- --On Sunday, October 18, 1998, 4:44 PM +0100 "den Otter"
<neosapient@geocities.com> wrote:
 

> ----------
>> From: Ian Goddard <Ian@Goddard.net>
>
>> Remote mind control by radio controlled brain implants
>> had been mastered as far back as 1964, to the point that
>> scientists "played" animals "like little electronic toys,"
>> according to the following New York Times article:
>
> [snip]
>
> Very interesting indeed! But...is this for real? One would think that if
such
> amazing feats were already possible more than 30 years ago, "wired" people
> (criminals for example) and animals would be a common sight by now...What
is the
> current status of this kind of research anyway?
>

The same thing HAS been done with people... and I believe it was done before it was done with animals. I remember reading about some guy in Louisiana or something in the 50s who was a schizophrenic and homosexual, and they put a wire into his pleasure center, and the hospital staff gave him control of the button while he was watching a heterosexual porno, then got a prostitute for him (really!). I don't have the source with me so I don't remember the exact details, but it was from a book called "The Three Pound Universe". They also use it to control pain in terminally ill people.. I think the
basal ganglia is the area that is stimulated. Someone who took a biopsychology class told me that one day the professor brought in a rat who had a wire directly into his basal ganglia, and could stimulate it with a lever, and the rat had been pressing the lever for three days straight, and while the professor is going over this to the class, the rat dropped dead from exhaustion.. some girl in the class started complaining that it was cruelty to animals and he said "honey, this rat died happier then you'll ever be in your whole life". Apparently the procedure is not nearly as addictive with humans, and they can control it pretty well when they get one put in. I also seem to remember being told in a class that they have placed electrodes into people amygdala's to control anger.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Zeb Haradon
my web page:
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~haradon

About the bull experiment, that was similar technology but the electrode was placed to deliver electric current to the amygdala, which is the brain's center for both fear and anger (depending on the area of
stimulation). Anyway, the Doctor in the story activated the electrode and the bull suddenly felt extremely scared of the matador and stopped dead in his tracks. This has also been done to human subjects, and when the fear part of the amygdala was stimulated, the subjects would go into giant panic
attacks and have intense feelings of death. When the anger part was stimulated, they would go into bouts of rage. One patient described it like this: "I just felt like I wanted to strangle the man interviewing me for the experiment, and I had no idea why"
 

This is very interesting research and has been done with most areas of the brain, and the results are profound, and have probably taught us more about why humans behave in the way they do than any other psychological experiments. These experiments are still going on today, but are now focused more on (big surprise) cognition and memory enhancement.
 

Also, I have read "The Three Pound Universe" and it is a great book if you are interested in a more biological and "hard science" view of the brain and human behavior.

://
<  >
  Diego A. Mayer-Cantu
  diego@purdue.edu
  http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~mayercan
  PGP Key available upon request
</ >

Someone else must have used Skinner's work for inspiration that led to direct stimulation.

http://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/genetics/behavior/learning/SkinnerBox.html

T.R. Fullhart                                               |    VetMed Multimedia, KSU
email: trf2020@ksu.edu                               |    Whirligig magazine
web: http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~trf2020/ |    Swillhound Studios

The featured scientist, Dr Delgado, also wrote  a book called "Physical Control of the Mind:
Toward a Psychocivilized Society." It seems,  if much of the material on him on the net is true, that he was a open advocate for the mass  implantation of brain chips -- chips a'hoy! --
to reach the goal of a "Psychocivilized Society." The military has been vary interested in his work.

>One would think that if such amazing feats were already possible
>more than 30 years ago, "wired" people (criminals for example) and
>animals would be a common sight by now...What is the current status
>of this kind of research anyway?

IAN: I wondered how could it be that 33 years  after that article was written it still sounds like science fiction. I found it fascinating  because whenever the topic of remote mind control comes up, the routine reaction seems  to be claims that it cannot be done, that it's crazy talk and then the next things mentioned are usually Elvis, UFOs, and Area 51 -- but not necessarily in that order. I guess that  makes it all the more eerie when you uncover a 33 year old article where what I'm told by  educated people cannot to be done today, was done routinely almost a half century ago. Do you realize how much all sciences have evolved since 1965? 65 was virtually the stone age; computers that fit in your hand then were 5000 lbs.

The status of the type of mind control experiments conducted by Dr Delgado seems to be of the classified military variety. In fact, it was such  classified research that the US military contracted
Dr Delgado to do. It's a pretty disturbing situation  if we can see it through the haze of "crazy, UFO,
Area 51" rhetoric. I got the cite for the article I just transcribed from on of these articles, which have some surprising information:

  Conspire.com: Voices In Your Head:
  http://www.conspire.com/brainscan.html

  Mind Control. By Harry Martin & D. Caul:
  http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon8.html

  Toward a Psycho-Civilized Society:
  http://www.parascope.com/articles/0797/em1.htm

  Federation of American Scientists page on US PSYOP:
  http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-36/ch7.htm

**************************************************************
Visit Ian Williams Goddard  -------->  http://Ian.Goddard.net

The reference is:

Author
                     Delgado, José Manuel Rodríguez, 1915-
 Title
                     Physical control of the mind; toward a psychocivilized society [by] José M. R. Delgado.
 Imprint
                     New York, Harper & Row [1969]
 Edition
                     [1st ed.]

Also a movie by the title I think "The Terminal Man' was based on this work.

Best Ralph

Jose Delgato of Yale University was as much a showman as a scientist, he dressed up as a matador when he did his bull stunt, but I have to admit it was an interesting show. He wrote a book "Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society", another old book that has a lot about him is "The Brain Changers"  by Maya Pines. Both books are probably long out of print. Delgato did most of his work in the 50's and 60's and you don't hear much about him nowadays, his style of research is out of fashion and not politically correct.

He also did some work on humans. He approached several people about to undergo brain surgery for medical reasons, and asked them if he could implant some electrodes in their brain at the same time. Some agreed. In one case, when the electrode was fired the man would always turn his head to the left. The interesting  thing was that the man said he felt free, he couldn't even tell when the electrode was turned on. The patient was always able to come up with good reasons for turning to the left. He would say "I'm looking for my slippers" or "I'm restless" or "I heard a noise" or "I was looking under the bed". This man was intelligent and rational, he never said I'm looking for Martians, and felt perfectly free. In all cases he thought turning his head was his own idea, he felt free because he was, he was doing what he wanted to do.

I think the man was perfectly correct when he said "I'm looking for my slippers" that's exactly what he was doing. Nobody could convince him that he didn't really want his slippers because he truly did, he just didn't understand why he wanted them.

Just this year in the journal Nature, I think it was in March, there was a related article by Itzhak Fried. Dr Fried was applying an electrical probe to various spots on the brain of a girl to find the source of her epileptic seizures, when they give a small jolt at one spot the girl smiled, when they gave a larger jolt she erupted into robust contagious laughter. It was no mere reflex either, she was in a grim looking operating room, she was  fighting for her life, her head was cut open, and she found humor in the situation. At one point she looked at her masked surgeons and said "You guys are just so funny standing around".

John K Clark      jonkc@att.net
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

  IAN: Curious. I was just wondering what remotely induced thought/actions would appear like to the
actor, and it occurred to me that they may always seem to be self originated, since the brain would
assume anything coming from inside it (including an impulse from a implant inside it) is itself; it
would evoke no anti-bodies, so to say, in response to the alien invasion. An implant would slip into
the thing known as "myself," and thus the mind could not perceive it as being other than self.

The man's experience also indicates that subtle thoughts can be induced that serve to justify the actions the stimulus effects. The head is not just turned, but is so for a reason expressed as a set of thoughts and/or feelings.

It's all very fascinating from a philosophical  point of view, with respect to the concepts of self, free will, what and who is "the actor."

If remote brain control is someone controlling another thing, what controls the brain locally? I'd say the brain is a set of systems that have learned to control each other. Slip a new system in, and each subsystem assumes this new system is one of the team, and thus "I wanted to turn my head."

**************************************************************
Visit Ian Williams Goddard  -------->  http://Ian.Goddard.net

- ----------
> From: Scott Badger <wbadger@psyberlink.net>

> Den,  I'm having a hard time recalling the details, but
> there was a research scientist working out of a
> Canadian university who has published several papers
> on the effects of a machine he designed which
> manipulated and focused electromagnetic frequencies
> on various places in the brain.  It looked like a rather
> large and cumbersome helmet.  Anyway, the subjective
> reports from the experimental subjects included feelings
> of deep relaxation, spiritual insight, out-of-body
> experiences, etc.  These effects sound similar to those
> produced through the direct stimulation techniques used
> by Wilder Penfield.

It definitely looks like the technology is there, but no one is using it anywhere close to its real potential. I'm not sure how recent the above mentioned research is, but it seems like there hasn't been much activity lately. Very surprising, as we now could do a lot more thanks so massive increases in computing power and better brain imaging techniques.

Here's basically what I'd like to do: gather all available research material in this particular field, especially Dr. Delgrado's work (is he still alive? If so, he might be willing to co-operate). Though implants seem to give the best results, they aren't exactly user-friendly (though in some cases they might be acceptable, for instance with patients that suffer from severe chronic pain), so we'd have to focus on directed microwave beams, for example. This has allegedly been used by the CIA and such, though mostly as a weapon.

The design: some kind of helmet seems an obvious choice, or (preferably) a headphone like contraption for portable use. As relatively little energy is used, this may be feasible. Since it's very important to hit  the right regions of the brain, you'll need an accurate "targeting system". Perhaps sonar could be used for this (to create a rough image of the brain, which in combination with a standard model of a brain could be used by the machine's computer to determine where to aim - or is this too difficult for today's tech?) MRI or other scanning techniques could be used too, but then the machine probably wouldn't be portable (or affordable). Maybe something for a luxury/research model though...By using multiple beams that only produce effects when they converge you could perhaps target deeper areas of the brain as well, though I'm not sure whether this could be achieved with "safe" intensities.

Another, more simple variant would have to be "fine-tuned" by hand, by trying different kinds of settings and programming your preferences into the computer (every time you use it, as you never put the "helmet" in *exactly* the same position). Movement could also cause the helmet to hit the wrong spot,
so some kind of safety would have to be built into it. Of course, it could turn out that fairly large spots on the brain produce the same results when stimulated, so that the machine's aim doesn't have to be perfect.

> Mind machine people talk about the greatest effects
> occurring at the "crossover point", that point where the
> brain starts generating greater levels of theta than alpha.
> Interestingly, for most people the crossover point is close
> to 7.8 hertz, a frequency which is also known as the
> "Shumann Frequency", the natural resonant frequency of
> the Earth's electromagnetic field.  Is it all about getting "in
> tune" with mother Earth?

The earth as a big mental vibrator? :-) It would certainly make sense that this somehow got incorporated into our evolution.

> Anyway, this Canadian researcher noticed that UFO reports
> around the world were strongly correlated to fluctuations in the
> Earth's magnetic field and posited that these fluctuations were
> inducing hallucinations.

There also seems to be a portion of the brain that produces religious experiences when stimulated (the same one perhaps?) Maybe (very maybe) if you could turn on and off people's religious experiences it would help to further atheism, an interesting side effect of this technology. Maybe the very realization that our very being, our senses, emotions, memories etc. can be manipulated at the touch of a button would cause something of a revelation for some (many?) people. Just hearing about obscure experiments in some lab far away is one thing (this can easily be ignored), but having it done to yourself, literally holding your very being in the palm of your hand, is a lot harder to dismiss. Widespread use of mind machines could thus have something of an enlightening effect (for some, anyway).

- ----------
> From: Joe Jenkins <joe_jenkins@yahoo.com>

> ---den Otter <neosapient@geocities.com> wrote:
>
> >Even a machine with just one setting, pleasure, would be
> >an absolutely unbeatable product (and a very transhuman
> >one too: now you control your own emotions). The stuff that
> >dreams are made of. Now of course follows the inevitable
> >question: why hasn't this been done yet?
>
> Uh, aren't these called sex toys? :-)

Nope, this one aims for the ultimate pleasure spot, the head, instead of loitering around the pelvic area ;-) Besides, there are a lot of other possible settings, though "pleasure" would no doubt be the most popular one.

> I've been inventing, developing, prototyping, and testing technosexual
> devices for many years now.  I have many extremely unique, but so far
> unpatented designs, some of which would cause you to collapse in
> laughter upon hearing the details.  I know *I* did when I first
> thought up the ideas.  Many of my designs are intended to enhance
> partner sex, but training has been most effective with solosexual
> activity.  I'll be glad to post descriptions and links to the list as
> soon as I have protected my intellectual property.

Please do, I can't wait to see a real "transhuman" sex toy.

> It is a biofeedback technosexual stimulation device designed to teach
> the capability of having a long series of intense orgasms (up to 12
> hours in some test subjects, chemically aided of course).

And they survived?

The
> stimulation is a complex function of input from a sensor on the PC
> muscle. The PC or Pubococcygeus muscle goes around the anus, across
> the entire pelvic floor, and attaches in front to the pubic bone on
> both women and men.  To locate this muscle, simply stop the flow of
> urine. A weak PC muscle will result in urinary incontinence.

I can feel it! (think of the Jackson 5 song "Can you feel it"? when practicing, it might help).

> my machine which develops "fast
> reflexive" muscles designed for extreme involuntary contractions of
> the PC muscle.

So, it's basically one of those things that tone your muscles by means of electric stimulation, but now stuck to your ass? Pretty smooth idea! Why didn't *I* think of that?

> I'm not ready to say much more about my devices on the
> wider list yet, but hopefully will within the next year.  That is, if
> I ultimately decide they are transhuman in nature

Ah, who cares, as long as they *work*! ;-)

> The ones with biofeedback from the PC muscle are far too addictive to
> make available as a commercial product and not expect legal problems.
> Of course, I *will* do it anyway :-).  Coming soon to a net store near
> you.

That's the spirit!

> > Now, can anyone tell me: why on earth isn't this product on
> > the market yet? Are there technical problems, or is everyone
> > just missing a great opportunity here? I mean, one could get
> > richer than Bill Gates by making a product that will virtually sell
> > *itself*, and no doubt will change society quite a bit in the process.
>
> Improper usage can cause injury.

No doubt. Perhaps surgeons specialized in brain tumors will have
a field day...

> Improper sharing or cleaning/maintaining can transmit disease or
> infection.

Not with the headset, which I might call "Mr. Feeling" btw.

> Mental and possibly physical addiction.

Oh yes! But at least they'll die happier than they've ever been...

> "For novelty use only" - not applicable because of needed detailed
> instructions

> Limited market for complex learning curve techno devices - no matter
> what the reward.

The beauty of the mind helmet is that it doesn't require any practice or special skills whatsoever; just sit back and be pleasured, or whatever. Push the "lust" button and even your hamster will seem irresistible.

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