ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC “TELEVISION” AND AI
Most of you know that I am fascinated by the burgeoning technologies of mind manipulation, from the "soft" technologies and techniques of neuro-linguistic "programming" to the harder technologies of modulating microwaves and beaming words and whole conversations into someone's mind. As I outlined in my book Microcosm and Medium (available on this website or directly from Lulu), there has existed since the 1970s a technology that I dubbed "electroencephalographic dictionaries." A word about this technology is necessary here, perhaps, for newcomers to the concepts of mind manipulation, for it plays a central role in today's article-centerpiece was was kindly shared by T.M. Briefly, neurologists during the 1970s realized that specific words, in any language, would have a pattern of brain waves associated with that word, and that these patterns would be similar from individual to individual. By capturing the encephalograph of an individual hearing or seeing certain words, an "electroencephalographic dictionary" could be created. These patterns in turn could be modulated onto microwaves, and literally beamed into an individual's brain, creating a kind of interior dialogue with a literal "someone else" stepping into an individual's internal conversation. The idea is frightening, especially to those who may not know about such capabilities, and who think - to put it very bluntly - that they're going nuts. I talked about 0ne such individual who suffered this sort of attack who literally
thought she was having some sort of mental breakdown, until she discovered that simply by physically moving from the place or spot where the attack occurred, it would cease. At the time that such experiments began, the "electroencephalographic dictionaries" amounted to about 2000 words in the English language. That was the 1970s. One can only imagine to what extent they may have grown now, with fine tuning to include the neurophysiological differences between reading a word, and hearing a word.......and while we're contemplating such fine tuning, associating certain emotions with certain smells (with their brainwaves!), or certain images (with their brainwaves!). Indeed, wed the whole concept of "electroencephalographic dictionaries" to artificial intelligence, and you have a potent technology and technique of mind manipulation...
But... too late... it's already apparently been done:
AI re-creates what people see by reading their brain scans
As neuroscientists struggle to demystify how the human brain converts what our eyes see into mental images, artificial intelligence (AI) has been getting better at mimicking that feat. A recent study, scheduled to be presented at an upcoming computer vision conference, demonstrates that AI can read brain scans and re-create largely realistic versions of images a person has seen. As this technology develops, researchers say, it could have numerous applications, from exploring how various animal species perceive the world to perhaps one day recording human dreams and aiding communication in people with paralysis.
Many labs have used AI to read brain scans and re-create images a subject has recently seen, such as human faces and photos of landscapes. The new study marks the first time an AI algorithm called Stable Diffusion, developed by a German group and publicly released in 2022, has been used to do this. Stable Diffusion is similar to other text-to-image “generative” AIs such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, which produce new images from text prompts after being trained on billions of images associated with text descriptions.
And as the reader will have noticed, the article drills the alleged success of this program home with a series of eight photographs, four of the images people were actually shown, and four of the images reconstructed by an artificial intelligence based on the brainwave activity of the individuals:
In this case, the "brainwave scans" were actually based, not on a typical EEG (electro-encephalogram) but on an MRI scan, and the program combined image and textual processing:
Unlike previous efforts using AI algorithms to decipher brain scans, which had to be trained on large data sets, Stable Diffusion was able to get more out of less training for each participant by incorporating photo captions into the algorithm. It’s a novel approach that incorporates textual and visual information to “decipher the brain,” says Ariel Goldstein, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University who was not involved with the work.
The AI algorithm makes use of information gathered from different regions of the brain involved in image perception, such as the occipital and temporal lobes, according to Yu Takagi, a systems neuroscientist at Osaka University who worked on the experiment. The system interpreted information from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, which detect changes in blood flow to active regions of the brain. When people look at a photo, the temporal lobes predominantly register information about the contents of the image (people, objects, or scenery), whereas the occipital lobe predominantly registers information about layout and perspective, such as the scale and position of the contents. All of this information is recorded by the fMRI as it captures peaks in brain activity, and these patterns can then be reconverted into an imitation image using AI.
All of this brings me to my high octane speculation of the day, and it's based on an aphorism coined by our colleague Catherine Austin Fitts: No cyber-system is secure.
The reader will have noted that I do not call these technologies "mind control" technologies, but rather, mind manipulation technologies. This is due to my conviction - somewhere between mere belief and argued documented fact - that complete mind control of any individual is impossible. We have hypnotism as a possible relevant context in this regard, for the standard view is that hypnotism works best with certain types of people who are very susceptible to it, while other people lie at the opposite end of the spectrum, and are difficult if not impossible to hypnotize. "Hypnotizability" is, in other words, a spectrum dependent on the human population itself. I suspect something similar may be in play with respect to these "hard" types of mind manipulation technologies: some people are much more susceptible to them than others.
Which brings us back to "The Fitts Aphorism": No cyber-system is secure. Artificial intelligence is a cyber-system. It is only as good (or bad) as the humans programming it, and it can be hacked. And while the technology here is frightening in its implications, I think an equal if not greater danger attaches to the possibility that such "electroencephalographic television" images might be deliberately manipulated against the programmers. For a simple and crude example: imagine that one is a part of such an experiment, and the technician in charge of it asks you to think or imagine a picture of the word that you are about to say, and then he says "locomotive" or "airplane". Instead of thinking of a late 19th century-style steam engine, you think of the big electric locomotives on the old Pennsylvania railroad, or the electric locomotives of France's TGVs or Japan's bullet-trains. Instead of a jet airliner, you think of the Wright-Brothers' first airplane, or of a World War One biplane fighter, or what have you.
Indeed, maybe somebody, somewhere, has concluded that such experiments are not really in the best interest of humanity, and decides to deliberately skew and pollute the results (think of people who do this to political pollsters). Of course, the programmers may notice such attempts and weed out such persons from their samples. But like the political poll, all this really does is it further skews the results. The bottom line here is that yes, such technologies exist, yes they work, and yes, a whole new era of mental and epistemological warfare has been launched because of it. But by the same token, this has opened up new ways of fighting back...
See you on the flip side...
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