Jack H. Schick

Mind Control with a Magnet?



Posted: Sunday, January 02, 2011

by Jack H. Schick

My wife’s got this gadget. Well, it’s not really a gadget, I guess. It’s sort of a pillow/neck warmer/massager thing. It’s rectangular, about four inches thick and has a notch that you lay your head or neck down into. It feels like it’s stuffed with dried beans and sand. It’s electric. You plug the thing into a wall socket. It has a key-pad that gives you control over the intensity of its several functions. It warms up. It creates a “soothing, relaxing, completely harmless” (they assure you on the back of the box), electro-magnetic field that engulfs and stimulates your brain stem and upper spinal cord. I’ve tried it out. It seems to vibrate a little, but I think that is just the sensation created by the electrical pulses it sends through your head. It’s made in China.

I tried another Chinese electro-magnetic device once. A friend lent it to me when I had a very badly cramped muscle under my right shoulder blade (I’d suffered it, on and off, since the Clinton administration). His gadget had a peanut shaped ‘patch’ that looked like it was made from the same material as refrigerator magnets. It had a cord and control dials, too. You stuck the pad on, over the sore spot. It somehow attached to the skin by itself, like a magnet. You plugged it in and adjusted the intensity and speed of the electro-magnetic pulses. My friend warned me to start on a very low setting and gradually work my way up the scale. It’s supposed to scramble the nerve signals in the muscle and eliminate tightness. At first there was just a prickling, tingling sensation; but, all of a sudden, it felt like my knotted muscle exploded and caught fire. It felt like every fiber in the muscle ruptured and shredded. I was in agony. I could barely move the whole right side of my body for a few minutes. It did work, though. I’ve had no trouble with that muscle again. I’ve been afraid to try it on the spastic muscle I have in my left shoulder, though.

My wife really enjoys her “neck thing,” as she calls it. She’ll lay there on the couch for half an hour with a silly grin on her face, occasionally letting out a subtle moan or “aaaaah.” I argued, to no avail, that it simply could not be good sticking your medulla oblongata into a magnetic field and sending electrical pulses through it, no matter how good it felt. I envisioned her spinal cord shredding and exploding like my shoulder muscle did. But, even in one of her crabbiest moods, after using the thing she’s much easier to get along with. She gets up with a goofy smile on her face; her head cocked at a slight angle to the left, and doesn’t say anything for quite some time. I quit worrying about it. Why argue with success?

The other evening I was laying a hot bubble bath soaking some other sore muscles (I guess getting old really does suck after all). I was reading a popular science magazine. It was their “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010” issue. Number 80 was under the topic of Neuroscience, and titled “Magnets Can Change Your Moral Values.” Neuroscientist Liana Young and her colleagues at MIT and Harvard did some experiments on twenty college student volunteers in April, and discovered an interesting phenomenon.

They asked the volunteers to judge a bunch of made up scenarios that involved morally questionable behavior. The example given in the article was: Jane gives her ‘friend’ what she thinks is poison, but it turns out to just be sugar. No one is hurt. On a scale of one (‘forbidden’), to seven (‘that’s cool’), how immoral was Jane’s behavior? The experimenters then did ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ to the volunteers’ brains, focusing on an area behind the right ear called the ‘temporoparietal junction.’ It’s an area they think plays a role in a person’s ability to deduce another person’s intentions. They asked the subjects the same type of questions again.

After the ‘subjects’ had had their brains zapped, they were consistently more likely to rank the actions of the characters in the scenarios as being more morally acceptable. Almost all the answers to almost all the questions averaged a full rank closer to being “okay behavior.” Ms Young’s interpretation of the experimental results is that, if you shoot electro-magnetic pulses through a person’s brain they are more likely to focus on the outcome of the scenario and not get distracted by the perpetrator’s intentions. Jane may have wanted to kill her ‘friend’ but she didn’t succeed, so her behavior didn’t seem that bad after all.

Some people ranted that manipulating an individual’s morality with magnets sounds like something out of a diabolical Vincent Price film. Ms Young insists, however, that she has no interest in mind control. She just wants to learn why ‘intentions’ seem to matter so much to people. If Jane’s friend didn’t die, or even get sick, what’s the big deal? This discovery could have a valuable use in our society, though. A trip to the zapper chamber could easily replace nap time at pre-school and simplify a lot of things. There is a rumor that the Chinese are interested in buying the rights to produce the experimental device. I think the US government already owns, though. It’s kind of obvious that government officials and elected representatives have been zapping their brains for years.
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