TORTURE: ASIAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES | JUNE-AUG 2013
healthy people. 44 While neuroscientists agree that the brain is the most complex scientific problem today,45 there is no agreement among neuroscientists on how to go about solving the neural code. Nevertheless, the brain can be divided into two fundamental components that the public can understand. Neuroscientists often describe the brain as “the electrochemical brain” because the brain consists of two essential and equally important properties—bioelectrical and biochemical.46 Significantly, two critical facts to know about neuroweapons are that first, they are based on the bioelectrical properties of the brain, not the biochemical properties of the brain; and second, they require the development of technologies for remote communication and surveillance of the brain and only a bioelectrical approach--not a biochemistry approach—can lead to remote access to the electrochemical brain. Victor Chase authored a book on the importance of research on the electrical activity of the brain. Chase explained that “electrical signals provide the most efficient method of transmitting information within the body. No living creature could survive without electricity, because the body is, in essence, an electrical machine.”47 Neuroscientists still don’t understand how the brain’s electrical signals are transformed into human thought, actions, hearing, seeing, and more.48 There is no dispute that the electrochemical brain communicates with electrical,
44 Ibid. 45 Gwen Ifill, ‘Will US forge public-private partnership to draw brain activity map?’ PBS NewsHour, February 20, 2013. Available at: http:// www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june13/ medical_02-20.html. 46 Horgan, n. 41 above. 47 Victor Chase, Shattered nerves: How science is solving modern medicine’s most perplexing problem (2006), 1, 2. 48 Ibid.
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electromagnetic and magnetic signals as well as chemical signals. Additionally it is well established that electrical, electromagnetic and magnetic signals from outside sources can mimic, interfere with or directly communicate with brain cells. For example, neuroscientists have communicated with the brain by way of its electrical properties. Brain implants utilize electrical signals to affect or cause movements and actions, and to alter, influence, even control behavior. Jose Delgado, a Yale University neuroscientist, conducted research in the 1960s and 1970s which helped to establish that brain implants could be remotely controlled to electrically stimulate an animal’s brain to control various complex behaviours, instincts, and emotions.49 Delgado stated: “A new technology . . . has proved that movements, sensations, emotions, desires, ideas, and a variety of psychological phenomena may be induced, inhibited, or modified by electrical stimulation of specific areas of the brain.” It becomes highly relevant that research on the electrical properties of the electrochemical brain has lagged far behind research on the brain’s biochemical properties. Progress on the electricity of the brain is still considered rudimentary.50 Furthermore, since the 1960s, biochemistry is the area of research that mainstream neuroscience has completely focused on, at the expense of the equally important research on the bioelectrical properties of the brain. Consequently, it can be argued that bioelectricity, as one of two fundamental properties of the electrochemical brain, should be a major focus of neuroscience but for some reason it is not.
49 Jose Delgado, Physical control of the mind: Toward a psychocivilized society, Vol. 41, World Perspectives (1969) 50 Chase, 1, n. 47 above.