Sonic ‘Attacks’ Show Us How Susceptible Our Brains Are to Mass Hysteria | Hacker News Reader

Sonic ‘Attacks’ Show Us How Susceptible Our Brains Are to Mass Hysteria

slate.com

94 pointstptacek56 comments

While it is possible that this whole incident was due to some sort of shared hysteria, I don't think one can elevate that to the most plausible explanation for a few reasons:

1. This has a national security and counterintelligence aspect to it. For that reason, there may be evidence that proves the source and nature of the attack(s) that is classified.

2. This article keeps going back to 'it's impossible for an acoustic device to cause brain damage'. This assertion is coming from a guy who doesn't seem to be an expert on that particular subject. And just because he is not aware of such a thing, doesn't mean "it's impossible'.

3. A lot of focus is on the very specific language of an 'acoustic attack' but the incident could have been caused by microwave radiation. Indeed in the 60's US intelligence has uncovered Russian listening devices that were activated remotely with microwaves. Back then, they could find no definitive link to any cognitive degradation but who knows what technology may be in play today.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/25/the-secret-history-of-di...

There was another story about a similar incident involving 2 NSA employees who were deployed to a clandestine location who experienced nervous system disease afterwards.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/was-a-spys-parkinsons-d...

Maybe these were all imagined incidents or something else is at play but I wouldn't dismiss it as hysteria out of hand, given what is publicly known.

What I don't get is that in the medical specialist's report it is stated that 'the consensus was that the patterns of injuries that had so far been noted (referring to 'similar to what might be seen in patients following mild traumatic brain injury or concussion') were most likely related to trauma from a non-natural source.', and yet Petrie, not having examined the patients somehow is convinced its all due to mass hysteria and nocebo effects, his domain of academic interest?

It's not just this source; the FBI also formally reported to Senate Foreign Relations that there was no evidence of any "sonic attack". The FBI had medical professionals examining the patients directly. That's presumably the story behind the timing of this story.

It's also totally possible for the actual reason to be neither a targeted attack nor mass hysteria. The FBI's conclusion is evidence against the attack scenario, but it doesn't specifically elevate the hysteria hypothesis over everything else.

I prefer to remain skeptical of diagnoses that are advanced by someone with no actual patient contact and appear to be geared more towards self-promotion (talking to the press) than helping the patients.

So what caused 'mild traumatic brain injuries'? Mass hysteria?

Yes, or, more specifically, stress. Mild TBI is diagnosed primarily through patient-reported symptoms, and is notoriously hard to confirm with imaging.

Exactly. People working overseas, under stress, start experiencing symptoms and read about these "attacks" happening. And start freaking out that maybe they're a victim too.

From the first moment I heard this story I believed it was mass hysteria and I haven't seen anything that changed my instinct on that. Now, that's just one man's completely baseless opinion.

What's been interesting is that everyone I have said it to (this is in real life) has reacted the same way: defensive, cross, irritated. As if they had a stake in the outcome. It was a stronger reaction than "meh"...it was an angry response.

I think people find something deeply distasteful about the concept of mass hysteria.

I think it sparks that reaction for two reasons; 1. it doesn't satisfy our deep-seated need to find a reason for things 2. It sounds like an off-hand dismissal with implied criticism of the sufferer.

Perhaps we need to find a way to remove the stigma from mass hysteria. Come up with with different name perhaps.

I think a name change would be very beneficial, but also, mass hysteria seems like more than one phenomenon, and at least some of it seems mixed with hyperbole so unpicking it all might help too.

This instance sounds like one the 'medical' variety of mass hysteria, but there's also the psychological version where the only symptom is a panic caused by perception of threat (real or imaginary).

I sat through a lunch talk a couple of years ago by Dr Julia Pierce, a psychologist who's a specialist in public response to threat. She had an armful of case studies where people had proclaimed 'mass hysteria' but actually looking at the evidence people had broadly remained calm and made normal choices. For example a lot of people talk about "panic" during the evacuation of the World Trade Centre in 2001 but actually during a lot of those episodes you find people acting fairly rationally, going back to help colleagues etc. or descending stairs in an orderly fashion, moving out of the way for others, etc.

The evidence she presented suggested that the conditions that prompt actual panic are predictable and quite constrained. We're less susceptible to it than Hollywood might suggest.

I think it's more that we should be able to trust some of the best doctors in 2 countries (Canada too) to figure that out before slate does. We want to trust that medical doctors know more than the layman about such things.

But isn't it the point that the doctors have no clue what happened? And struggling for an explaination go with the sonic attack vector? I see this often, people who are pressed for an explaination and have no clue make things up.

> I think people find something deeply distasteful about the concept of mass hysteria

Possibly unease that their perception of reality and the state of their own body, can be rendered inaccurate?

I was once in an underground train tunnel fire. There was no real danger (at least I'd like to think so), but it was interesting to watch how people reacted. In some folks eyes you could see hysteria taking control and the brains shutting off. They wouldn't have noticed if they trampled others to death in this state.

Luckily around 10% were completely calm and managed to calm down the others. The scary thing really wasn't the fire but the people who completely lost control over their bodies.

> As if they had a stake in the outcome

A new type of weapon is relevant to everyone if deployed against the public..

In that case voicing the hypothesis would be reassuring, not aggravating.

A movement to de-fund traditional medicine in favor of homeopathy, on the hypothesis that it works better, would reassure you?

Sounds like they didn't find the hypothesis convincing, and felt it might detract from the issue.

If one were to argue to someone "The reported facts don't matter. Your own instincts on the matter are wrong. Here's what's really going on. You should believe me." and they did believe you, that sounds like the setup for a cult. So maybe the people you were talking to had their defenses up in anticipation for that sort of thing (whether or not you took such a tone)? (I like to argue that cognitive dissonance can actually be valuable for this reason)

Your claim shatters people's reality. You should make sure to propose some objective rules for the universe that can be used to scrutinize your own claim among other possible explanations.

I wonder if the victims/hysterics themselves would react similarly upon questing? i.e. with a defensive emotional reaction, assuming such an emotion were observable in the midst of the other strange behaviour:

https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/10-stran...

I find it more interesting that the media coverage has been, predictably, completely one sided and sensationalistic going so far as to strongly imply 'suspects.' It's a great reminder of how, in the past, we slipped into 2 red scares and it seems we just barely dodged a third in the present.

Perhaps ironically we can attribute this to the internet. It is a great device for misinformation and FUD, but at the same time it also allows people to openly point out poor logic, unsupported conclusions, or even false facts. This diversity of view probably helps any singular view from taking as hold as strongly as it has in times past -- for better (red scare) and for worse (climate change).

It's not "interesting" because the media industries have been doing this everyday for at least 2 centuries. Maybe more interesting is how people keep getting amnesiac about this.

We can attribute any of it to "the Internet" or "Facebook" or "Twitter"... or to any other communication platform that lets people reach a wide audience.

One of the big reasons I find it interesting is because I expect there's probably more news outlets now than ever before, yet we see such a peculiar level of homogeneity in the views they espouse - perhaps even more so than in times past. The New York Times has an awesome archive going all the way back to the 1850s. In fact there's a lot of really great free newspaper archive resources [1]. And in perusing these archives something that I think has really changed is that in the past there was a far greater diversity of published views. By contrast today views tend to be quite uniform except in archetypical difference, such as partisanship.

In a way I would not be surprised if behind the scenes people were collaborating with one another, feeling that expressing different views would undermine the credibility of what's said as different organizations contradict each other. But ironically I think this sort of homogeneity is playing a large role in peoples' diminishing trust in media. It makes the news seem very artificial and orchestrated. And the homogeneity means that when they get things wrong - as seems to be the case here, it makes the entire industry look just awful. Being wrong is one thing, being so collectively ill informed as to not have even meaningfully considered the possibility of a binary truth (it is a weapon, or it's not a weapon)? That's something far worse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...

I think the first sentence of this article may hold the key. Weeks after the President takes office with the mission to undo every accomplishment of his predecessor, the Cuban embassy is 'attacked' with Cold War era fantasy weapons with no motive, suspects, or physical evidence. Giving the President the excuse he needs to revert another of his predecessors key accomplishments, and return to locked-down relations with Cuba.

Its no wonder the administration has done nothing to de-escalate the situation, but instead fanned the flames of public speculation, and re-enforced the claims of the affected embassy workers.

I think the "gluten sensitivity" craze is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

I don't think its really comparable. The difference to ultrasound sonic attacs is that celiac disease actually exists, but is very rare. There are clinical tests that can be executed, and the symptoms of it are also not quite uncommon. so a bit of confusion in this regard is understandable.

> celiac disease actually exists, but is very rare

I wouldn't call a disease that affects around 1% of the population "very rare".

It's true that there's a gluten-avoidance fad that has drawn in lots of people with no medical justification, so that not everyone who demands gluten-free food is necessarily a celiac sufferer. "Gluten intolerance" seems to be a fashionable ailment these days, with perhaps varying degrees of validity (and potential confusion with other issues that may have similar symptoms), but sources suggest that around 3 million Americans, for example, really do have celiac disease.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3496881/ http://www.uchospitals.edu/pdf/uch_007937.pdf

What is 1% if not very rare? Yes there's a lot of celiac folks around. There's a lot of people, period. The fact that there are 3-4 million celiacs in the US does not discount the fact that there are 330+ million folks without it.

There's nothing wrong with describing a rare thing as rare.

A few thoughts.

1. It's not been clearly established that gluten sensitivity doesn't exist. Even if current medicine hasn't established it, it's actually quite common for established medicine to be slower than alternatives (e.g. probiotic, medical marijuana, babies needing touch and breast milk).

2. For gluten sensitivity, it's not clear if you're denying people have physical symptoms (bloating, gas) at all, or whether they are misattributing them to gluten. Either way, I don't see a connection.

3. Your comment really has the affect of associating two very different, very emotionally charged things that I think is lazy and exhausting to debug.

Excerpt:

> And what’s more: “This is a small, close-knit community in a foreign country that has a history of being hostile to the United States,” he says. “That is a classic setup for an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness.”

A small close-knit community that is already anxious and on its edge could also describe Salem right before the witch trials. I remember reading a hypothesis about some fungal spores possibly causing real hallucinations, but this could be another possibility.

It's not a sonic attack (experts agree), but it's very likely not mass hysteria either (an unproved speculation from a medical doctor not involved in the investigation).

More research is needed (and not by journalists looking to capitalize on a popular story).

> With no details, no motive, and no plausible explanation for what kind of weapon this might be, doubts began to surface.

I'm probably reading this wrong, but is the "Sonic weapon" not a real thing? I thought it is:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sonic-weapo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapon

There was also a discussion here on HN, but I can't find it now.

It's a real thing but it can't physically reach some of the places the victims were said to be affected and it's not known to cause many of the specific symptoms suffered by the victims.

In case of sonic attack, think only of yourself. Do not panic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8pGS4cWbHo

Thank you. I came here to make a Hawkwind reference and I'm pleased to see someone beat me to it :)

Where did the audio of the attack come from then? Was it just random, completely safe background noice?

The slate pitch strikes again.

Sorry do not understand. What does this mean?

They're trying to snark about Slate's notorious tendency to write contrarian pieces as bids for attention --- those pieces are called "Slate pitches". But they've missed the mark; it's not "contrarian" to report that something didn't happen, especially when most sources agree.

It is absolutely slate-pitch-y to mark that as "mass hysteria", especially given the way that it originally arose to public attention i.e. through specific opinions of people in power who themselves had no experienced the phenonmena. The piece is also just awful, lots of weasel words ie "appears", "on the surface", plus it side steps that "mass hysteria" is as unlikely to produce the brain matter changes as a supposed fantastical secret weapon. I'm the last person to want to whip up war fever by pinning a bogus cause on an unknown phenonmena. I'm also pretty tired of reading slates garbage.

Also, calling it a "bid for attention" is soft pedaling it I think, its pretty nakedly about clicks.

>its pretty nakedly about clicks

I think in this case "mass hysteria" is this particular author's shtick:

>Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes.

His other article on Slate:

"Is PMS Real? Or is it just a figment of our menstruation-fearing culture?"

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

hahahahahaha jesus thats both depressing and perfect. what a hack. thanks for linking i wouldn't have seen it otherwise

And what caused the mass hysteria? The greedy news media out for clickbait ad money.

Just off the top my head, I can list a few hysterias caused by the news media just in the last couple of years... "Trump will end the world" hysteria, north korea hysteria ( a few times ), "russians hiding in your computers and voting booths", flu hysteria ( a few time ), ebola hysteria, college rape hysteria, neo-nazi/alt-right hysteria, asteroid hysteria, AI hysteria, etc.

I'm sure I left out a few.

Bullshit. If the genpop had any idea just how advanced the EMF weaponry the blackbudget type of orgs had they would shit bricks.

One more thing I guarantee I'll be saying "told you so" in 5-10 years when something on it leaks, just like the NSA spying before Snowden, and many other things.

Mass hysteria is real (muh Russians via shareblue, for example) but I really don't think this is one of those cases.

I love the careful logically falacious setup in the article though, very masterful. When you finally get to the meat of the claim, by a man who is selling books on hysteria (nail-hammer problem) he already discredits himself via the statement: “It is physically impossible to have brain damage caused by an acoustical device." Well that's just not correct. What else is he obviously not correct on? Has he seen the evidence from StateDep and CIA? Nope, so he's making claims without seeing all the evidence. Then immediately the article transitions from their baseless claim on this particular incident to saying "oh but even if it's hysteria it can still have real effects ala placebo". See how subtlely they pass over the problems of their own claim and manipulate the reader? And then to see the author is also the author of a "everything is a syndrome" book is just icing on the cake.

Especially funny they mention the Taos hum... if only ya'll had any idea what that really was... HN isn't ready for such a truth bomb though. (I'll give you a hint. DUMBs)

I was at a smart grid workshop in VA a year after Obama took office; Steven Chu was there. It was mostly technical staff from grid operators. We were there because we'd been doing vulnerability research on smart meters, and a smart meter vendor had asked us to go.

There was a guy talking exactly like your comment in our working group. We'd all be talking about some technical detail of, I don't know, off-peak power storage or something, and this guy would keep interrupting and demanding that we talk about EMF and EMF weapons.

We all just looked at him like something was deeply wrong with him. Little did I know that years later I would read this comment and know the truth.

(Schneier wrote about NSA spying. In Applied Cryptography. In the 1990s.)

>We all just looked at him like something was deeply wrong with him. Little did I know that years later I would read this comment and know the truth.

tptacek, my sarcasm detector has been broken from birth, is this sarcasm?

>(Schneier wrote about NSA spying. In Applied Cryptography. In the 1990s.)

Schneier, Bamford, and Cryptome and some others (Prouty) were the origins of my knowledge of the NSA stuff since the 90's as well. At the time not many people listened and we were constantly derided as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists... of course it would be logically fallacious to extrapolate that makes me right about another subject, (hence understandable if your comment is sarcasm), but I think it's worth remembering in context of similar claims of government technological overreach.

One time, I read a physics paper, but some of the words were the same as ones a vagrant fellow was using to try convince me he'd been abducted by aliens the previous week, glad I noticed when I did.

There's this, for a start:

https://www.google.com/patents/US4349898

If there are patents, one can be sure that these things exist.

And logically, the CIA and US military would love sonic weapons. They can target people and have others think they're just crazy and paranoid. Good way to take down your opponents and damage their credibility.

How about US6960975? So, what you're saying is that we've been wrong all along about perpetual motion machines.

There's also this patent for a "free" energy source: https://www.google.com/patents/US6362718 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_ma... has many more similar patents.)

Patents do not require showing that the described invention actually works, it just needs to be different enough from prior art to qualify.

That doesn't mean that sonic weapons don't work (I believe it's possible), but a patent alone is not enough.

Also, these:

http://www.directedenergyweapons.net/p/patents.html

The only sites I can find in reference to “DUMB” are truly mad. Do you have any resources which aren’t trying to get me buy gold, guns, and bibles? The problem with th tinfoil set isn’t that they’re always wrong, but that it’s impossible to sift through the dross for kernels of valuable information.

I’m always happy to explore ideas on the fringe, but based on reason, rationality, and ideally something like evidence rather than people screaming “sheeple” at me.

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