Rather than simply having "shrunk" these brains -- according to at least on other summary article, the team's findings were rather less conclusive:
But the medical team that performed the scans said the findings were not conclusive. They do not match what is normally seen in brain injuries and the severity of symptoms did not vary with the extent of the brain differences spotted.
“It’s a unique presentation that we have not seen before,” said Ragini Verma, a professor of biomedical imaging on the team at the University of Pennsylvania. “What caused it? I’m completely unequipped to answer that.”
Independent experts agreed the findings were inconclusive and said it was still unclear whether the diplomats were victims of any attack or had suffered related brain injuries. The apparent abnormalities might have pre-dated the attacks, they said, and could have more mundane explanations such as anxiety or depression. One said the study did not meet the usual standards for publication.
The real take-away from this article is: These people are legitimately ill. But we still are no closer to knowing what caused it or by whom. The previously released sound recordings are likely made by Indies short-tailed crickets.
There's been a lot of finger pointing, but until we know HOW this was done it may be hard to figure out WHO conducted it, or even if it was man-made at all (e.g. disease).
This is an interesting theory. Probably one of the more plausible ones. I imagine some sort of biological or toxicological attack could cause some sound processing related symptoms.
On the wild end of things one could imagine it being a combination of sonic and chemical attack where the an innocuous chemical structure became active as a result of high frequency sound.
It may not actually have anything to do with sound. The recordings offered as "proof" (of what, we can only guess) have all been explained as normal innocuous sounds.
That headline seems inaccurate -- I was surprised when it seemed to point to "sonic attacks" being the definitive cause of the brain abnormality, but it's not:
“The study supports the validity of the patients report of symptoms, but doesn’t answer the question of whether they have had a brain injury or not or whether the exposure they report is relevant."
So something happened, but no one knows what caused it.
Most academic literature attributes the complaints (which are inconsistent with each other and span ambassadors of some countries but not others), to a mass psychogenic event.
You can find out more here: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4603
And this is shaping up to be yet another case where doctors and researchers ignored what their patients were telling them and labelled an illness as psychogenic when it wasn't.
Through history doctors have all too often assumed their current testing capabilities were perfect and there was nothing more to learn. Thus if a patient looks normal on tests of the day then they must be imagining the problem and they label it psychogenic. Then this can't be disproved until new technology or research reveals how wrong this label was.
People should think about the amount of grief these people and others through history have suffered due to this.
> And this is shaping up to be yet another case where doctors and researchers ignored what their patients were telling
No, it’s a case where doctors and researchers disagreed with one another and continued gathering data to try and reach a more definitive conclusion. Who, exactly, do you think was doing the MRI studies on their brains and publishing it in JAMA?
I don’t really know what your point is. The fact that some researchers or doctors were more diligent, scientifically principled, and didn’t fall into the “no evidence yet == psychogenic” trap, does not free those that did from the criticism.
Those that do label illnesses psychogenic without any evidence do harm to patients. They cause grief, delay or hinder access to further research, and so forth.
Doctors are very quick to find some reason it’s not their ‘fault’, meaning they can’t help. Anyone with a serious illness or who has spent a lot of time with doctors will be well aware of this.
That’s pretty common in software too where we want to blame the users endpoint computer or browser cache or something. We never want it to be an actual bug in our software.
But those are local problems, when you have multiple eyes (and variety of experts) looking at it and a major geopolitical implication, simple dismissal is less of a problem.
But agreed this is something that all professionals should be aware of, fighting our natural instincts, and try not to be so lazy or dismissive, and ask the harder questions.
> Different people reported different symptoms. Most people did not report hearing any particular sounds. Of those who did, they said they heard very different sounds, and at different times and places. None of the sounds bore any similarity to sonic weapons. Only one person reported permanent hearing loss; and as nobody else did, we can safely assume that it was likely due to natural causes for that person. One reported a concussion with no apparent cause, but nobody else did either. So if we are looking for some external cause for these symptoms, we learn that it was probably not any one cause. It was a number of different causes, suggesting that these people were suffering from various unrelated problems.
The point is that this event is inconsistent with any known diseases or injuries, including sonic devices, but completely consistent with other events of (self-reinforcing) mass hallucinations. No one is saying the affected have not suffered.
But isn’t this just saying: “we have no existing evidence or test today showing a physiological illness so therefore we are going to call it this other imagined thing for which we also can’t prove, yet which has been repeatedly disproven over history.”
All illness have at some time been “inconsistent with any known diseases or injuries”, MS, epilepsy, CFS, etc. What’s more likely at this point.
I think lack of evidence in medicine shouldn’t be used as evidence for “psychogenic illness.” Just as lack of evidence for something in physics shouldn’t be used as evidence for “god put it there.”
Doctors should get used to saying “we don’t know what’s wrong with these people yet” instead of trying to force an answer where there currently isn’t one. It’s far more correct and much kinder.
Show me an event that is conclusively psychogenic.
At this point I feel like a psychogenic diagnosis is like attributing something to god/religion. When you say what the cause of something is the burden of proof is now on you to provide evidence of that.
There's always the "US Intelligence thinks Russia may have microwaved US embassies" theory. I'm not sure mass psychogenic events cause the "sustained injury to widespread brain networks" noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association which I guess is academic literature.
Looking at the wikipedia for mass psychogenic events they are noted for "symptoms that are transient and benign;
symptoms with rapid onset and recovery" eg headaches and coughs not stuff like "one diplomat's hearing was damaged to the point that he now requires a hearing aid" (skeptoid article) or structural changes to the brain (telegraph article).
my favorite theory of those sounds - the people hearing (and affected by) them is just a sideeffect of the sound attack on electronics by generating suitable intermodulation distortion (IMD) :
"Computer science researchers have explored the physics of IMD. In the DolphinAttack paper, we used ultrasonic signals to trick a smartphone’s voice-recognition assistant. Because of nonlinearity in the smartphone’s microphone, the ultrasound produced by-products at audible frequencies inside the circuitry of the microphone. Thus, the IMD signal remains inaudible to humans, but the smartphone hears voices. In an early 2017 paper, Nirupam Roy, Haitham Hassanieh, and Romit Roy Choudhury at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign described their BackDoor system [PDF] for using ultrasound and IMD to jam spy microphones, watermark music played at live concerts, and otherwise create “shadow” sounds."
Your Siri is talking to the voices in her head... Conspiracy theory wise i'd think (ie. hope that "at least some of my tax dollars at work") that NSA uses such tools too, and this is why everybody is so mum about it.
> Design, Setting, and Participants: Forty government personnel (patients) who were potentially exposed and experienced neurological symptoms underwent evaluation at a US academic medical center from August 21, 2017, to June 8, 2018, including advanced structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging analytics. Findings were compared with imaging findings of 48 demographically similar healthy controls.
Would it be politically incorrect to compare the average diplomats brain against an average adult? What if we find out diplomats just have small brains.
While it doesn't say in the article, I would imagine that the statistical difference is significant enough to recognize that this specific group had been impacted when considering an average adult human's measurements.
They are measuring against average sizes for people of similar group. Size being smaller thank average for all staff members is definitely raises suspicion.
What I don't understand is how these "studies" seem to find things that would require a baseline to compare with. Results like, brain damage was suffered, cognitive impairment, brain-shrinkage, all would require the subjects to have some baseline snapshot before the "sonic attacks" occurred.
Assuming that there was in fact shrinking, could that be caused by being in a warm climate for an extended period of time? Studies have shown that heat affects cognitive ability, but has anyone ever studied if there’s a temporary efect on brain size?
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
I remember listening to a segment on NPR where it was claimed this was already solved and the "sonic attacks" were actually caused by a specific species of cricket:
" US diplomats' brains were shrunk by sonic attacks at Cuban embassy, study finds " - that is not at all what the study has found. What a terrible and misleading title for an article. Talk about pointing fingers...
But the medical team that performed the scans said the findings were not conclusive. They do not match what is normally seen in brain injuries and the severity of symptoms did not vary with the extent of the brain differences spotted.
“It’s a unique presentation that we have not seen before,” said Ragini Verma, a professor of biomedical imaging on the team at the University of Pennsylvania. “What caused it? I’m completely unequipped to answer that.”
Independent experts agreed the findings were inconclusive and said it was still unclear whether the diplomats were victims of any attack or had suffered related brain injuries. The apparent abnormalities might have pre-dated the attacks, they said, and could have more mundane explanations such as anxiety or depression. One said the study did not meet the usual standards for publication.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/23/brain-scans-...
There's been a lot of finger pointing, but until we know HOW this was done it may be hard to figure out WHO conducted it, or even if it was man-made at all (e.g. disease).
On the wild end of things one could imagine it being a combination of sonic and chemical attack where the an innocuous chemical structure became active as a result of high frequency sound.
“The study supports the validity of the patients report of symptoms, but doesn’t answer the question of whether they have had a brain injury or not or whether the exposure they report is relevant."
So something happened, but no one knows what caused it.
Through history doctors have all too often assumed their current testing capabilities were perfect and there was nothing more to learn. Thus if a patient looks normal on tests of the day then they must be imagining the problem and they label it psychogenic. Then this can't be disproved until new technology or research reveals how wrong this label was.
People should think about the amount of grief these people and others through history have suffered due to this.
No, it’s a case where doctors and researchers disagreed with one another and continued gathering data to try and reach a more definitive conclusion. Who, exactly, do you think was doing the MRI studies on their brains and publishing it in JAMA?
Those that do label illnesses psychogenic without any evidence do harm to patients. They cause grief, delay or hinder access to further research, and so forth.
That’s pretty common in software too where we want to blame the users endpoint computer or browser cache or something. We never want it to be an actual bug in our software.
But those are local problems, when you have multiple eyes (and variety of experts) looking at it and a major geopolitical implication, simple dismissal is less of a problem.
But agreed this is something that all professionals should be aware of, fighting our natural instincts, and try not to be so lazy or dismissive, and ask the harder questions.
The point is that this event is inconsistent with any known diseases or injuries, including sonic devices, but completely consistent with other events of (self-reinforcing) mass hallucinations. No one is saying the affected have not suffered.
All illness have at some time been “inconsistent with any known diseases or injuries”, MS, epilepsy, CFS, etc. What’s more likely at this point.
I think lack of evidence in medicine shouldn’t be used as evidence for “psychogenic illness.” Just as lack of evidence for something in physics shouldn’t be used as evidence for “god put it there.”
Doctors should get used to saying “we don’t know what’s wrong with these people yet” instead of trying to force an answer where there currently isn’t one. It’s far more correct and much kinder.
At this point I feel like a psychogenic diagnosis is like attributing something to god/religion. When you say what the cause of something is the burden of proof is now on you to provide evidence of that.
Looking at the wikipedia for mass psychogenic events they are noted for "symptoms that are transient and benign; symptoms with rapid onset and recovery" eg headaches and coughs not stuff like "one diplomat's hearing was damaged to the point that he now requires a hearing aid" (skeptoid article) or structural changes to the brain (telegraph article).
There are a few DIYers making microwave guns on youtube but I don't think they point them at people much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80kDn4vit_w&feature=youtu.be...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reve...
"Computer science researchers have explored the physics of IMD. In the DolphinAttack paper, we used ultrasonic signals to trick a smartphone’s voice-recognition assistant. Because of nonlinearity in the smartphone’s microphone, the ultrasound produced by-products at audible frequencies inside the circuitry of the microphone. Thus, the IMD signal remains inaudible to humans, but the smartphone hears voices. In an early 2017 paper, Nirupam Roy, Haitham Hassanieh, and Romit Roy Choudhury at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign described their BackDoor system [PDF] for using ultrasound and IMD to jam spy microphones, watermark music played at live concerts, and otherwise create “shadow” sounds."
Your Siri is talking to the voices in her head... Conspiracy theory wise i'd think (ie. hope that "at least some of my tax dollars at work") that NSA uses such tools too, and this is why everybody is so mum about it.
> Design, Setting, and Participants: Forty government personnel (patients) who were potentially exposed and experienced neurological symptoms underwent evaluation at a US academic medical center from August 21, 2017, to June 8, 2018, including advanced structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging analytics. Findings were compared with imaging findings of 48 demographically similar healthy controls.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/25/7049036...
I wonder if microwave damage would be consistent with the effects found.