In and among the vertebral disks

2002-01-01

Some subjects discussed below:

  • About the product integrity of cybernetic control services.
  • Is it possible that scientists or other people are using cybernetic technology on themselves for electrosex applications, and that shyness or hesitance due to that circumstance explains part of the secrecy?

    Hopefully obsolete:

  • About the still missing(?) applications of cybernetic technology to repair spinal damage: Is it to some extent caused by a general ignorance about the power of electronic methods on many hands?

  • Is that just one of many aspects of a more general need for more of cross-disciplinary approaches in many different areas?

The application of cybernetic technology for the repair of spinal damage was considered one important topic motivating this document. Hopefully some of the arguments are already obsolete. I havent followed all news releases or science programs. In the year 2001 there were some discussions about related things, although these things are always presented in a misleading manner. Some expert might state that they hope to be able to realize some type of function, while in reality more advanced things have existed for decades.
It is like reinventing the wheel over and over again.
In the interest of clarity I wish to explain that there are modern types of cybernetic technology that operates without the need for any action from the user or any contact with personnel. That is it is not necessary to have some clumsy object inserted, nor is there any need for replacing batteries. Further the modern types of this technology have the capacity to handle a large number of channels of information. This means a very refined type of control can be achieved, without any noticeable sideeffects. It is possible to create an almost ideal type of medical appliance out of this technology. There are also older types of the technology, that are presently offered to patients. The people who are involved in this type of medical practise are not be blamed. They are at least trying to do something although the services they offer are very far from the state of the art. Crudely speaking, patients are being offered 1960s level of cybernetic technology. The components used are of course of more recent date, however the actual performance isn't.
As I said, I hope this characterization of the situation is becoming obsolete and that this anachronistic condition will not last.
This paragraph is a bit technical and connects back to other things I have written about in earlier documents. It isn't vital to understand everything.
In the last year I have been trying to estimate various aspects of rf-communication involving microscopic RF units that were deemed necessary to explain some of the observations made by people subjected to involuntary experimentation with cybernetic control technology. I even went to such extremes as seriously contemplating single-quantum detection on the FM broadcast band using huge maser amplifiers. There is however no reason to beleive that such methods are of any practical use, due to the ever-present thermal noise that far exceeds the single quantum limit. It is no big deal in the case of the microwave region but on the FM broadcast band it would be quite exotic. If the scattered rf energy derives from the incoming wave, I have come to think that there are great difficulties to overcome for any conceivable type of scatterer, in particular when it has a microscopic size. It now appears to me more likely that one would want to use an internal source of rf energy and then switch it on and off with the incoming field in some predetermined fashion.
Let us consider the energy production in living cells, power per/unit weight or size.
Let the typical thermal energy production in living matter be 1 W/kg (I am making a crude guess) it corresponds to an average of 10-15 W/um3.
Assuming a size H in units of 10 um, and that a fraction f of the energy could be used to produce the wanted type of rf energy, in the form of a short pulse of duration t in units of ms, the resulting power P would be P=(f·H3/t)nW
When trying to estimate the bandwidth in the case of microwave frequencies, I obtained a lower limit of 0.5 kHz and an optimum pulse length on the order of milliseconds. It was assumed that the tiny scattering system was subjected to brownian motion due to disturbances from the molecular environment. Other effects might add further to the line width. I dont regard it as a very rigorous result.
Various complex arrangements where contemplated. One was to use the nerves to communicate between miniature devices in order to be able to use all of them at once for the transmission of data from each separate device thereby significantly increasing the signal strength. It's doubtful whether information can be added to the biological signals without seriously disturbing the system. It does seem likely however, that the biological system doesn't exhaust the full communication bandwidth of the network and that therefore an artifical system could piggyback on the usual traffic to some extent.
The natural continuation was to rationalize away the transmission from the tiny devices alltogether and use some centrally positioned transponder for that function, maybe mm sized,and connect it directly to the nerve bundles, somewhere near the neck. Or on several different locations in and among the vertebral disks.
If one critical component has to be large in comparison, the secret is already broken if that component is found. The need for tiny devices directly connected to the neurons in the brain is then limited to the type of effects that cannot be mediated through the spinal nerves. There are for example many reports of symptoms that cannot be mediated that way, such as those connected with hearing and vision. But in that case too, there are other ways to make the connection than to use the proper brain neurons. The nerve-ends near the sensory organs would seem to be a better placement. Only for the use of very sophisticated types of effects involving subtle higher-order functioning in the brain there might still be need for the direct connections in the brain, but I have no experience of anything that would indicate strongly that such methods are in use. Most everything I have heard about or experienced would be explicable by connections near the sensory organs and in the spine. But there are some observations that may indicate that brain centres are used. And also complex phenomena like stroboscopic visual meories(?) and many other isolated incidents that I am unable to put into context. I dont even recall everything at the moment of writing this. I suppose memories cannot be gotten other than through the proper brain neurons? (Supposedly those neurons connect to some type of protein chains where memories are stored? I haven't studied the subject but it seems incredible that our memories would be stored dynamically, which is actually hypothesized in older papers I have seen.)
There may still be secret technologies under development like nanotechnology which may realize some of the effects attributed to hypothetical microscopic rf-devices but it is possible that such devices would only communicate over very short distances, maybe only inside the person or animal where it is operating. And there would still be need for centrally positioned transponder units.
Even when the powerlevel from such a small device would allow shortrange communication it wouldn't be a very attractive solution.

One purported victim of mind control has reported having seen secret documents in 1977 showing grain-sized transponders that were intended for mounting in peoples necks. Since there are openly available grain-sized transponders for tracking there is a need for more detailed information.
The critical part is the connection from the transponder to the densely packed nerves. The person who spoke of those secret documents didn't think any connections to the nervous system would be necessary. Therefore, without further knowledge, it sounded just like some kind of plain tracking device.

It seems that many nonexperts like to endow radio waves with properties that they simply do not have. There is no way to deconvolute the high frequency components of brain wave spectra in order to figure out what nerve signals that caused the spectrum. It is a classical example of irreversibility. Huge quantities of information are irretrievably lost beyond the direct electrical contact with the nerves.
The relation between the original data and the resulting field is a many to one relation. Such relations cannot be uniquely inverted. The measurement is a projection, and just like a shadow it does not reveal in a unique fashion what actually caused the shadow. Compare Platos classical tale of the prisoners in the cave.
On first look, there will have to be a very large number of independent connections in order to explain many effects that I have experienced, such as very precise control of internal organs, the artificial system actually acting as a very sophisticated medical appliance. I will be a little more specific about it further down. I think the number of connections is significantly higher than 100 in my case and it wouldn't surprise me if the number I have 'felt' is just a subset.
It is a possibility that the chosen type of connection varies between one extreme: that of connecting single nerves to the other extreme of actually bundling several together sensing the sum of their signals where the highest resolution isn't required. And in the return path all the nerves belonging to that bundle would receive the same signal. In this type of arrangement 100 connections might seem like many more. For instance some symptoms would indicate single neuron resolution and other symptoms would indicate that large parts of the internal organs are also precisely controlled. Perhaps it isn't necessary to retain the full resolution to create that impression. Maybe a limited number of precisely chosen groups of nerves would suffice. But it still seems that a general method to connect to single nerves would be the most straightforward approach. And then, the lower resolution would be something used to limit the necessary rf communication.

When I was contemplating various ways to connect to the spinal nerves, I suddenly remembered an odd occurrence from the autumn of 1989, when I had a seemingly inexplicable pain in my back and neck when I woke up one morning. It took me something like two hours before I managed to get out of bed. No matter how I tried to twist and turn, I didnt find any way that I could get out of bed without excessive pain. It is quite odd that I have overlooked this for so long. I guess I just didnt want to contemplate the possibility that I had been in this type of situation for so long before the events of 1992, without having noticed anything. The pain in the neck and back doesn't prove that anything was inserted at that particular location, but I now seriously suspect that something was done to me then that is connected with the cybernetic control system that has been in operation for many years now. In addition a lipoma suddenly appeared on the back of my arm at about the same time as the pain in the neck. In january 2001 a surgeon operated it and it turned out to weigh 171 grams. According to different doctors, a naturally caused lipoma does not emerge suddenly as was the case with this strange bulge. I am sure that somebody put it there on purpose, but I have no idea why. Maybe it was a practical joke.

Logically electronic connections can be made almost anywhere along the part of the nervous system that relates the corresponding areas in body and brain. Technically the neck seems like an optimum place to put it if a single crossection of the nerve bundles is desired.
I beleive, that placement outrules some types of control reported, in particular relating to parts of the head for which there are no connections to the nerves in the spinal cord. But in my case the most prominent effects could be explained by such a device and connection if one would be found there. Another possible place to put such devices would be just before one or several of the 31 different nerve bundles leaving the spinal vertebrae and continuing to the respective body parts. There it would be slightly easier to identify the nerves. On the other hand, the geometrical arrangement of spinal nerves appears to be reasonably well defined and it seems possible that by identifying a chosen subset of all the nerves in the crossection the rest of them could be identified with a reasonably high probability. An entirely different matter is the problem of avoiding to disturb the natural functioning of those nerves when they are connected to some type of electrode network. Obviously the passage of nutrional material must not be significantly hampered, and I will assume here that the required type of materials do exist. If not it would be necessary to use few electrodes in every local region and it would therefore be necessary to use many different points of insertion. It is to be expected that the optimum arrangement has been carefully figured out.
Moreover covert applications necessitate a rather stringent protocol.

It seems unreal that some type of fine mesh invading the spinal crossection would constitute the interface through which a person can be remote controlled in such a sophisticated manner that is the case.
Still it remains a distinct possibility.

The next thing is to describe the type of control they can achieve. Actually I am quite enthusiastic about the positive uses I have experienced for several years now. This may sound at odds with the talk of torture and harassment which is also part of the picture. The harassments have been going on many times in parallell with the positive uses. The character of the harassment was much more severe in the earlier phases and things improved as I began to protest and became an activist. I wasn't sure things would turn out that way, but I figured I didn't have much choice since I was being tortured and regularly prevented from having a good nights sleep. (Incidently it appears that they have, again, demonstrated a kind of clearly artificial sleep-deprivation in the period when this is written.) They harassed me while I was taking courses at the university and elsewhere and at work. It was totally unacceptable. At one particular period in before that, as I was being tortured for days in a row it became clear that they could control my internal organs in a way that can be described as a kind of virtual reproduction of somebody elses nervous system. It was a highly resolved experience of having a physical examination done inside the body despite the fact that I was alone in the room. The experience encompassed anomalies, for instance sometimes it felt as if the examination didnt follow the exact extension of the body and even took part outside the body. It gives you the anomalous feeling that you can sense parts of the body outside its physical extension where there are none. Moreover it appears very certain that previous recordings of the internal state of my body were being replayed back and forth, which resembles virtual rape, and this was probably intentional. In a period when I was driven into an almost desperate state I shouted, 'when you can control my body like this why dont you do something useful instead'. I was thinking of the health problem I had been suffering from for 15 years.
My intestins didnt operate satisfactorily and this had a rather unfavorable effect on my general well-being in many respects. I didnt expect any response to my sarchastic remark and therefore I was very surprised when, less than maybe two days later they actually put an end to that very annoying health problem. I guess they used the control signals to stimulate the intestin a little more than was done naturally and it worked immediately and has continued to do so for 6 years. It has also become clear that those control signals are actually needed to maintain the improvement. (When I have spoken of this type of elctromedicine, they have switched off the system and things have immediately returned to the original condition)
In the case when a patient has a sporadically occurring health problem and that, in between, the system is operating well it is possible to use recordings of those successful 'runs' at least as a reference. This is a very attractive aspect of this technology, that there is often the possibility of imitating something that is known to work.
This may be the secret behind the surprisingly high performance that I have observed.
The torture didn't stop, but there is no reason to beleive that any of the torture was inadvertent. Consequently the positive use demonstrated is a genuinely useful effect.
And there was no testing period, it worked immediately. This shows the power of electromedicine: precise diagnose and cure very swiftly and reliably. The testing that needs to be done is probably best done on a remote computer using advanced software and the data already available from previous recordings. This particular example maybe doesn't sound very spectacular. But there was no medicine or food or anything that seemed to help. The nerve signals however did the right thing. And this has undoubtedly meant a greatly improved life quality for me. I cannot deny it despite all the other absurdities. So basically I am very enthusiastic about electromedicine in general. High inherent product integrity, no known side effects. A great variety of possibly services. For some of them complete autonomy can be achieved. I beleive this to be the case if the technology is used for repairing nerve connections. The main problem would be to identify all the loose ends. I have decided to make a serious effort to push for the full use of this technology in connection with patients suffering from spinal damage, in case it is still needed and is not already being carried out. I dont follow every news broadcast.
Anyway, it doesn't take too much fantasy to realize that if you can connect in a reliable manner to nerves at one location, there is nothing to prevent you from doing it once more and thus it is possible to bridge in a general fashion, disconnected parts of the nervous system. In particular when the damage is recent. When this is not the case there may be other aspects and I haven't yet had time to get into detail but I think its hopeful.
And moreover what could be a worthier task for science than to complete the dotted lines if their are some missing elements before everyone in that predicamment can be offered more or less full recovery. It is not a very original idea, but it is a fact that this technology does exist and that it has hitherto not been openly available. And that medical students and even some experienced neurologists are not in general aware of its existance.
This should raise the alarm and make us suspect that there may be important unoriginal things left to be carried through. I have a distinct feeling that if we want to, we can make it happen in a few years.
And it will look rather silly that we didn't do it long ago. Its not like finding general cancer cures.
It's a much more contained type of problem.
I am reflecting a little about one difficulty that may lie behind the inadvertently long delay in applying cybernetic technology to help handicapped people. In this case I am seeking reasons appart from military secrecy.

The general understanding of electronics may be one problem. It occurs that scientists in some branches of science also have advanced electronics expertise relevant to the type of science, but this is quite rare.
When I say relevant I dont mean adequate, I mean that it makes the most out of it. After it is applied there can be no further improvement. Of course it applies only to such cases when electronics can really help.

There are many advanced technical tools in clinical use and there sure are experts in the high-tech companies that develop and manufacture the equipment, but that expertise is not around in those situations when technologies suited for clinical use are being assessed at an early stage.
The reason for dwelling on this, I want to remind the reader, is that I want to find out why hundreds of thousands of people in the rich countries are left paralyzed, while technologies have existed for a long time, whereby they could have been offered help.
I am having trouble understanding it. And, like I said earlier, the services actually offered give the appearance of people reinventing the wheel over and over again.
While I am at it I beg you to figure yourself in the predicamment of many handicapped people, knowing that there are means to help, but nobody is acting in the way they ought to.
Need I say more??

In many military and civilian industrial applications a rational use of electronics becomes a necessity either because of the competitive pressure or because the problems are insoluble without it, which is often the case in advanced military applications.

This is why challenges are needed.
Because we have to ridden ourselves of ingrown modes of thinking and really look for the best ways of approaching problems.

Without a good understanding of modern electronics, one may underestimate its power and simplicity, resulting in a conservative clinging to older methods that aren't perceived as such. And a very obsolete way of thinking, talking about many trivial uses of electronics as 'science fiction' and the like.
Not even in a hard science such as physics, electronics is always brought to its full use. This was an oppinion I heard expressed by some physicists in the 1980s.
I suggest that this may be part of the reason why handicapped people are still waiting for the dramatic breakthroughs that are inherent in cybernetic technology.
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In recent science programs I heard it mentioned that young scientists were paired together to form some kind of cross-disciplinary unit. I dont know if this is a systematic new trend, but perhaps such combinations might be worth trying in many different contexts? Maybe the system of higher education should build this in from the outset. I mean maybe the type of knowledge should be chosen with the intention of making that type of cooperation more successful. The group would be a renormalized human to use physics terminology. And the purpose of higher education would be to create wellfunctioning units rather than just individuals. It would be like the evolutionary process when cells are grouped together forming more complex entities.
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One reason for the secrecy surrounding cybernetics might be connected with the subject below. That there are scientists or other people who are connected for such reasons and that they might feel shy about it or that there is some difficulty that comes up when such services become more common. Maybe there is a limit to the number of people that can be safely handled or some other dilemma.
I will continue to discuss my experience of how the cybernetic system operates in connection with sexuality.
Electrosex as it was coined in the 1960s.
At that time it was fully understood how the technology could be used in that context. It would be rather surprising if none of the scientists who developed it or others who knew would be interested in having some of the services that it offers.

What services does it offer then?

I'll tell you what little I know.

In the case of a single individual it can do everything that the natural system does, but in addition it is possible to tweak the system, to increase the intensity and overall performance in a manner that would never happen naturally, even for a young person.
I suppose, in this extreme it is in kin with the drug viagra, at least in some ways. It is also possible to inhibit part or all of the system.
It can be used like an aphrodisiac, for men and women alike.
The typical operation wanted by most users would be something in between those extremes. In some cases when a person is overly sensitive a degree of moderation of the natural condition might be a wanted service.
They have sporadically demonstrated all those aspects in the way they have affected me.
There was even a case last year, while going by train, when I noticed that the system seemed to be in the inhibit mode or maybe, and less flattering for my male vanity, simply disconnected(???). Then, in a short while a person apparently 'turns me on' by the flip of a switch inside a huge sports bag with very heavy content. He behaved as if he wanted to make sure that I noticed him. And the unmistakable signs of the artificial system came back after he did something in the bag. I am the first to recognize that this doesn't prove that there is a connection in the way that I suggested. The person was very tall, perhaps 2m, and clearly capable of defending the equipment and himself in case I would have tried to get a hold of it or to attack him or something. This would make sense if the person was an agent who was on a mission to let me know the power they had over me in case I hadn't understood it.

This is a delicate issue.
The position I have taken is that if I were to discuss this at all, I had better tell you about the positive side of it and be honest about it. And despite all I must be able to look at it from a perspective, where torture is not an issue. Otherwise I feel we might loose a lot of time before it gets out in the open and can be used for a wide range of useful medical applications, while Big Brothers smart agents are using it on the little brothers who where deemed to need special treatment.
I dont mind if people laugh at me. I can see that its quite pathetic to have me of all people talking like some kind of sex guru.

Nevertheless, as I have stated before, the inherent qualities of this technology allows for a very high product integrity. It has a very reliable and predictable mode of operation and great versatility. This is my experience despite the fact that I have never consciously fed back a single comment about it. I have never cooperated in any way. And yet I am unable to point to anything that could be improved in this particular respect and that's certainly a sign of high product integrity.

As far as I can understand this, the feeling of lust and satisfaction is related to something as prosaic as repetition rates of nerve pulses in nerve fibres. And in principle all men and women can be compensated for their natural differences in this respect by adjustments of those repetition rates. Maybe I am oversimplifying a little bit but I think there is some degree of truth in that.

But Nature is never wrong.
If people have developed varying degrees of propensity for feeling lust it has been advantageous in the struggle for survival.
I beleive that we would have been much uglier, that there would have been less beauty in the world if people had been more easily satisfied than has been the case. Then it wouldn't have mattered who they slept with.

If the government or say, the church would be able to control peoples sexuality generally by some means such as those under discussion, where there is certainly great potential for control, it would be possible to make married couples stay together for life. They would only be able to find satisfaction with a single person. As soon as two different IDs came too close together Big Brother would block their sexual drives. Some people would probably welcome that. And would in particular like to apply it among underpriviledged groups of people where there is a lot of crime and lone parents.
This will not happen of course(?) but it is a rather intriguing thought.
I am sure there are other people who know everything about electrosex.
But I dont know who they are.
I do know that several people, prisoners and others have spoken of being subjected to various types of experiments such as having their internal organs manipulated, having forced ejaculations and other strong effects. But I haven't seen discussions where there has been a serious assessment of the technology as it applies to the present situation.
For instance the sometimes quoted cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick who is experimenting on himself and has a connection made to his wife, has a little earlier made statements about the technology that are clearly not up to date. Such as saying that it is very new to use electrodes in the brain for various purposes.

And when pushing for the application and knowledge transfer of cybernetic technology for the purpose of repairing damaged nerves in connection with spinal damage, it is of some consequence that there exists fully functional technologies that are capable of handling more complicated tasks than needed in the case of spinal damage. In the case of electrosex, there is a need to adjust the repetion frequencies, according to some fairly elaborate scheme, whilst in the case of spinal damage all that is needed is to have the original signals propagate to the right place. A standard pulse of a type very easy to handle is to be repeated and sent to another location where the signal is connected to the other side of the damage. The difficulty is to identify the nerves.

Digression
The focus on spinal damage is not arbitrary since a broken nerve poses a comparatively simple type of problem. There are other types of handicaps for which cybernetics offers help, such as in case of hearing and vision. In the 1960s experiments with artificial vision where performed where the number of resolved elements where roughly the same as those discussed 30 years later.
The same reinventing of the wheel.
From what I know about hearing and vision (and I certainly dont claim to know enough!) as it applies to human beings, both those sensory systems pose far more complicated problems than repairing a broken nerve. That is why I have put the focus on spinal damage. Because, whith the knowledge I presently possess, it is the least complicated type of problem. In addition, even a limited degree of success may mean a lot to the affected patients.
About hearing
I have the impression that this is the most complicated sensory system we have. Some types of damage may be simple to handle. Other problems may need a replacement of the whole set of sensory cells. Anyone can understand that such problems are vastly more difficult to solve. In addition there are already some examples of clinical uses of implants functioning as hearing aids. From what I have seen, they where battery powered. In that case improvements are probably possible if the doctors can get access to later versions of the technology.
Vision uses a high data transfer rate in the normal condition. In some cases that may need to be replaced artificially.
This poses problems distinct from the others discussed.
In cases such as these when we are dealing with extremely complex and varied types of conditions one has to find a balance between the wish to have an autonomous system and on the other hand the possibility to apply accurate trimming procedures to the system. When having a brain computer communication from the patient, it is possible to optimize the operation not only on average but in a most refined manner to a rich variety of external conditions. Then some individually chosen algorithm programmed into the cybernetic device could be deduced, by which the system would set its internal parameters under all occuring external conditions, for the best possible operation. Without this access to the system, the patient would probably have to accept a more modest performance. In the case of vision, it would be like having a camera of a simpler construction. To achieve the best in the case of hearing and vision, there is a need for continued scientific research concerning a wide range of problems. No-one knows where the most important breakthroughs are going to come. Cross-disciplinary work is necessary.
The military presently have lots of researchers having expertise that would be of use in the development of prosthesis methods. It is unavoidable that cross-disciplinary approaches have been in use there. Actually they could even develop new types of senses if we wanted that. This has indeed been mentioned in science programs on TV.

I will also take the opportunity to return to something I have mentioned before, namely a little discussed aspect of scientific development. What happens when some new types of technology suddenly provide lots of solutions to problems that previously required much more elaborate methods and skills that took a lot of time to aquire. What to do with all the knowhow? Is economy sometimes shrinking because technology becomes 'too' efficient? Do note that this isn't the conventional opposition of old and unsophisticated vs new and very advanced. I am thinking of cases when technology becomes extremely well-fitted to the problem while previously more general and consequently very complicated methods where used. And what conclusions must be drawn? The last time I discussed that issue I suggested some kind of compensation transferred to the older technologies, provided they represent advanced knowhow that suddenly seems to be less needed. The idea was to avoid obstacles for scientific development while on the same time avoiding the destruction of knowhow, since I instinctively revolt against that kind of waste.

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