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Mind Control by Cell Phone - Scientific American

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mind-control-by-cell

May 7, 2008

Mind Control by Cell Phone
Electromagnetic signals from cell phones can change your brainwaves and
behavior. But don't break out the aluminum foil head shield just yet.
By R. Douglas Fields



Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their
electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical
devices. Could the brain also fall into that category? Of course, all our
thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by
neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull.
Electrical signals between neurons generate electric fields that radiate out
of brain tissue as electrical waves that can be picked up by electrodes
touching a person's scalp. Measurements of such brainwaves in EEGs provide
powerful insight into brain function and a valuable diagnostic tool for
doctors. Indeed, so fundamental are brainwaves to the internal workings of
the mind, they have become the ultimate, legal definition drawing the line
between life and death.

Brainwaves change with a healthy person's conscious and unconscious mental
activity and state of arousal. But scientists can do more with brainwaves
than just listen in on the brain at work-they can selectively control brain
function by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This technique uses
powerful pulses of electromagnetic radiation beamed into a person's brain to
jam or excite particular brain circuits.

Although a cell phone is much less powerful than TMS, the question still
remains: Could the electrical signals coming from a phone affect certain
brainwaves operating in resonance with cell phone transmission frequencies?
After all, the caller's cerebral cortex is just centimeters away from
radiation broadcast from the phone's antenna. Two studies provide some
revealing news.

The first, led by Rodney Croft, of the Brain Science Institute, Swinburne
University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, tested whether cell phone
transmissions could alter a person's brainwaves. The researchers monitored
the brainwaves of 120 healthy men and women while a Nokia 6110 cell
phone-one of the most popular cell phones in the world-was strapped to their
head. A computer controlled the phone's transmissions in a double-blind
experimental design, which meant that neither the test subject nor
researchers knew whether the cell phone was transmitting or idle while EEG
data were collected. The data showed that when the cell phone was
transmitting, the power of a characteristic brain-wave pattern called alpha
waves in the person's brain was boosted significantly. The increased alpha
wave activity was greatest in brain tissue directly beneath to the cell
phone, strengthening the case that the phone was responsible for the
observed effect.

Alpha Waves of Brain
Alpha waves fluctuate at a rate of eight to 12 cycles per second (Hertz).
These brainwaves reflect a person's state of arousal and attention. Alpha
waves are generally regarded as an indicator of reduced mental effort,
"cortical idling" or mind wandering. But this conventional view is perhaps
an oversimplification. Croft, for example, argues that the alpha wave is
really regulating the shift of attention between external and internal
inputs. Alpha waves increase in power when a person shifts his or her
consciousness of the external world to internal thoughts; they also are the
key brainwave signatures of sleep.

Cell Phone Insomnia
If cell phone signals boost a person's alpha waves, does this nudge them
subliminally into an altered state of consciousness or have any effect at
all on the workings of their mind that can be observed in a person's
behavior? In the second study, James Horne and colleagues at the
Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre in England devised an
experiment to test this question. The result was surprising. Not only could
the cell phone signals alter a person's behavior during the call, the
effects of the disrupted brain-wave patterns continued long after the phone
was switched off.

This was a completely unexpected finding," Horne told me. "We didn't suspect
any effect on EEG [after switching off the phone]. We were interested in
studying the effect of mobile phone signals on sleep itself." But it quickly
became obvious to Horne and colleagues in preparing for the sleep-research
experiments that some of the test subjects had difficulty falling asleep.

Horne and his colleagues controlled a Nokia 6310e cell phone-another popular
and basic phone-attached to the head of 10 healthy but sleep-deprived men in
their sleep research lab. (Their sleep had been restricted to six hours the
previous night.) The researchers then monitored the men's brainwaves by EEG
while the phone was switched on and off by remote computer, and also
switched between "standby," "listen" and "talk" modes of
operation for 30
minute intervals on different nights. The experiment revealed that after the
phone was switched to "talk" mode a different brain-wave pattern, called
delta waves (in the range of one to four Hertz), remained dampened for
nearly one hour after the phone was shut off. These brainwaves are the most
reliable and sensitive marker of stage two sleep-approximately 50 percent of
total sleep consists of this stage-and the subjects remained awake twice as
long after the phone transmitting in talk mode was shut off. Although the
test subjects had been sleep-deprived the night before, they could not fall
asleep for nearly one hour after the phone had been operating without their
knowledge.

Although this research shows that cell phone transmissions can affect a
person's brainwaves with persistent effects on behavior, Horne does not feel
there is any need for concern that cell phones are damaging. The arousal
effects the researchers measured are equivalent to about half a cup of
coffee, and many other factors in a person's surroundings will affect a
night's sleep as much or more than cell phone transmissions.

"The significance of the research," he explained, is that although the cell
phone power is low, "electromagnetic radiation can nevertheless have an
effect on mental behavior when transmitting at the proper frequency." He
finds this fact especially remarkable when considering that everyone is
surrounded by electromagnetic clutter radiating from all kinds of electronic
devices in our modern world. Cell phones in talk mode seem to be
particularly well-tuned to frequencies that affect brainwave activity. "The
results show sensitivity to low-level radiation to a subtle degree. These
findings open the door by a crack for more research to follow. One only
wonders if with different doses, durations, or other devices, would there be
greater effects?"

Croft of Swinburne emphasizes that there are no health worries from these
new findings. "The exciting thing about this research is that it allows us
to have a look at how you might modulate brain function and this [look]
tells us something about how the brain works on a fundamental level." In
other words, the importance of this work is in illuminating the fundamental
workings of the brain-scientists can now splash away with their own
self-generated electromagnetic waves and learn a great deal about how
brainwaves respond and what they do.

Mind Matters is edited by Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the blog
The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust was a Neuroscientist.








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