inside your BRAIN: Experts warn of growing threat from monitoring and controlling neural signals

 

UK Daily Mail

• Hackers placed images in apps and record your brain's response with BCIs
• Could find out anything from religious beliefs to sexual orientation
• May one day be used by advertisers, police and government 

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.

Experts at the University of Washington have revealed how hackerscould inserting images into dodgy apps and recording our brain's unintentional reaction using brain-computer interfaces.

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.'

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Neural Dust: tiny wireless implants act as "electroceuticals" for your brain

Boing Boing

 

UC Berkeley researchers are developing "Neural Dust," tiny wireless sensors for implanting in the brain, muscles, and intestines that could someday be used to control prosthetics or a "electroceuticals" to treat epilepsy or fire up the immune system. So far, they've tested a 3 millimeter long version of the device in rats.

“I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader,“ says researcher Michel Maharbiz. “Having access to in-body telemetry has never been possible because there has been no way to put something supertiny superdeep. But now I can take a speck of nothing and park it next to a nerve or organ, your GI tract or a muscle, and read out the data."

Maharbiz, neuroengineer Jose Carmena, and their colleagues published their latest results on "Wireless Recording in the Peripheral Nervous System with Ultrasonic Neural Dust" in the journal Neuron.

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Tiny implant could connect humans and machines like never before

The Independent

 

A tiny implant the size of a grain of sand has been created that can connect computers to the human body without the need for wires or batteries, opening up a host of futuristic possibilities.

The devices, dubbed “neural dust”, could be used to continually monitor organs like the heart in real time and, if they can be made even smaller, implanted into the brain to control robotic devices like prosthetic arms or legs.

It is believed they could help treat conditions like epilepsy by stimulating nerves and muscles, help people with incontinence control their bladder and even suppress appetite. They could also potentially either be used to prompt the immune system into action or reduce inflammation.

One of the inventors, Professor Michel Maharbiz, of University of California, Berkeley, said: “I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader.

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