How to Hack a Brain

How many of you remember the strange case back in ‘17 of the “sonic weapon attack” at various embassies in Havana? It was weird, wasn’t it? Dozens of diplomats and staff fell ill, laid low by a noise that gave them a wide variety of symptoms. It was enough that the US accused Cuba of targeting them with some sort of sonic weapon.

We humans of course, love our weapons. What we seem to increasingly not love is that they cause mass death, gore, and other horrific effects. That’s not to say we all have evolved to this point: the FBI arrested a neo-nazi terrorist just this week who planned on murdering hundreds, if not more, men in the US still murder their partners and then dozens of others when they’re scorned, and there is a disturbing minority of white people who are very much ready to commit genocide (one of whom, works in the White House, he ironically has Jewish grandparents!), but in general it is unlikely public opinion would tolerate the prosecution of a war in the manner in which we did World War 2 (at least, if we knew about it.) In development all around the world are manners in which to disable the enemy without actually killing them—sonic weapons for example. It’s no wonder that governments began to yell “j’accuse!” in Havana as their diplomats fell ill. Multiple scientific disciplines, and then newspapers, and then the current US regime, all began to argue back and forth about it.

But, as Vanity Fair reported last month , there was no weapons test. There was no attack. Everyone who fell ill, was a victim of their own brain.

Sift through these scientific feuds and media battles, however, and you will end up at a single unified theory that fully explains the diverse symptoms of the injured diplomats, as well as the seemingly inexplicable circumstances surrounding their ailments. Unlike a futuristic gun, it turns out, the cause of the pain and suffering at the American Embassy in Havana appears to be as old as civilization itself. Over the centuries it has been responsible for some of the most confounding epidemics in human history, from the Middle Ages in Europe to Colonial America. And in Cuba, it appears to have been weaponized for our time, opening up a whole new battlefield in Donald Trump’s war on reality.

In times gone by, this was called mass hysteria, and human history is rife with moments of it. Now we title it mass psychogenic illness, and we also title it conversion disorder. It’s common—an artifact of our very weird brains.

Mass psychogenic illness is in fact common. It’s my prevailing theory for the majority of the clown sightings before the 2016 election. It appears to be the cause of the dancing manias in Europe during the 15^th and 16^th centuries.

ProPublica reported in 2018 on the “attack” in Cuba,  writing at the time no one could really find a cause. The Patient Zero in this case, her noise turned out to be faulty equipment. And yes, everyone who was sick, was in fact sick---but a weapon didn’t do it---at least, not a high tech one.

Vanity Fair notes that humans are suggestible. There are now measles outbreaks in the Americas, two continents that had all but eliminated the disease, because a bunch of suggestible people believed a liar named Andrew Wakefield. Our brains often make us see (and hear) patterns that do not exist---the Virgin Mary in toast, faces in clouds and on Mars, men in the Moon, ghost voices in static, all of astrology, the list goes on and on. Our brains also respond to placebos, an effect very well known in medicine. This is simply how we are wired. It is part of our evolution, and now we live in an era where this can be weaponized.

Conversion disorder is “rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms among members of a cohesive social group, for which there is no corresponding organic origin” and this fits many of the symptoms of the diplomats. It wasn’t a large group getting them at once, it started with one, and then quickly spread amongst this cohesive group—which was under considerable stress. At present, there is no such sonic or acoustic weapon that can target this precisely and it isn’t even clear that such a portable weapon could ever exist except in science fiction. Recordings of noises, according to the Vanity Fair article, turned out to be crickets, and even crickets aren’t that loud.

Now it’s tempting to say “well, then, the Russians planted the seed of psychogenic illness in our diplomats in Cuba.” Even I fell victim to this for a time---I’d watched, around the time I read the Vanity Fair article, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls. We’ll discuss how terrible that movie is another time but there is a scene in which the Soviet villain describes how she wants to overthrow the United States without firing a single shot, using our own brains against us. It sounded remarkably like everything that happened prior to the 2016 election (I wonder if Putin was a fan of this movie!) but that doesn’t seem to be how psychogenic illness works.

For an episode of mass hysteria to begin, all that is necessary is troubled times in the culture, a shared set of beliefs and a final, fearful, anxiety-provoking trigger to set the phenomenon into motion.

Yep, sounds like the US diplomatic mission in Cuba. 

It happens all the time, pretty much everywhere in the world. It just can pop up, spread because we are in fact very suggestible beings, and then disappear without any trace---no Russian troll farm needed here. The symptoms experienced are extremely real.

One way to make these spells go away, is to let them run their course. That doesn’t happen when media gets involved, or obnoxious governments like the one running the US now. We also live in the era of social media which amplifies everything wrong up to eleven. Misinformation that we fall for is a type of mass hysteria—that’s how it and propaganda work (and we’ve known this for like, forever). They take advantage of how our brains organize the universe around them and hack it. But, we can hack our own brains all by ourselves---no outside influence needed.

I would highly recommend clicking through and reading both the Vanity Fair article and especially its terrifying conclusion, and the ProPublica article. I would also recommend this article about the weird cluster of Tourette’s that appeared in LeRoy, NY, in 2012—also very likely mass psychogenic illness.

There was no attack. But brains did get hacked---and I can guarantee that there are people looking for ways to weaponize this. Keep aware, and good luck.