Hope for life-changing therapies comes with a chilling caveat

On Jan. 28, 2024, Noland Arbaugh became the first person to receive a brain chip implant from Neuralink, the neurotechnology company owned by Elon Musk. The implant seemed to work: Arbaugh, who is paralyzed, learned to control a computer mouse with his mind and even to play online chess.

The device is part of a class of therapeutics, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), that show promise for helping people with disabilities control prosthetic limbs, operate a computer, or translate their thoughts directly into speech. Current use of the technology is limited, but with millions of global cases of spinal cord injuries, strokes, and other conditions, some estimates put the market for BCIs at around $400 billion in the U.S. alone.

A new discussion paper from the Carr Center for Human Rights welcomes the potential benefits but offers a note of caution drawn from the past, detailing unsettling parallels between an era of new therapies and one of America’s darkest chapters: experiments into psychological manipulation and mind control.

“In the past, there have been actors who were interested in controlling people’s minds,” Lukas Meier, the paper’s author and now a fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, said in an interview. “It’s not implausible that in the future there will be such actors, at whichever level, state or private sector, who might attempt the same but with improved technology.”

Meier, a former technology and human rights fellow at the Carr Center, was referencing the Cold War, when scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain participated in a dangerous race for control of the human mind. In 1953, in response to allegations that the North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet governments had successfully brainwashed American prisoners of war, then-CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized MKUltra, the CIA’s controversial attempt at eliciting confessions and controlling people’s behavior.

“That was indeed their aim; they just didn’t get very far, as far as we know,” Meier said.

According to Meier’s report, in one project, subjects were made to listen to recordings on a loop, including during drug-induced sleep, in an attempt to alter their personalities. In another experiment, subjects were given strong electric shocks multiple times a day for weeks at a time, sometimes while they were on psychoactive drugs. Some subjects lost key memories or even the ability to speak a second language; some lost the ability to walk or eat without support. Many suffered lifelong physical or mental consequences.

The CIA’s methods were crude, Meier said, but if the more advanced methods of the 21st century steer clear of the worst effects of MK Ultra, they have the same implications for self-determination, consent, and mental privacy. For instance, parents in China sounded the alarm in 2019 over schoolchildren wearing devices that tracked their brainwaves to improve their focus. In more theoretical applications, researchers have explored reconstructing images from the brain signals of people wearing BCIs.

“With these technological capabilities, we move dangerously close to inadvertently enabling one of the main goals of Cold War intelligence programs: the eliciting of information from subjects who are not willfully cooperating,” Meier writes.

Meier speculates that in addition to decoding our thoughts, BCIs could be used to change our behavior. He describes research showing that some patients receiving deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease experience manic symptoms, including a 2006 case in which a patient with no previous criminal record broke into a parked car when the stimulator was activated, then returned to normal when the stimulation stopped.

“Making somebody without any criminal record break into a car seems to be a pretty strong interference,” he said, adding: “We’re not at a point where you could create this effect at will. It can happen as a byproduct, but I don’t think anyone could predict which type of neuromodulation applied to which area of the brain could produce this effect, at least not with any accuracy.”

Despite Meier’s misgivings, he supports the continued development of BCI technology in the U.S., in part to stay ahead of global adversaries.

“It is during times like these, in particular, that technological innovations which are becoming available to the opposing parties are at high risk of being misused in order to gain an advantage,” he writes in the paper. “The dire consequences of the manifold attempts at developing techniques for mind control during the Cold War should act as a warning. The two dangerous ingredients are recurring: a resurgence of bloc confrontation and the availability of innovations employable for interfering with the human brain. We may not be able to rely on technological limitations thwarting efforts at mind control a second time.”