Brainwashing Helmets

 

I was rather surprised to find yesterday that if I asked a text to image AI to produce detailed labelled diagrams of brainwashing helmets, it actually did so.  This particular image is not ideal because it actually became more garbled on being enhanced by krea.ai .  As it was, feeding the text into ChatGPT led to it being able to read it as a number of clear English captions, some of which can be made out in this image.  It also noted duplicates.

Now, what it actually identified was surprisingly convincing, and this is where it goes a bit meta because considering it's on the subject of brainwashing, that's exactly what you'd expect it to do!  It's also what a lot of people seem to fear from AI, or what we call AI as it isn't clear that that's actually AI.  That, however, is a subject for another time.

Seven modules were identified.  Well, more in fact, but some are duplicates and one doesn't have much going for it, which is something like "Mid-Face Module" and seems to be a kind of junction box between the others.  What it produced in terms of discrete modules was:

• Hypnosis module
• Memory manipulation circuit
• Stimulation circuit
• Feedback sensor
• Viral module
• Dopamine regulator
• Hedral interface

The last one was listed first but doesn't make as much sense in that order.

They work as follows (yes, I've made a transition to accepting this as if it's real):

• Hypnosis module:  Audiovisual and direct neural elements.  Perusal of the diagram shows a headphone-like feature on the subject's left.  This could actually partly be a headphone, but there's no reason why there shouldn't also be more high tech stuff going on through it at the same time.  The audiovisual element could involve something as simple as a hypnotic script or binaural beats.  Visually, swirling patterns are projected onto a screen in front of the wearer's eyes, which is not present in the illustration.  I say "projected" because I haven't said this yet but the idea is that this is happening in the '80s.  More on this later.  The direct neural element is mediated through directed ultrasonic "beams" and transcranial electrical stimulation, which induces theta and alpha wave dominance.  There used to be a device called "Russian Sleep" (not to be confused with the creepypasta "Russian Sleep Experiment") which induced sleep by electrically stimulating the brain in a particular rhythm.  There is a debate, of course, about whether hypnosis is a state of consciousness or just role-playing, and I'll go into that later but not yet.
• Memory manipulation circuit:  Works in close conjunction with the Stimulation Circuit, which comes next.  Long-term memories with particular emotional associations are identified as patterns in brain activity.  These are then altered to memories with different feelings so that they are happier, sadder, more enraging, frightening, less frightening and so on.
• Stimulation circuit:  Presents sensory impressions to the wearer which can be visual, auditory, tactile or olfactory.  This is done by stimulating, respectively, the visual and auditory cortices, the sensory homunculus or the olfactory bulbs.  Unfortunately, although the olfactory has a particularly strong association with memory, it's both difficult to access and not well-understood, and is stimulated in a relatively crude manner with a punchcard to activate and deactivate particular smell receptors.  It can create a few basic smells such as a sewage-like odour, mint, burning toast, burning plastic or something based on a taste.  The visual stimulation is also relatively crude.  The helmet scans a series of images, then creates a pattern related to them in the visual cortex.  Since the wearer is in a dream-like state, they hallucinate a more realistic image based on these.  The auditory component is almost redundant, as the headphones basically do the same job.  The sensory homunculus is stimulated in such a way as to create specific localised tactile sensations of the usual kinds, such as pressure, light touch and pain, and also heightens current tactile sensations from the outside world.
• Feedback sensor:  Taking a slightly different tack, this is essentially a polygraph applied to the temples.  It detects pulse rate, blood pressure (by the Doppler Effect), blood flow (by detecting colour), temperature and skin conductivity, deducing probable emotional state and modulating the brain stimulation accordingly.
• Viral module:  Creates intrusive fixations similar to "earworms" through "hacking" the brain.  Memes are introduced to the subject's consciousness which subjectively amount to obsessional thoughts by presenting sensory impressions and thoughts along with patterns akin to addiction and obsession.
• Dopamine regulator:  Related to the previous module.  Stimulates dopaminergic pathways in the brain when the desired effect is being presented to it and inhibits them when the opposite is presented.
• Hedral interface:  Named after the Greek word for "face" or "seat", this responds when the new pattern of brain activity is sufficiently close to the objective by switching the brain permanently into the new stable condition.  In other words, it locks the target pattern in, rendering it a persistent new state of mind.  This is partly reached through changing brain activity from a hypnotic to a wakeful state through the hypnosis module.

How is all this achieved?  Well, there are electrodes, electromagnets and ultrasonic transducers, all of which can alter brain activity, and the brain activity itself is detected using the same electrodes the way EEG does.  The operation of the active side of the helmet is in some ways similar to a more targeted version of electro-convulsive therapy.  It also needs to be programmed to address the specific set of thoughts, attitudes, emotions and behaviour to be altered, both to assess their initial state and arrive at a goal state.  This is straightforward in some ways but not all.  For instance, taking the classic and apparently fabricated idea of brainwashing American soldiers in the Korean War to agree to the principles of the Chinese Communist Party, this is a highly specific and complex set of beliefs which it's difficult to see how the above could achieve.  On the other hand, the induction or relief of a phobia or paraphilia would seem to be more feasible.  This immediately suggests uses to address paedophilia, addiction, depression and many other mental health issues.

This helmet is of course entirely fictional, but it also presents some conceptual issues.  As read, it feels convincing to me, or rather the description of how it would work seems entirely credible, and this is fine in that it's supposed to be used in a story rather than being a design for a real-life device, but this conviction might only be mine, and it's also ironic because in a sense I may have been brainwashed into believing that it would work.  However, if I have, this is in itself evidence for the possible existence of a brainwashing "machine", namely generative AI, and this is something that an AI could do without having anything other than a visual interface to a human user.  That's rather disturbing, although it's also been suggested that we are considering the wrong kind of danger from AI.

Leaving all this aside, a story just needs to convince the reader enough for the time they're reading the story that this is what's happening, and of course that means that the story itself is engaging in some form of rhetoric, which may or may not be akin to brainwashing.

Okay, so now the backstory.  This is set in the 1980s, so any computing power in the helmet must be quite limited.  This is why the photo scanner only produces low-resolution images and the display screen is merely projected rather than a TFT.  I've chosen to imagine this helmet as almost stumbled upon by a male savant whose hobbies include neuroscience, biofeedback, hypnosis and, perhaps disturbingly, home-made electroencephalographs and ECT machines.  Russian sleep is also in his wheelhouse.  Rather than consciously designing the device, the boy receives visions of the diagrams necessary to produce each of the components, which he accepts uncritically, not because of arrogance but due to the fact that his unconscious mind produces them.  After that, it's just a job of getting the components, putting them together and arranging the jigsaw of circuit boards in the right order.  The helmet resulting is bulky and massive, and the wearer must lie down and place her head in it.

I don't know why the boy's male.  This process is to some extent handed down to me in the same way as the blueprints are to him in the story.

Now the question is, what could a helmet like this actually do in reality?  Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) exists and is used for epilepsy, depression, addiction and OCD.  This is rather like a mild version of ECT.  There's also focussed ultrasound, which can be used for thermablation but also more mildly.  It can be used for Parkinsonism.  As well as those two, there's something called the God Helmet, which uses a weaker magnetic coil to stimulate the right temporal lobe, inducing spiritual experiences, and beyond that there's the question of what a near-death experience does to the brain.  People who go through that often come out the other side confident that there's an afterlife, and to me that means that a physical event of some kind has influenced their belief system.  In other words, brainwashing.  In other words, although the precision of specific brainwashing isn't guaranteed, there seems to be no reason why a helmet somewhat similar to the one AI described for me could exist.

There are plenty of ethical and philosophical issues raised by this device, but I won't go into them here.  This is just an idea for a story I had which turned into something very vivid.