Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Laboratory >

please some technical ideas/language?

..

14:03 / 20.09.01

This should be fairly elementary for some of you geniuses over here. I've got an idea for an SF story, but I know nothing about the science involved...

How would you go about planting in some poor unsuspecting soul's head a statement that he/she would take for hir own thought? Of course the obvious method is by some kind of consicously imperceptible audio device. But what would be the best way to disguise the sound? Speed it up, slow it down, etc?

I also could use an up-to-date technical description of how this device might be built. I swear I'm not building it myself; it's for a story, really!

Thanks.

14:27 / 20.09.01

The most obvious method to me is visual--as with subliminal advertising, wherein a message is flashed on a screen in between the frames of a film: it's too fast for the mind to consciously perceive, but repeated enough times the mind picks it up on an unconscious level.

This can be effective in stimulating basically non-cognitive urges--body urges like thirst and hunger and the need for evacuation (the way the sound of a dripping faucet makes some people have to pee!), but I'm not sure about high-cognitive-function "ideas," as such.

14:28 / 20.09.01

I...erm...did try building something like this once. Didn't get very far tho' 'cos I couldn't build anything like the machine needed. & if I did, it wouldn't have worked anyhow...

I forget the exact details, but I think the basic plan was to measure the brain patterns associated with a state of mind (I think it would only be anything like possible for general states of mind, not specific ideas), then try and reconstruct them in someone's head. You can make the brain vibrate at certain frequencies by playing different frequency notes in each ear - through headphones. The brain will tend to resonate at the difference between them. For example, if you play a 440Hz note in one ear, and a 445Hz note in the other, you get a 5Hz brainwave. My idea was to use electrodes on the forehead to pick up the brain waves, & feedback complicated patterns through the earphones, cancelling out unwanted waves & reinforcing others, kind of like an animated hologram. Pretty impractical, but you could probably induce epilepsy like this.

Another way to stimulate certain areas of the brain is to use induced current - using patterns of coils around the head, you can induce a current in a pretty exact point in the brain. There's been some experiments done, producing specific sensations. Still, I don't think you could get it accurate enough to implant ideas. And I think people would notice you trying to stick coils of wire to their head.

So yeah, I reckon subliminals are pretty much the way to go...+ drugs in the water supply to make people susceptible.

Sorry if this wasn't much help, I'll try & find out some more.

..

15:43 / 20.09.01

Maybe this isn't as simple as I thought.

Wheaty: you actually tried... nevermind.

In order for this device to work in the story, it has to be concealable, portable, and based on sound. I guess I'm not really a stickler for scientific accuracy here. Feel free to speculate wildly and bend the laws of physics if need be. I only need something that sounds plausible to your average unscientific Joe.

Jack: Couldn't you theoretically hide an audio subliminal message in much the same way you described visual one's?

17:24 / 20.09.01

Hmmm...
I recall that in the 1950s-60s there was subliminal advertising in American films. This was basically aimed at getting you to buy food(?) and whatnot, but that got stomped out pretty quickly. Some laws got passed on that issue and that was pretty much the end of it. (Oh, yeah, right.)
And when I was a kid (the 1970s) there were advertisements for a game called "Husker Du". That advertisement got pulled because subliminal "Buy it!" messages were embedded in it. More laws, etc...
Does anyone remember the old Max Headroom series? Yeah, the American version wasn't all that good, but if you can find an English version of "20 Minutes into the Future", watch it! Blipverts, anyone?
Be seeing you...

18:03 / 20.09.01

don't know if this could help but...

18:37 / 20.09.01

quote:Originally posted by tiger's mouth:
Maybe this isn't as simple as I thought.
...
Jack: Couldn't you theoretically hide an audio subliminal message in much the same way you described visual ones?Well.... the evil genius of subliminal advertising in film and video is that it depends on one of film's intrinsic qualities and the related human perceptual quirk that makes it work--that it is a series of still pictures, and that the brain, because of the "persistence of vision" phenomenon, reassembles them into the illusion of a single moving picture.

Hearing isn't like that: we receive information in a constant stream, and process it instantaneously.

That said: there are frequencies above and below the range of human hearing, exposure to which which can stimulate physical and emotional responses. These work on a very primal level, though--fight-or-flight, reptile-brain stuff: subsonics can induce a feeling of unease or fear.

But it's a start.

The beauty of speculative fiction is that, if you bluff with a straight face, people will usually go for it: "The infrasonics put her in suggestible state, and the rest was a simple matter of encoding a message to her alpha-wave frequency band, bypassing the conscious mind entirely--planting the seed. Then, when the thoughtbomb went off and bubbled up inside her head, she honestly believed she'd come up with it herself."

Rule of thumb for SF: never belabor the science in your story unless the science IS the story.

18:59 / 20.09.01

Well, there's the acoustics to alter mood, or there's the thing where you can tune a person's head to be a radio receiver - think braces-as-antenna stories, or similar stories about fillings. Once you find the right station to transmit from, you can beam verbal or musical impulses right "inside" someone's head. Problem is, people outside could also hear it, very quietly.

19:15 / 20.09.01

Get a low level MASER and fire it at the inner ear. Proper modulation of the ray amplitude will result in sound being heard (as the inner ear fluid is heated up and cooled down rapidly). The words though must be kept to being those of one or two syllables. There are much easier ways of making people hear things but the MASER one is the coolest sounding one.

"They had a sniper on the roof and equipped him with a MASER audio gun. Having the mark in his sights, he fired, an invisible ray of modulated microwave energy shot out from the barrel and proceeded to rapidly heat up and cool down the inner ear fluid resulting in what the mark thought were voices coming from his inner ear. 'Kill!', the voice kept on repeating, 'Kill! and buy Coke!'"

..

14:34 / 21.09.01

quote:Originally posted by Jack Fear:

The beauty of speculative fiction is that, if you bluff with a straight face, people will usually go for it: "The infrasonics put her in suggestible state, and the rest was a simple matter of encoding a message to her alpha-wave frequency band, bypassing the conscious mind entirely--planting the seed. Then, when the thoughtbomb went off and bubbled up inside her head, she honestly believed she'd come up with it herself."

Yes! Yes! This is the sort of stuff I need!

quote:Originally posted by Enamon:

"They had a sniper on the roof and equipped him with a MASER audio gun. Having the mark in his sights, he fired, an invisible ray of modulated microwave energy shot out from the barrel and proceeded to rapidly heat up and cool down the inner ear fluid resulting in what the mark thought were voices coming from his inner ear. 'Kill!', the voice kept on repeating, 'Kill! and buy Coke!'"

Beautiful! Give me more! Bull-shit your little hearts out!

15:12 / 21.09.01

...airborne / inocculated virus affecting a certain group hit up for vaccines in an area...activated biologically by the use of a signal resonating a certain sound...similar to virus sound detection but applied...

just looking at previous topics / posts for the info...

15:17 / 21.09.01

Um, all the research on visual subliminals reveal that they, er, don't work. But only those of us who paid for too much schooling are likely to know that. For example, I still love that JG Ballard story where the guy keeps buying cigarettes and stuffing them in his overflowing glove compartment on the way home from work.