In my previous post, The True Power of Visualization and Its Importance to Success, I explored several concepts. One of the important ideas presented was the scientific understanding that our brains respond similarly to observation, imagination, and execution of any particular action. This has profound effects in terms of goal-visualization, skill development, and personal confidence. If you haven’t read the post, check it out here.

By extension, the idea that observation, imagination, and action are related in the brain raises an interesting question: could I control your thoughts and actions with mind control? If all three forms of brain activity are very similar, could your brain be hijacked to do what someone else wants? Is any kind of mind control possible?

Let me explain myself a little better before I continue. What I’m suggesting is a thought experiment where we explore two things:

1. What kind of technology would be required to control someone’s mind? How powerful would it need to be?
2. Could I get you to experience something at will by sending electrical/magnetic signals to your brain that represent the imagined or physical action?

The USA Has Already Tried

The idea of mind control gathered steam in American pop-culture around the 1950s, towards the end of the Korean War. The New York Times had even published an article in 1954 expressing fear that returning POWs were at risk of being “converted” by “Communist brainwashers”. This paranoia started to grip the US once rumors of USSR sponsored mind control ran rampant on the media. The US believed that these mind control techniques were used to rapidly spread Communism. CIA director at the time, Allan Dulles, fed into the frenzy and approved a covert operation called MK-Ultra in 1953. MK-Ultra was designed to explore the effects of electroshock therapy, magnetic resonance, paralytics, and drugs on mind control, information gathering, and psychological torture – often times on unsuspecting subjects.

The results of the experiments were underwhelming at best. Most subjects were under the influence of LSD because there were rumors that Russia was buying the entire world supply of LSD to aid their mind controlling efforts. Others that suffered electroshock therapy and intense magnetic waves applied to certain areas of the head felt nausea and dizziness, intense headaches, and experienced mild hallucinations. It’s safe to say that the CIA’s efforts were futile, and this entire experiment was started simply because of paranoia and rumors spread by the media, and also a race for power.

The All Powerful Machine

While the US and apparently the Soviet Union were unsuccessful in their investigations, technology has changed drastically since the 1950’s. Would it be possible today to control someone’s mind?

To be able to control someone’s mind, you’d need to have a dictionary of brain activity that maps specific brain activity to specific actions, thoughts, and feelings. Assuming that there’s a person that’s eager to be brain washed and is willing to cooperate to create this dictionary of brain activity, you’d need to have a continuous stream of data of the state of all neurons in the brain to begin. What would be the required capacity of a recording machine for this experiment to be successful?

The average adult human brain has 100 billion neurons (that’s with a B as in boy). If we were to record the state of each neuron as a 1 if it’s excited and a 0 if it’s suppressed, that would be a 100 billion digit number, and this would be the shortest way we could represent the state of every single neuron. This isn’t even keeping track of which digit corresponds to which neuron.

100 billion numbers could be represented as 100 billion bytes (800 billion bits since there are 8 bits in a byte), and 100 billion bytes would take up about 93 Gigabytes of data for an instant of brain activity. The fastest that a neuron can fire and change its state is about 1 ms. So if we took a snapshot every single millisecond, that would be 93,000 Gigabytes or 93 Terabytes of information! Dang. Do it for an hour, and now you’re up to 5.58 Petabytes. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are rumored to store up 1,200 petabytes between the 4 of them. At this pace, you’d become the biggest data hoarder in history within about 10 days. This isn’t much time to create an entire dictionary of human thought and action.

All of this isn’t even considering the complexity of the system required to stimulate or suppress each and every one of your 100 billion neurons. The result would honestly be a huge feat of engineering that would win the inventor “god status” in the engineering hall of fame.

Let’s be idealists and assume that technology will one day be advanced enough to record this amount of information and be complex enough to control billions of individual cells. Would mind control be possible then?

Neuroplasticity

There is one more thing that makes mind control difficult, and that’s neuroplasticity.

From birth, you are born with about the same amount of neurons that you have in adulthood. However, the connections change between each and every one of them throughout your life as you experience things, learn new things, and think different things. Certain connections get stronger as you continually experience, train, or think the same way and the connections that are not used in your brain begin to weaken and eventually break.

However, that’s not it! Not only do connections change between neurons, but clumps of neurons can form in different parts of your brain depending on how much you use them. If you study language a lot, the areas of your brain associated with interpretation and understanding of language will physically grow larger. Imagine having a computer with a hard drive that could change the connections between all its parts and rearrange the parts to make itself more efficient. This is how the brain changes throughout your life.

To prove my point, take a 14 year old boy named Ahad Israfil. One day in 1973 while at work, Ahad was shot in the head when his employer accidentally dropped a firearm on the floor. The shot was so devastating that it took out half of Ahad’s skull. The injury required him to remove a large portion of his brain, yet his recovery was remarkable. Ahad did lose the ability to walk; however, he has successfully regained most of his faculties back, even obtaining a college degree – with half the brain capacity. The brain rewired itself to make the best of what was available, including regaining functions and abilities that belonged specifically to the portions of his brain that he lost.

This process isn’t specific to injury. Your brain is doing this all the time, all throughout your life. Even if you did have the technology to record and map functions, thoughts, and actions of the mind, you would have to constantly update it as the individual changes, experiences new things, and ages, as the neurons change connections, and the physical structure of the brain changes.

So NO, to create mind control would be an extremely complicated, data-intensive, arduous, and fruitless task.

Even if you had the entire connectivity history and developmental changes of someone’s brain, it would still continue to change in unpredictable ways because life is unpredictable – and that’s just considering one person. If you wanted to control more than one person, you’d need a brand new mapping and dictionary for that person as well, since each individual comes with their own attitudes, experiences, thoughts, and skills.

One could find great relief that any sci-fi nightmare we may have of someone rising to power and controlling us like zombies is not only very implausible, the task extremely pointless and complex. The reality is that each of us are unique – based on our experiences, attitudes, and opinions – and this uniqueness is reflected in the physical structure of our brain.

There is something special to take away from this. The paths we take in life are strictly different for every individual. Every experience marks you in a unique way and will continue to do so as long as you exist. Not only do you live life, but the life you live is reflected in your own biology. We are inextricably linked to experience.

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