The war inside your mind: unprotected brain battlefields and neuro-vulnerability

1.1. The war for your brain—targeted cognitive conflict and mind wars

Brain theory and cognitive functional analysis rests as it does on various theories where the exact role of neurons, dendrites, axons, the central nervous system, and external environmental factors such as electromagnetic sensitivity and interactive microbiome effects may act independently or in concert in ways much less clear than desired. Integrated neuronal elements and supporting neural systems that govern or influence thinking, perception, judgment, reasoning, central nervous system (CNS) functionality, plasticity, and proprioceptive behavior are equally ambiguous despite the pace, focus, and scope of ongoing research. Now in the 21st century, we must grapple with yet another threshold challenge, and enduring mystery—externally based brain manipulation, cognitive influence, and insidious targeted degradation is possible via technology designed to elicit harmful neurobiological effects where brain security itself is under threat. This is a wholly new form of brain research involving the very risky era of true mind wars.

In his 2006 book Mind Wars, author Jonathan Moreno speculates about the enthusiastic quest to discern what makes the brain function, how the mind operates, and what the interplay of thoughts, ideas, and how emotions govern behavior with such sophistication in ordinary human life. Over 15 years ago, Moreno wondered aloud in his book about what novel ethical questions are raised by the emergence of new neuroscience applications for war, which will alter human identity by modifying memory, cognition, and core physical, emotional, and spiritual capabilities. This is a classical challenge to serious neuroscience studies, brain activity research, normal neurological operations, plasticity, and core brain functions [1].

Surely since 1970 significant scientific inquiry and national security research have been conducted along two lines of pursuit, which are equally driven in pace while they are quite different in perpetual focus. One aspect of this parallel energy has been rooted in medical inquiry focused primarily on ways to understand the brain, what governs neuromechanics, neurobiology, and the inherent neurobiological functions of the mind for purposes of healing it, maximizing its operation, and fostering its restoration. On the other hand, resolute military planners and analysts have been energetically engaged with zeal and passion very much in equal measure to discern and decode how the mind functions so that it can be insidiously exploited, impaired, degraded, and externally influenced in potential stealthy ways to steer the outcome of future conflicts. This dichotomy is not accidental but underscores the inherent dilemma in brain science for the 21st century and beyond. The brain as the battlefield is unquestionably the issue.

1.2. Dual use neuroscience: the healing imperative versus the harming imperative

One salient point worth noting is the traditional history of using science and technology for dual-use outcomes and operations in medical sciences and military sciences. This is vitally important as grasping domains of neural activity, cognitive performance, and essential elements of neurobiological health and routine operations become the equally valuable domain of research for therapeutic purposes as well as eventual weaponization. We have witnessed this numerous times since the First World War in the areas of nuclear, chemical, biological, aeronautic, maritime, vehicular, communication, and satellite systems where every technology designed to expressly confer societal benefits can be redirected to instead for harmful and deadly military purposes.

In the 1990s, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a study on brain mapping that tried to explore the newly emerging field as a direct offshoot of earlier efforts launched in 2013 by the Obama administration in its Brain Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). That project was originally designed to be a collaborative, public-private research initiative to support and develop innovative applied technologies to create a dynamic understanding of brain functions and neural operations and unlock the mysteries of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, depression, and traumatic brain injury. The NAS sought to identify complex neural and anatomical connections; enhance research capabilities for understanding the biochemical, molecular, and genetic mechanisms that control brain structure and functions; and increase existing knowledge about crucial brain functions to discern the dynamics of plasticity and the interactive patterns of dendrites, synapses, integral brain chemistry influences, and overall brains vulnerabilities. Ostensibly this overall effort was designed to maximize beneficial treatment and remedial therapeutic strategies for better brain health stability and restoration of fundamental neural operations. The various programs were positive in orientation and purpose to better understand the origins and intricacies of brain diseases as well as finding effective means of communication across the diverse disciplines of neuroscience (basic and clinical) and computer science and informatics (encompassing digital graphics, database technology, and electronic networks). In effect, the majority of well-known brain research was governed by the “healing paradigm”, which encompassed all varieties of treatment, intervention, surgery, and ongoing care designed to alleviate brain disease and minimize its most pernicious effects.

Aside from that largely beneficial, benign, and helpful strategy for brain health and well-being, there also lurked during the same period a darker more malevolent interest in brain issues which was rooted in the “harmful paradigm”. This well-funded and comprehensive program sustained itself through a mix of overt clinical research (using laboratory animals) and covert projects with some involving imprisoned humans. These projects were supported by democratic, communist, and tyrannical governments simultaneously aimed at determining express areas of brain vulnerability and cognitive access to exploit, endanger, manipulate, and control human thoughts, behavior, and cognitive functions. One prime example inside the United States was the infamous MK-Ultra program, which was a top-secret CIA project involving hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering, and psychological torture. Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and in some instances around the world. Continued covert research on ways to penetrate and influence the brain, analysis, judgment, and thought among nations is likely to increase and diversify in future years.

It is important to recognize these projects were subsidized and sustained by governments of all types existed within the context of geopolitical rivalry and geostrategic leverage. For example, in 2021 Russia denied that it is investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technology that would allow humans to control cars, planes, and nuclear power plants through microchips implanted into their brains. Despite evidence the Russian government plans to spend 54 billion rubles ($740 million) on the brain-computer interface project as part of its massive science, healthcare, and infrastructure spending plan within the larger “Brain, Health, Intellect, Innovation for 2021–2029” program, devised by the Russian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Moscow State University, leaders vehemently denied that it was working on brain chip implants, saying the program had been ruled “unfeasible” in 2020. The degree to which routine covert collaboration between that academy and Russia’s defense ministry is largely unknown but it should be expected that insights and revelations about exploitable brain function and vulnerability can be shared.

Inside China, a decade or more of investments undertaken by its leading scientist Mu Ming Poo who is the Director of the Institute of Neuroscience (ION) and Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). China’s military [PLA] and the CAS have a reciprocal cooperative relationship in shared technology. China has put publicly supported emphasis on brain disorders and brain-inspired AI as immediate high-priority areas. Because China has the largest patient population in the world for all brain disorders, making research on prevention, early diagnosis, and early intervention particularly urgent, and offers the largest database for researchers to work on. Ongoing neuroscience research in China is heavily infused with thousands of monkeys as animal models for studying the neural mechanisms underlying brain functions under both normal and pathological conditions. China retains a high interest in investigating Connectivity and Activity maps where one map examines the wiring diagram of nerve connections among all neurons in the brain, very similar to mapping the “genome” displaying the complete sequence of all nucleotides and genes encoded along the entire DNA of an organism. An activity map displays the firing (spiking) pattern of all neurons in the brain associated with a particular state of the brain. Chinese authorities have also periodically admitted to the existence of research in so-called cognitive influence technology. Beijing has carefully explained that other governments have conducted related experiments. China is embracing research in sensors, brain-image scanners, and other high-tech equipment to study children’s learning and performance in real time. “These benign technologies can help improve educational practice,” explains Bruce E. Wexler, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Yale University. But Wexler cautions on the many unknowns, pointing out the challenges of a range of learning styles, a lack of consensus on ideal attention levels, and the possibility that constant interventions might inhibit self-discipline and discourage creativity. The opportunity to pursue technology that leverages or influences cognition either for educational or for military purposes cannot be overlooked or ignored.

The net conclusion is that legitimate neuroscience research aimed at maximizing the “healing” imperative has to be understood as clandestinely co-existing with the “harming imperative” where dual-use science allows military experts to redirect neuroscience technology toward a weaponized purpose. Therefore, the explicit use of covert technology designed to target cognitive functions and neural operations for the purpose of degrading, impairing, or injuring brain health and its normal operations is obvious and real. The implications of our brains becoming targets of hostile neuromodulation must be understood.

1.3. Exploitable neuroscience areas of interest

Given the function and operation of the CNS, the ANS, the vagus nerve, dendrites, nerve cells, axons, synapses, and other elements in the brain’s operational environment and its apparent linkage to human behavior, certain ambiguities about it reside largely in mystery, speculation, and theory. We know there are certain cognitive processes and foundational elements of thought and analysis, but their direct causative triggers, operational sequence, and biochemical aspects are the stuff of ongoing medical research. We retain some degree of confidence that cognition is vital, and perception is crucial without being able to explain how plasticity works and happens as it does. Many unanswered questions exist.

We also reckon that cognition can be impaired, expanded, and diminished but it still reflects a puzzle in neuroscience, which is rooted in studies of brain plasticity and what really governs that phenomenon. If cognition can be enhanced or reduced, then specific influential factors essential to that must be understood. Therapeutic neuroscience research aims to heal, restore, treat, and renew damaged or impaired brains. Brain warfare destroys that notion and identifies cognition and brain function as legitimate targets.

It may offend reason and sensibility to imagine brain wars as evidence of a looming contest where the indirect influence of brain functions by hostile nations and implacable enemies target cognition, perception, and analysis without fear of discovery or forensic attribution. However, we stand at the threshold of a contentious era latent with such pernicious and global threats, which merit attention.

The enhancement, and targeted erosion, of cognitive processes such as memory and analysis, for example, raises questions about how it occurs, what technologies enable it, and what aspects of cognitive function are truly vulnerable to degradation. We grasp a linkage between shortened telomeres as part of the aging process. Yet we pursue energetic cures for Alzheimer’s disease and seek insights about driving factors behind autism and genius because of the belief that an underlying set of causes explains why it happens in our global population. Science and technology offers the opportunity for the engineered convergence of multiple technologies to magnify and enhance brain function. While seemingly benign and beneficial, we must contemplate the diversion of good science for evil purposes. Why not consider the same engineering paradigm for alleviating TBI as an alternate pathway to brain-altering weapons? Does it make sense in blending nanotech, genomics, electromagnetics, and other technological dynamics that only a more productive brain can result? Should this excursion in neuroscience fiction be encouraged or tolerated? Are the best experts pausing carefully to consider the impact or implications? What happens then?

Will acceptance of humans on a developmental curve of intelligence mean that efforts to maximize brain function and mental power in the future are risk-free, dangerous, or ill-advised? If serious transhumanism and brain implant research are launched where the brain-machine interface is fundamental, who will govern it and what baseline moral imperatives or ethical standards will guide it? Will the net result be a better world, one where ordinary people are better off, or open the door to totalitarian mind control? Or can one assert that the open-ended Pandora’s box of totalitarian mind control has already been loosened? Can the risks, implied dangers, and unexpected negative outcomes be casually assumed away? Is the carefully engineered augmentation of human brains a desirable or lofty societal goal with no hidden or implied drawbacks? Instead is it evidence of true genius or simply the manifestation of madness itself?

The single best revelation that serious neuroscientists must confront is that for all the laudable therapeutic and treatment augmentation approaches, benign technologies, and creative devices developed for brain healing and cognitive well-being, a parallel arena of covert brain weapons, insidious cognitive disruptive technology, and palpable ongoing research to maximize neural threats and exploit neurobiological vulnerability are being researched, developed, and perfected in covert settings. This is the paramount challenge, emerging global threat and enduring medical dilemma of the 21st century.

1.4. Technological progress in neuroscience and the dance with the devil

Technologies we hardly imagined 50 years ago such as cell phones, hypersonics, advanced genomics, quantum computers, and vehicles for transiting space are prevalent and ubiquitous. The human brain has launched and nurtured these ideas and infused these technologies in ways that cause one to ponder if the brain itself is truly without limits. Is it desirable that brain enhancement and expansion of human cognition become the salient goal of human activity after 2030? Does this goal displace the quest for peace, an end to poverty, or the odyssey of ending human hunger and suffering? Does it open the door to human experimentation and risky neuroscience projects to attain brain enhancement? What cautionary standards and guidelines should govern medical research in this domain? If we are simply trying to end a variety of painful and devastating brain diseases and erase the causes of cognitive decline, why not invest a full-scale Manhattan Project on the matter? Such a fulsome inquiry must confront, discern, and discover the risks and implied dangers as well as the benefits of neuro-maximization. Absent an array of signals that the risks outweigh the benefits, should we expect or encourage medical science to run down this road?

We must always balance the good with the bad, the expected with the unexpected, the known with the unknown. Outcomes are not guaranteed and negative or harmful results on open-ended neuroscience research do impose a cost on its sponsors, creators, and subjects. Basically, we raise the important question of whether the goal of enhanced brain function and maximized cognitive health should be pursued regardless of the risks involved. After all science and technology has brought society great things and may do so in this arena as well. Although we can seldom see or anticipate the actual end of all things we embark on today, we can pursue legitimate research as a worthy, acceptable, or tolerable risk to embrace. The offsetting reality is that science and technology has both beneficial and destructive potential owing to its dual-use nature and that exploitation of the best ideas for evil outcomes never goes away.

Now we generally accept certain technologies can alleviate troubling emotional or mental health issues and relieve those with traumatic brain injury. For example, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the MeRT (Magnetic e-Resonance Therapy) used by neuroscientists offer a benign and helpful pathway to reduced mental stress and reductions in chronic brain problems. Here the admirable skills of public health aim to heal and restore people suffering a variety of mental and cognitive woes. It can readily be extolled as marvelous and conferring verifiable relief on those afflicted. Neuroscience remedies are doubtless wonderful things.

However, can we also contemplate for a moment the deliberate redirection and repurposing of MRI technology for mentally harmful or disruptive effects? MRI treatments are delicate and include the risk of incorrect treatment dosage and exposure risks, which can be injurious. Basically, our brains lack sustained defenses against inadvertent MRI accidents as well as external nefarious efforts to degrade and distort ordinary thought and cognition. Instances of MRI resonance errors and accidents are very real. Should we accept that a hostile nation could subvert cognitive functions and redirect certain technologies such as MRI and TBI insights to instead disrupt and destabilize the brain? The idea is not far-fetched and medical science must reckon with the reality of this scenario as the inherent risks of devising deliberately harmful neuro-cognitive technologies and neurobiological disrupters for warfare use are genuine.

There should be few experts surprised at the highjacking of legitimate medical and scientific research away from therapeutic purposes to instead create harmful weapons technologies. This has been the history of dual-use science for years as benign and helpful science is perverted and re-engineered for weapons purposes. The overall concept of devising a technology to deliberately impair or degrade a healthy brain and diminish its cognitive functions seems alien but is genuine, macabre, and very real.

Targeting healthy brains to disrupt, impair, destabilize, and degrade their innate functions using stealthy technology sounds like Science Fiction but it isn’t. While many of our cognitive instincts against danger are sound our brains to stop short of being alerted instinctively to every conceivable pitfall, calamity, and risk. We can fall victim to shock and surprise without warning. Try for a moment to picture our brain as a target and an objective to be conquered, neutralized, and crippled by a determined clandestine foe. As wild and criminal as it seems, this has happened to many people and has been verified as a confirmable neuroscience assault incident. Those adversely affected by targeted disruptive cognitive degradation technology in recent years have stepped forward to claim harm and seek relief knowing a shroud of serious doubt and medical derision is often levied at them. If this harmful technology exists, where is the proof of its existence that the naysayers claim to have? Worse, the medical profession appears stymied by the absence of a coherent case definition and uniform treatment protocol for these victims. However, these randomized attacks on human cognition and brain function are significant, affecting hundreds, and have continued to inflict adverse effects. Evidence abounds regrettably that this is happening in our midst.

1.5. Brain vulnerability—scalar waves and NeuroStrike

Brain vulnerability to RF signals, electromagnetic forces, and other indirect or external technologies shown to be potentially hazardous and harmful to cognitive function, and which contain the genuine risk of injury if not properly dosed or calibrated by medical professionals, is well established. What is far less well-known is the episodic evidence, and a fragmentary array of compelling facts indicates that nefariously engineered, designed, and devised technologies that aim specifically to impair, disrupt, or degrade brain functions and reduce cognitive performance are real. These technologies operate clandestinely but frequently and often effectively as the novel deliberates new weapon of the 21st century. Here the suspension of disbelief and foundational medical curiosity should guide our inquiry.

Two rudimentary examples of this neuro-disruptive and cognitive degradation technology can be found in the metaphysical and biophysical realms of Tesla waves and their bio-effects along with remote convergent technology platforms targeting individuals for the purpose of eroding their cognitive abilities. This is not specious speculation, nor does it depict a future technology risk decades away, instead both are here now despite being misunderstood, ignored, or overlooked purposely because of the challenge they truly represent. Deconstructing and decoding these harmful technologies is a crucial medical challenge…