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The Frey Effect (or, When Microwaves Attack)
26 Plays5 years ago
Rolf and Joe tackle an interesting perceptual phenomenon called the Frey Effect. In the Frey Effect, first discovered in the 1960s, pulsed microwave beams can cause the perception of a high-pitched sound. This has come up in the news recently as an explanation of possible "attacks" on the American embassy in Cuba. How exactly does this work? Should it be something we should worry about? Discussion is based around UC San Diego professor Dr. Beatrice Golomb's paper documenting the case that the Frey Effect is responsible.
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Transcript
Introduction to Cognation Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
This is Cognation, the podcast about cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, technology, the future of the human experience, and other stuff we like. It's hosted by me, Joe Hardy. And by me, Rolf Nelson. Welcome to the show.
Mysterious Incident at Cuban Embassy
00:00:24
Speaker
Okay, so today we are going to talk about
00:00:29
Speaker
an interesting incident that happened at the Cuban embassy a couple years ago, and then possible explanations for it. So yeah, the main paper we're talking about is diplomats mystery illness and pulse radio frequency microwave radiation by Beatrice Alexandra Galome, MD PhD, who is a professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. And it's a
00:00:56
Speaker
a paper that she's put together to really dive deep into this topic about what might be causing these illnesses that these Cuban, these US diplomats at the Cuba Embassy, or the US Embassy in Cuba have been experiencing, and to talk about, you know, what's going on there? What does she believe? What does she think is happening? And it's a good, it's a good exploration of the topics.
00:01:25
Speaker
So this is a fascinating incident that happened.
Symptoms and Theories of Attack
00:01:28
Speaker
So the incident happened in 2016 and the way that it seemed to have happened is a bunch of diplomats in the embassy in Havana came down with some mysterious symptoms and word kind of spread out that it was some kind of sonic attack or there was some kind of Cold War technology that might have been used
00:01:55
Speaker
So there are tons of investigations about this. Forensic people went down there and neuropsychologists examined the potential people that had problems. I think it was something like 24. 24 people employees of the embassy had some complaint of some kinds of symptoms, and these are things like dizziness, headaches, fatigue, insomnia, but critically, critically,
Comparisons to Historical Events
00:02:25
Speaker
They all heard sounds, or most of them heard sounds. Is it the case they all heard sounds or just most of them heard sounds? I think that, I think the claim was that they heard sounds and there was some strange aspects to these sounds that were reported that they were heard in some places in a room, but not other places in a room, which, you know, some people thought, okay, well, what could be
00:02:52
Speaker
what could be causing this kind of thing. So now you sort of think about a physical cause of a directed sound like that. And it sounds like in military releases, there was some description of it as being a sonic attack. And it really, I mean, it really seems like a Cold War era kind of attack that
00:03:17
Speaker
that there's some space age technology that's being used. One bit of history that I think is relevant to this too is that there actually was, there were reports of microwave radiation being used in the US Embassy in Moscow in the 70s and the Russians using some kind of microwave radiation that was causing some neurological symptoms in
00:03:47
Speaker
U.S. diplomats in Moscow. So that was a real thing. And that happened. That caused a big uproar. So this kind of hearkens back to that.
Directed Sound Theories
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah. And so the question is, you know, these are some vague type of symptoms with one notable sort of point about hearing these sounds that makes it kind of an interesting thing that kind of got everyone's attention, I guess. And people were reporting these sounds, following them around.
00:04:15
Speaker
being located within or behind their head. And so that was a thing that made people wonder if it was some sort of technology that could beam in a sound to someone's head. How would that work? And that's where it gets into this idea of a phenomenon called the fray effect. Yeah, and there were a couple mentions of this, but I think the idea gained some popularity.
00:04:45
Speaker
And this is where I first heard about this is in, there was a New York Times article in September of 2018 that seemed to kind of boldly claim that the fray effect was what was responsible for this. Now, there may be some dispute about where that theory came from. And this is what Dr. Golem talks about in her paper. But one of the things we were interested in is what's the plausibility
00:05:12
Speaker
Well, first maybe a description of what the fray effect is and then what the plausibility of it is in using for some kind of attack like this.
Intersection of Psychology and Current Events
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting place. One of those rare cases where cognitive psychology meets the news in a very direct way. Yeah, say something topical, right? So yeah, that's kind of what got us excited about the story. And there's a lot to talk about here. It's kind of an interesting
00:05:41
Speaker
phenomenon in and of itself. And then if it is related to an attack on on the US Embassy, that would be an added layer to it. Yeah, and there's all kind of stuff out there on the Internet where it really seems like everybody has their favorite pet theory, and it's pretty hard to disambiguate between different ones. And I think, yeah, in this case, knowing a little bit about how the brain works and how some of the research in this area progressed in the past that
00:06:10
Speaker
It might actually help out in understanding this stuff. In terms of the possible explanations for what happened, I think first of all, it's important to just recognize that there was for sure a spate of mystery illnesses. People were getting sick in a way that was beyond the level that you would expect from just normal day-to-day living and working
00:06:38
Speaker
Normal healthy conditions people were getting sick more frequently than you expect so there and enough so that they were sent home, too So they were I mean, it was severe enough so that they weren't just complaining about it. They were actually sent home So what explanation could be that everyone just had some sort of an illness? It was a viral thing or a bacterial thing Sure, and you want to go with the obvious stuff first, right? Right exactly. So, you know, why do we think that it was it was not a virus and
00:07:09
Speaker
Well, let's see. Well, first of all, there were these associated sounds that everyone's reporting on that seem to be prevalent in the area. The sounds are definitely the thing that kind of get your attention, right? At the same time, we know that there's such a thing as tinnitus, ringing of the ears that can happen. That's associated with a variety of different medical conditions, including different medications, but also
00:07:38
Speaker
anything where you might have inflammation in and around the ears, and even things that are happening in the brain, for example, can lead to this ringing in the ear tinnitus type of effect. So that would be a possible explanation there. Now, I think in terms of a virus, I think they were all checked out by doctors fairly thoroughly, too, because this was a major incident. And after they brought them back, they were all
00:08:07
Speaker
pretty thoroughly examined, and I don't think there was any evidence that there was a virus that was responsible for it. Right, and it was also sort of located to certain places, right? You mean physical places that they were or places in the brain?
Exploring Psychosomatic Causes
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah, physical location of where they were. Yeah, my impression of the report was that they were all in the embassy when this was happening.
00:08:35
Speaker
I think that's correct, but I can't say with 100% certainty. Right, it's I think it was mostly associated with the embassy, but I believe there was also a couple cases where people reported symptoms, similar symptoms in hotel rooms. OK, OK. One other thing about the locations too is I know that there was another similar incident in China, which which. From a couple years back to that,
00:09:04
Speaker
kind of makes things a little more confusing for some of these other ideas about how it might have happened. If it's the same, if it's the same sort of attack or the same sort of thing happening. But anyway, we can talk about that in a little bit. OK, so it's not so we know it's not a virus. We're pretty sure about that. And then it could be psychosomatic, for example, right? It could be something that's just caused by stress. They're worried about it. Some kind of mass hysteria kind of deal.
00:09:34
Speaker
Right. And, and so one person reports hearing sounds and feeling nauseous and having insomnia and everyone else is sort of just suggestible. It's suggestible. People, people experience it. You know, this is something that is always possible, you know, especially when you have these sort of vague symptoms. Um, when I say vague, I mean, these are symptoms that are common across a variety of different causes, right? So,
00:10:03
Speaker
you know, headaches, insomnia. Hard to be specific about or diagnose exactly. Right, exactly. So that there's there's the psychosomatic concept there. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's hard to rule this out 100% unless you have another plausible explanation. It just, yeah, I don't know. It seems it seems unlikely. It doesn't seem like it's a group of highly I, you know,
00:10:33
Speaker
completely isolated individuals who would be highly susceptible to something like this. I mean, they're trained diplomats, they're, you know, they've been in the country for a while, they, it seems, it just seems unlikely. That's all just sort of strikes me as unlikely. Yes, yeah, it's difficult to rule out. But, but, you know, for the sake of argument, let's just, let's say that that's not the cause. And I think, again, that sort of thing is always possible. But
00:11:02
Speaker
You know, it doesn't it does seem unlikely that so many people would have those same very similar symptoms. And I think there were some there were some when when neurologists looked at actual MRI scans of all of these people, there was I mean, there's a fairly large report on traumatic brain injury, some
00:11:26
Speaker
what they refer to as white matter abnormalities. So some actual destruction of some white matter pathways in the brain, some swelling, things like that. So there were reported brain differences too. And that would be really unlikely if it were something that was just psychosomatic. Yeah, I totally
Brain Imaging and Interpretation
00:11:47
Speaker
agree. And certainly the imaging data is huge on this, of course.
00:11:54
Speaker
I also, you know, it's not to me, a hundred percent convincing in the same way that if you look at what these so-called white matter differences that are reported in athletes in a lot of studies, you know, whether it be, I mean, obviously the NFL, we know that there is real, real brain damage happening to NFL football players for sure. But then you look at it in other sports as well. And you also see these super high rates of white matter differences. Um, and you,
00:12:22
Speaker
The problem is that it's not an experiment, right? You're looking at these scans. You know what you're looking for. You're looking for something wrong. You know that this person is reporting symptoms and is in some sense sick. And we don't have a scan of them before and after so we can do a careful comparison. Right. You don't have like a time series. What you really need is like to really be convinced you need to see it before.
00:12:48
Speaker
And then right after they started having these attacks, or punitive attacks, and then, okay, now we can see that it happened at this time, this change happened, it gives us more confidence. Yeah, that's a really good point. That would be a danger in relying too much on,
00:13:07
Speaker
suggesting that it's purely brain damage and that has to be something that explains brain damage like this because you know some of that some of that kind of stuff can come from these other symptoms like severe insomnia can cause brain swelling and and that sort of thing right and of course you know also again you know any kind of viral explanation would be consistent with that as well yeah that's a good point
00:13:31
Speaker
All right, so I think it makes sense to dive into the fray effect a little bit and let's do it because that's the I mean, this is really interesting.
Military and Microwave Contexts
00:13:38
Speaker
It's a totally fascinating phenomenon. So maybe I can just kind of go over a little bit of history of this idea or this effect. So the first reports of this kind of thing are during World War Two when radar was first widely used and they have these big powerful radar machines that are that are
00:13:59
Speaker
using radio frequencies and microwave frequencies to locate things. And it turns out people that are standing right next to radar machines have higher incidences of what they called neuroaesthetic syndrome, which is the same kinds of symptoms that we mentioned that these people at the embassy indicated. So headaches, dizziness, insomnia, things like this.
00:14:28
Speaker
And then, okay, so after World War II, of course you've got the Cold War starting and then you've got this mentality of using space age technology as weapons. I mean, how exciting is that? Giant space ray weapons used against Russia and developed by the Russians used against the United States. And of course you've got spy agencies and defense agencies
00:14:56
Speaker
DARPA, the top secret projects being worked on to figure out whether you can use microwaves to zap people at a distance. And the first real evidence that there was some kind of effect that you could use at a distance came from a researcher named Alan Frey, who the Frey effect is named after. By the way, he's still around too.
00:15:21
Speaker
He was fairly young when this original paper came out. He did some research in 1960 and 1961. His paper was out in 1962. He reports that using the right kinds of frequency, you can get people to hear sounds from microwaves. Now, we should probably explain why this is a surprising finding in the first place. Go ahead. The idea here is that
00:15:51
Speaker
the auditory system is not sensitive to these frequencies acoustically. So in other words, there's no such thing as sound at these frequencies. These frequencies are outside the audible range. Right, and so sound is perceived from physical energy being passed through some kind of medium. So sound has to travel through air and
00:16:20
Speaker
travels at a much slower rate. I mean, this is the idea that thunder takes a lot longer to reach you than the view of lightning, because the view of lightning is traveling at the speed of light, which is nearly instantaneous as far as that kind of distance. But sound is traveling to you at a much slower rate. So on the order of, what is it? Hundreds of feet per second.
00:16:50
Speaker
So, sound and what's picked up by the ear are physical vibrations and microwaves are electromagnetic radiations. Electromagnetic radiation, so for physics, if you remember your physics classes, just produced by from black body radiation, essentially same as visible light, exact same
00:17:17
Speaker
thing as light just at a different frequency. So if you look at the electromagnetic spectrum, you've got super short wavelengths and then you've got super long wavelengths from all the way to X-rays and gamma rays and all that stuff. Same thing, just different frequency. But this is what all communications technology is based on, cell phone towers and television, all that kind of stuff based on electromagnetic radiation.
00:17:47
Speaker
OK, so totally different. Right. So yeah, exactly. Electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. And obviously, the sound moves at the speed of sound, which is different depending on the environmental conditions in which the temperature, the other contents of the humidity of the air, et cetera. But obviously, it's much, much slower. So 343 meters per second in dry air. Thank you.
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So how the heck does microwave radiation actually cause people to hear sound? Well, okay. Alan Frey and his original paper didn't know. He had some guesses as to how it happened, but he wasn't really clear on the mechanism. The first thing you might think of is, all right, we know that neurons are communicating with each other in an electrochemical way. So maybe it's just disrupting the
00:18:45
Speaker
signals between neurons, the action potentials between neurons. And he wasn't really sure exactly how it was happening. Long story short though, that's not what appears to be the mechanism. So through a number of research papers between that original 1962 paper and now, there have been some different theories proposed and
00:19:11
Speaker
So the way that we think that the Frey effect works now, and this just seems to be fairly well substantiated, is that it's not affecting any particular location in the brain. It just affects the brain as a whole.
Understanding the Frey Effect
00:19:25
Speaker
We've got this big piece of soft tissue in our head, and it's not all that different from the way that a microwave oven heats up foods that have liquid in them. So it has an effect on soft tissue.
00:19:40
Speaker
One key is that the microwaves that are used in the fray effect have to be pulsed, which means they have to be of a square wave. In other words, they have to be sharp pulses rather than a continuous amount of microwave energy. So your microwave oven just gives continuous energy into it. These pulses happen at regular occurrences and
00:20:08
Speaker
A key here is that the wavelengths that affect your head are about the size of your head. So they have about the size of your head. And essentially they cause the soft tissue in your head to jiggle a little bit. So it's really just rattling your head a tiny bit. And then that jiggling gets transferred through either the bone or through the fluids in your head.
00:20:37
Speaker
to affect the cochlea, which is where normal sound gets processed, and then you hear it as sound. One sort of side note, I guess, here is sort of interesting that the frequency that you hear is going to be dependent on the size of your head, so that people with larger heads are going to hear something different than people with smaller heads. Right, so this is basically an experience of
00:21:05
Speaker
hearing these sounds that are generated by, according to this model, essentially your head rattling around a little bit. And the interesting thing here is that this is something that's been studied pretty extensively and it's been repeated over a number of occasions. It's a little bit of a difficult area to study in human subjects because
00:21:32
Speaker
Not that many people are excited about signing up for an experiment to stick their head in a microwave, basically. And I've got to say, my first impulse here was, OK, how do we get one of these things and try it out? And I talked to a physics professor at my college. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, OK, well, we're trying to figure this out because we're trying to figure out why
00:22:02
Speaker
People in Cuba got brain damage. Wait a second. Let's not do that. Maybe we don't want to. Maybe we don't want to. The first thing we want to do is maybe not pointed at our own heads and see. I am totally curious, by the way, what this actually sounds like. Supposedly, it's a it's a it's a very low power effect, so it's well under the kind of threshold that should do damage to your brain. And physicists say that
00:22:32
Speaker
This is way less, this is causing way less jiggling to your brain than an ultrasound does to a pregnant woman. But again, we've got these people with brain damage, it's microwaves, not supposed to open up your microwave oven, microwaves are not good for you, right? There is some high power here, so I'm still skeptical about pointing it at my head.
00:23:02
Speaker
That wouldn't be the place to start, I don't think. In terms of this, though, I mean, we talk about the power. What was he using as a device? Yeah, so this is interesting. This is something I went and tried to figure out, too. So there's an interesting review paper a few years ago about different amounts of energy that you can use.
00:23:31
Speaker
I suppose this is a good thing, but you wouldn't be able to get this just by jamming the door on your microwave and sticking your head in it. Not that it's more power, but it wouldn't give you the kind of pulsed power that you want. So the amount of power that you need is, let's see, microwatts per square centimeter. So it's going to depend on how far away.
00:24:01
Speaker
The average power density can be at least as low as 400 microwatts per square centimeter. 400 microwatts per square centimeter. So the farther away you get, the less power it's going to have. So you either need a decent sized microwave generator right up to your head or a gigantor machine that's far enough away
00:24:29
Speaker
from the embassy that would actually go and affect it. Right. And in the Fray paper, the original 1962 paper, he's talking about the effect was induced several hundred feet from the antenna the instant the transmitter was turned on. So that's the cool part. Right. Because, yeah, exactly. It's traveling at the speed of light. And you can do it at a distance. So if you focus your beam strongly enough. So there's some sort of microwave generating antenna.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it's something that, I mean, it's something that you could go out and buy industrially. So these types of, you know, these are, uh, these antenna are used in like astronomy and stuff like that. Right. I don't know. Boy, that's another theory right there. Aliens. Aliens. Oh, right. Oh no.
Speculative Microwave Technologies
00:25:21
Speaker
And by the way, this this stuff has attracted a fair number of conspiracy theorists to with some pretty crazy ideas about it all. Well, I mean, if you're going to be, you know, aluminum foil helmet type person, I mean, this is this is the aluminum foil helmet situation right here. I mean, it really is. Yeah, it really is. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, OK, so one interesting if you want to
00:25:48
Speaker
go down the avenue of thinking what sorts of effects these things can have, the next question you might have is, well, you can produce a kind of humming in someone's head. Can you control their minds with it? Not necessarily control their minds directly, but how about can you communicate with someone? Can you cause someone to hear a word in their head? And the answer to this seems to be no.
00:26:14
Speaker
The most direct evidence was one paper in the 70s that found you could sort of get a Morse code level signal to someone, but as far as forming an actual word, no. Part of this might be that we know that the frequency heard is dependent on the size of your head. It's really difficult to modulate it.
00:26:41
Speaker
in those tiny amounts to actually change the frequency that gets heard by the person. So this is, I think this is a really, it's a pretty crude way to generate a signal that somebody hears. And it's not going to be as precise as making people hear voices in their heads. Right, right. But you could get a signal to someone if, you know, if that was the only way to do it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, if you're like Russian spies, you could
00:27:10
Speaker
you could get just like a quick coded signal, I suppose. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting too, though, in terms of the, we start getting into the damage question about, you know, how much power are we talking about to where people are getting damaged by this? And it's important from a number of perspectives. I mean, not only is it important from the perspective of, you know, in this case, was this an attack? But, you know, these types of radio, microwave frequencies,
00:27:40
Speaker
are being used in industrial across all kinds of different telecommunications systems, cell phones. Yeah. So that's where it starts to become an intersection between the kinds of claims that people have been making about, for example, when they had these smart meters installed in their homes that were nominally sending out some signals that were affecting people adversely.
00:28:09
Speaker
And so Dr. Galoma in her paper kind of got into reports that were similar in terms of people experiencing similar symptoms and sounds from the smart meter incidences as what people were experiencing at these embassies. You know, the question that this has to bring up to people is, okay, all of these microwaves that are bathing our body constantly from cell phones and from all of these other sources,
00:28:39
Speaker
Are they having these kinds of adverse effects, too, and how many bad things are happening? And from what I can gather, it's a pretty difficult question to answer. One of the researchers that did a whole lot to convince people that the levels of microwave radiation that come out of cell phones and what we're exposed to on a daily basis is harmless was a researcher called Eleanor Adair, who
00:29:08
Speaker
published tons of stuff and even did some experiments where people are exposed directly to microwave radiation to the levels at which they're actually starting to sweat. So causing heat on their skin and found no adverse longer term effects. And what it seemed like is that at the most microwave radiation would have an effect on the surface of the skin.
00:29:38
Speaker
Of course, there are other kinds of cosmic gray kinds of weapons that people use and there was a crowd control gun that was essentially a super powerful microwave. The most that it did is possibly cause a rash on your skin or make you feel sort of warm on your skin.
00:29:58
Speaker
And if you're not right next to it, I think it's just kind of makes you feel a little warmer. But still not super encouraging. It's not super encouraging. And this is the point at which if you're a conspiracy theorist, you you can go down a pathway of saying, ah, they're all around us. There's cell phones everywhere. But do I want to keep my cell phone in a Faraday cage and keep everything away so that I'm not exposed to all this radiation? And man, it's a hard one. I just don't have enough time and energy to think about that.
00:30:26
Speaker
No, I'm just assuming that people are protecting me. I'm just hoping that it's safe. Absolutely. Yeah, the. But the question that that raises for me in association with with this particular case with the embassy is how much radiation are we talking about that if it really was that let's let's just assume for a second that that was what it was. You're talking about a lot of microwaves if these people are having
00:30:56
Speaker
really brain damage and nausea, nosebleeds, et cetera. First of all, there's all this ambient, now ambient microwave radiation in the atmosphere anyway, but then of course we're putting so much more in with all the devices and antennas that we're using everywhere. And we're not having anything like this on a day-to-day basis.
Skepticism on Frey Effect's Impact
00:31:20
Speaker
So you're talking about a weapon that would be generating a decent amount of pulsed microwave radiation.
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, and this is a confusing part about the story, I think, which is if it is microwave radiation that's causing people to hear these sounds, we know that, or we at least think that getting the fray effect as it was experimented on people with is a pretty low energy thing, that it's not enough to cause any damage.
00:31:55
Speaker
You know, like I said, supposedly less than an ultrasound. And there was a researcher who came out with a description of it. And it was published in Scientific American a few months ago. Kenneth Foster, who did some of the original research in the 70s, demonstrating how the fray effect might work. So he was demonstrating that it probably had this
00:32:22
Speaker
thermo-elastic effect on the brain, that it's jiggling the brain around a little bit, suggests now, he's come out saying that he thinks it can't possibly be the fray effect that's causing any of these neurological symptoms because it's just too low power and it wouldn't actually do this much damage. It'd have to be much, much, much more powerful. But that doesn't, wait, that doesn't mean though that even if he's right that the kind of effect that they saw with the fray effect
00:32:51
Speaker
That could still be causing the sounds, right? But that wouldn't be caused, but there'd have to be more radiation to cause the damage. Right. That was my take on it too. I think that was the thought that I had too, is that at a low level, you could do it so that it wasn't causing any kind of brain damage. But if you're just kind of hurling a bunch of microwave radiation at somebody, you could do both. You could get the fray effect and then also do some other damage too. So why would they want to do this?
00:33:21
Speaker
Why would the Cubans or the Russians or the Chinese or whoever it is, why would they do that? That is a good question. That gets into conspiracy theory level thinking too, getting to the motivations. I feel like there could be a million answers to that. Since this stuff was
00:33:51
Speaker
This kind of thing was demonstrated to be used in, in the cold war in the seventies. Maybe there's just some leftover technology hanging out in Cuba that somebody's like, well, somebody was bored. Let's just put this to use. And somebody was just bored. Yeah. I mean, that's possible. That's possible. It could be also, I mean, you could imagine it could be an experiment. They could be thinking, well, we're not really, yeah, I mean, they're not, they're thinking, Hey, you know,
00:34:20
Speaker
This is not necessarily something that we're not at war directly with the US right now, but in the future, let's see what we could do with this technology. As a provocation? In the immediate term, just to see what the effects are, just to see what they could do with it. You don't get many willing participants, so we use diplomats. We use diplomats. I'm thinking the enemies of the US would be doing that,
00:34:50
Speaker
not the US doing it to themselves. Although it could be that too. False flag. Isn't that what the alt-right calls like when you do an attack on yourself to make people think that you're an attack, false flag? Exactly. When George Soros pays someone to do something, whatever it is, it's always a false flag according to these theories. That's the part that makes it a little weird, right?
00:35:20
Speaker
Motivation. Motivation. If you're trying to put things together, why is this happening? No one's claimed responsibility for it either, which isn't that what terrorists usually do? They try to claim responsibility. They try to claim responsibility. Yes. That's where people tend to point people thinking about the Russians. And that's where, oh, well, if you think maybe they're just generally trying to disrupt our democracy or what have you.
00:35:48
Speaker
There's some evidence for that. So chaos. Chaos. So chaos, exactly, that they see this as just an opportunity to get people spun up and literally getting in our heads figuratively and literally. Well, there are two other theories which are worth maybe talking about just a little bit. And
00:36:13
Speaker
One of them is the idea that this was part of a surveillance, this is a side effect of some kind of surveillance project. In other words, that people are trying to listen to them at a distance and using existing surveillance technology. And it just happens to be a side effect that they cause this brain damage or these kinds of effects on them. Right, right. What kind of technology would have that overlap?
00:36:42
Speaker
that I'm not entirely clear on. I don't know. I don't know either. But that's an interesting thought in terms of just from a motivational perspective. From a motivational perspective, that kind of makes sense. I guess it would be kind of a coincidence if it happened to have caused a fray effect also. Right, right. It would be quite an interesting coincidence. I think it might be worth thinking a little bit now about this
00:37:10
Speaker
issue of the crickets. The crickets. Crickets. The cricket issue. The cricket issue. Wait, don't we first have to talk about smoking guns and angles of the diplomats and stuff like that so we can get into some serious conspiracy theory? So the angles at which the diplomats were getting hit by the radiation? The positions. No, I'm just this is like this is when you really get into the weeds. It's like, but it's impossible that the diplomat could be standing here. Exactly.
00:37:40
Speaker
the multiple microwave detector theory, the one bullet theory. Is that what it was called in Kennedy? Yeah, exactly, the magic bullet. The magic bullet. Yeah. So crickets, crickets is an interesting one. Yeah, I mean, I mean, just while we're on that topic of like the conspiracy theory topic things is that this didn't happen to everyone. Yes.
00:38:07
Speaker
So that's a big problem that you have right away, is that this is not something that everyone experienced. So if it was just radiation that was being beamed into part of the embassy, everyone who crossed through that part of the embassy should be affected. If it's on all the time and yeah.
00:38:31
Speaker
then you have to get into why that isn't the case. And, uh, well, here's where psychophysics can help us out. I think, um, because some of the original research on the fray effect found that not everybody could hear it. And there seems to be a, uh, a specific, um, range of sounds that range of sensitivities that people had that would make them more likely to perceive the fray effect.
Sensitivity Variability and Cochlea Damage
00:38:59
Speaker
It is related to your level of auditory sensitivity. However, of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the Frey effect is perceivable in deaf humans. Yes, I found that to be interesting also. It obviously depends on what kind of deafness it is. Yeah. I think Frey reported on this in his original paper,
00:39:29
Speaker
because he was trying to figure out at which level it was happening. In some deaf humans, there was still perception of this fray effect. He didn't call it the fray effect at the time. I think it's right. No, exactly. That would have been awesome if he did this first paper. Yeah. It's helpful, I guess, to know what kinds of deafness you could have. Sound is a physical pressure wave that
00:39:58
Speaker
impinges on your outer ear and sort of travels inward and eventually causes a neural signal, you can have damage anywhere along that pathway and you can have deafness occur. So you've got your eardrum, your tympanic membrane, and then it's connected to the tiny little bones inside your ear and eventually goes into the cochlea, the organ of hearing in your ear. So if you had damage to
00:40:26
Speaker
just the bones in your ear, the ossicles, and your cochlea is still working, you could conceivably induce a sound through the fray effect since it goes through the skull or through the vasculature in the brain. So this is my guess as to what's happening in these deaf individuals. Conversely, you could also have someone who has damage to the cochlea so that they're not hearing a certain frequency of sounds.
00:40:55
Speaker
And even though they can hear other frequencies through the normal hearing pathway, they wouldn't be able to hear the fray effect because their cochlea just isn't sensitive to that range. That's right. Either through neural damage or some combination of the level of sensitivity that they have with sounds. And then it interacts with that thing you were talking about before about the size of your skull. So if you have a small skull, or a really big skull,
00:41:25
Speaker
puts the frequency of the vibrations of the head outside the range of what your cochlea is sensitive to, then you wouldn't hear it. Yeah. Yeah. That almost seems to fit with the idea that some people are not hearing it and other people are. So sensitivity to the sound is one thing. Different people might be sensitive to the fray effect versus not.
00:41:53
Speaker
But then why would some people get sick and other people not get sick? And that's where Dr. Gollum goes into, you know, there's just different levels of sensitivity to this, right? And that happens with a lot of stuff, right? And she got into a big discussion of oxidative stress. And that, whenever, if you want,
00:42:23
Speaker
a vague explanation for a lot of things that's very hard to pin down. Oxidative stress is always a good thing to bring up. Right? I mean, it's yes, it's a thing for sure. But wow, really hard to measure. Yeah, it's like saying that something's due to resilience or something like that or inflammation or inflammation. Which isn't as explanatory as it sounds, right? It's not.
00:42:53
Speaker
It is not because what is being inflamed? How for how long? Why? Why? So it's a word that people like to use in these in these situations when they don't really have a lot else to say about it. It is true that when things get damaged, they tend to be inflamed. So yeah. There's always going to be some correlation there, but.
00:43:19
Speaker
It's a mystery. It's part of the mystery, let's just say that, that to my mind has no well-described explanation why some people would be affected and others would not be affected. It seems like it should be just a straightforward effect. Like if you have soft tissue in your head and you vibrate it and it's connected up to the ear, then you should be able to hear it.
00:43:49
Speaker
Right. And I mean, 24 people sounds like a lot of people and it is a lot of people, but there are hundreds of people going in and out of this embassy every single day. Right. I guess maybe one relevant piece is that it's a threshold thing. So in all of the experimentation on it, it's something where people are in a totally quiet room and they're asked to kind of distinguish whether or not they're hearing a noise or not. So it's not
00:44:19
Speaker
It's not necessarily a really loud noise in your head, something fairly quiet. And maybe if you aren't paying enough attention to it, you don't even notice it. Or if you've got tinnitus or something already, maybe you don't even hear it. Right. Or if you're just in a loud room all the time or got your headphones on, it's just under the radar for you. So to speak. So to speak.
00:44:49
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's possible.
Alternative Theories and Crickets
00:44:52
Speaker
But I think that's where we should bring up the crickets. Crickets. Okay, so this is the other piece of the puzzle. Crickets. So what's going on with crickets? There was an article in the New York Times recently. Was it just a couple weeks ago, right? January 6th. Basically, they
00:45:12
Speaker
came to the conclusion that the sound that was being reported by the folks having these experiences was essentially exactly the sound that crickets make. There are a lot of crickets apparently there. And especially consistent with the fact that these sounds were heard mostly or exclusively at night suggests that maybe what they were hearing was crickets.
00:45:39
Speaker
I think when a lot of people read this headline, or at least other people that I had spoken to, a lot of people just said, ah, all of this was just crickets. That was kind of the end of the story. But not really, right? But no, not really. At all, because the whole point is that you can't hear it at all outside of your head. You couldn't record the fray effect on a sound recorder and play it back and hear it. That's not how it works.
00:46:09
Speaker
Okay, and a couple things about the crickets. Don't get me started about the crickets. Let's get into the crickets, man. Okay, so the first thing that made me wonder about this is, okay, so there are crickets pretty much everywhere, right? So why is it that diplomats are susceptible to cricket attacks, whereas other people are not? So why only diplomats? Doesn't that seem weird? Yeah, the crickets don't explain why people got sick at all.
00:46:39
Speaker
They might explain what they heard, could explain what they heard, but does not explain at all why they would get sick. I think we would know if crickets routinely caused brain damage or if they caused these kinds of effects. Yes. Second of all, we also do know that there were some events in China, too, which seemed to be similar. And it would seem odd that only diplomats in United States embassies are affected by crickets on different continents, right?
00:47:08
Speaker
I feel like that would be weird. That would be weird. So sort of examining this stuff a little more deeply, I think there's some misleading press here. The way that- No. Yeah, totally true. I know, believe it. No. So the way that it was stated is something to the effect of sounds associated with embassy attacks are found to be crickets.
00:47:37
Speaker
Now here's my conspiracy theory assembling. So originally this was a theory. Early on, soon after the attack is that maybe it was insects and there were a couple doctors who had suggested this. They said, well, maybe it's local insects.
00:47:56
Speaker
And they sort of put that theory aside because it didn't really seem to match up with the kinds of effects that were happening and how it was localized in some way. It was sort of like it was laser like in, you know, focused on certain areas and not other areas. And then so there were a couple of recordings that were made and this is what got out. So people looked at that sound and focused on
00:48:20
Speaker
what could be causing that particular sound, sort of like a chirping sound. And people couldn't get an exact match to it. So there's a group of researchers at Berkeley, and I think it's a graduate student at Berkeley, who did a match. He said, okay, that sounds exactly like a cricket that I know of, except there seemed to be a few more echoes in it. So he simulated, he used that chirp of the cricket in
00:48:50
Speaker
more echoed environment and got an almost exact match to the sound that was provided. So that seems to be the extent of the evidence. And again, so what is the point? There's there's a place that people were where they were hearing sounds. Yeah, those sounds sound a little bit like crickets. Mm hmm. Someone else recorded a sound that maybe let's say, let's say, for the sake of argument that it was crickets.
00:49:18
Speaker
Which I think it very well could have, I mean. Why not? Why would it not be crickets? There's nothing to do with this. There's nothing to do with this. The whole point is that there would not be sound waves associated with the microwave attack. You cannot record them. Yes. It's unrelated. Maybe some of the confusion hinges on it would be a confusing thing if
00:49:47
Speaker
there was a microbe attack. And in addition, there were crickets nearby that sounded sort of similar to it. Would it be? I mean, there were crickets everywhere. Well, I just mean the reporting is kind of, OK, there were cricket sounds there. They were identified as crickets. So that must have been the cause of it. Right, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, no, I don't think it's solved. It certainly doesn't solve it. Let's just say that.
Challenges in Solving the Mystery
00:50:17
Speaker
You won't hear the last of this. No. Definitely not. Definitely not. How do you solve something like this? You don't solve it until you find the actual microwave antenna. The lack of an explanation is always going to be a counterfactual here. You're never going to be able to disprove the conspiracy theory. Well, maybe somebody tries to use it again. Maybe somebody has some of this
00:50:47
Speaker
technology and they try to use it somewhere else and they get caught red handed. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Exactly. You could prove it, but it's very difficult. It's very easy to prove it in a sense, you know, or more to say the proof would be compelling if you actually found the antenna that was positioned appropriately and you turned it on and you saw that you could reproduce the effect. Yeah. That would be compelling evidence for the microwave attack theory.
00:51:17
Speaker
it would be very difficult to unequivocally disprove the theory. I think what you would want to do is get, I mean, if you had the resources, get every single person that went through that embassy and get your own microwave set up and run them past it and say, does this sound like what you heard? By the way, I hope I didn't brain damage you again. Right, exactly. And then you could bring in the crickets, you could have
00:51:44
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Oh yeah. A cricket control condition. Exactly. And then you might have some people, if you had them, if you had them next to the microwaves and some of them were susceptible and some of them weren't again, if this relates to the ones who didn't hear it in the embassy, then you could be a little more sure about things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the crickets. All right. So if you, let's say you wanted to go with the crickets thing, the crickets explanation is consistent with the psychosomatic story. So
00:52:13
Speaker
A story you could tell is that people were stressed out as they are in the embassy. It's a stressful job and working in general is super stressful and just being alive is stressful. So people have stress related effects all the time and they include insomnia, nausea, tiredness, irritability,
00:52:37
Speaker
you know, headaches, even nosebleeds, I mean, everything. And then they were hearing these sounds and these sounds were like, oh, this is driving me crazy. It sounds like it's in my head. Yeah. We've all heard crickets, you know, especially at night if you're in a dark place. You know, maybe they got inside or something. They get inside. Exactly. I remember when I was a kid, I had a cricket in my basement where my bedroom was. Super frustrating. It was so frustrating. It's impossible to fight. And it does. It really does sound like it's right in your head.
00:53:07
Speaker
So that would be that would be the consistent explanation there. This is all just a psychosomatic stress related. Uh huh. That was that was happened at the same time as as crickets. And when you work in an embassy, maybe you're maybe you could get a little paranoid. Right. Well, you should. Right. I mean, it should be a little paranoid. Yeah, you should be at least cautious, let's say, because in fact, people are trying to get you. Mm hmm. That's right. Or as they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're trying not trying to get you. Exactly.
00:53:38
Speaker
and these are correctly paranoid people. That's right, exactly. Okay, so do you have any favorite conspiracy theories? If you could go with any theory. Okay, so what do I really think? Just brainstorming. I don't know. I haven't changed my mind of what I really think, so I'll just say that right away, but then we can have some more fun with it. Okay. Because what I really think is it's the psychosomatic thing. Really? It really 100% feels like that, yeah.
00:54:09
Speaker
It's a super common thing that happens. You know, people get sick in similar ways and similar environments all the time. All of these symptoms are very common symptoms that happen to people all the time. And sometimes, you know, whether you choose to focus on it or not can often be determined by what's going on around you and whether if other people are calling in sick on the topic and, you know, are these similar kinds of calling in sick on these similar symptoms, then it's much more likely you're going to that you are as
Revisiting Psychosomatic Explanations
00:54:38
Speaker
well.
00:54:38
Speaker
And the sounds could be just even just tinnitus or crickets. OK, well, so that theory has the it has some value in that it's probably the most parsimonious, but it's also the most boring theory. Totally boring, totally boring. So let's let's just put that to one side and let's say that that is a possibility that is also difficult to disprove, by the way.
00:55:02
Speaker
Right. That's that's the that's the frustrating thing about all these psychosomatic theories is that they're very difficult to prove. Super difficult to prove. And impossible to disprove. Yeah. So they're they're they're not that exciting from that. Ununfalsifiable, we could say. That's right. Unfalsifiable. But yeah, I mean, forget that for a moment. The
00:55:23
Speaker
More interesting. I mean, I think the microwave attack theory is great. I think it totally makes sense. I mean, just especially the fact that we know that these kinds of attacks have been used in the past is super suggestive. I feel like it would be totally reasonable if the technology is lying around that it's not something that they had to invent or test a whole lot. They've just got it lying around. Cuba's clearly an old
00:55:53
Speaker
battlefront of the Cold War. They have it around, somebody uses it, who knows who. And that's the thing, it wouldn't even necessarily have to be someone who's acting on part of a state agent. It wouldn't even have to be a terrorist. It could be just a random person who happens to have access to this technology.
00:56:19
Speaker
who's doing it for shits and giggles, you know? You know, people do ham radio stuff, you know, like someone who's like, that kind of thing, you know? And I think even if it wasn't leftover technology, I think it, you know, it's conceivable that somebody could have put together this level of equipment with, you know, by themselves. I don't think it would be, it's not out of the realm of possibility that you can, you can hack something together that would do this.
00:56:50
Speaker
Right, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Someone who's at the level of sophistication of someone who's a ham radio operator and really gets into that kind of stuff, right? Yeah, maybe he just wired together 12 microwave oven units and forget how to pulse them and just kind of let it loose. Just let it rip. Yep. How directional and focused is it, though? Wouldn't this affect the person who's, I guess they could operate it at a distance?
00:57:20
Speaker
Uh, well, I mean, if, if they're getting these kinds of results in 1962 at a, you know, at a hundred feet, seems reasonable that you could construct something now. Yeah, no, yeah. Spy satellites. This could be a conspiracy level thing.
00:57:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if it's if it's a satellite, then you could definitely then my original idea of like, this is just a research project and they're testing it on Americans because it's Russians or whatever. Yeah, that seems like an unlikely one, certainly, though, if it's a satellite kind of thing, because I think you would be able to detect that. Right. Wouldn't you? I mean, other other people would see that in the sense of that because people are monitoring the. Yeah. Microwave.
00:58:11
Speaker
I can't imagine that you could you could just point it to that degree of specificity that you could get you could actually point a satellite at a head That'd be weird. Yeah, and that seems unlikely mutant crickets Really pissed off crickets it just Coming after you specifically. Yeah, that seems unlikely. I Have to say I still do like the fray effect as it
00:58:41
Speaker
as an explanation, and I feel like some of the evidence laid down by Dr. Gollum is pretty solid. Yeah, I would like, it would be great to dive into it more. I mean, I don't know what's gonna happen with the paper. This was a pre-print, right? I think it was actually published. Oh, that's okay. I think it actually got published in a journal. Okay, just because I like the paper, I thought it was good.
00:59:11
Speaker
kind of worried me a little bit that she went off into the discussion of the smart meters so much. Oh, remind me, what are the smart meters? So the smart meters are these, you know, you have the electricity meter on the side of your house. Yeah. That records how many kilowatt hours
00:59:37
Speaker
You can figure out how much you how much you pay for your. Yeah, yeah. So different places have installed these systems that are accessible remotely, so they're essentially networked. I don't know if it's Internet or if it's a different system, but but they're basic. They're they're networked systems. And.
00:59:56
Speaker
people have repeatedly reported having electro sensitive symptoms when these were installed in their house. And this happened in California and happened in, I guess it happened in Maine also. And yeah, people reported when they were at their house, they got sick and then when they left their house, they felt better, things like that. And then when they disabled the units, they felt better. But that was like,
01:00:28
Speaker
really conspiracy theory level stuff. Like that's been pretty well shown to not be true. It isn't true. My understanding is that these units are everywhere now. And people kind of just forgot about it. And there's no problems anymore.
Public Fear and Historical Context
01:00:48
Speaker
That's my understanding. That's my understanding. So maybe that's a whole other show. But she did also mention that there was this
01:00:56
Speaker
report that was, I believe it was in German scientists who put together this report about the effects of electromagnetic radiation and sensitivity to that. That was pretty, a lot of scientists came together to like report on this. And you remember there was that thing a few years ago where people were talking about the effects of like living under power lines. Yeah, I do remember that. Yeah. Yeah.
01:01:24
Speaker
There are certainly some other kinds of effects on the brain from radiation. I guess it's just the kind of radiation or the level that it is. One of the things that was reported on in the 60s and 70s, and it seems to be true with a decent amount of radiation, is that it can break down the blood-brain barrier so that you can get some kind of complex kinds of issues that come with it. If you're getting different things floating through the blood
01:01:54
Speaker
blood-brain barrier that don't normally go through it. I know there's kind of a listing. You can get some damage to mitochondrial membranes, other things like that. Oxidative stress, there you go. You can get oxidative stress from it. Yeah, of course. You can get oxidative stress from everything, right? I guess you can get oxidative stress from everything. Just being alive. Literally being alive. Stressful being alive.
01:02:20
Speaker
I mean, that is the number one cause of oxidative stress is just being a metabolizing entity. But this is this is from the paper from the figure where she has the big table.
01:02:34
Speaker
of all the different symptoms and things that people were reporting. And this is talking about in the main smart meter survey report, comments by effective persons were included. Exemplars, including fray noises. Exemplars involving fray noises included these. After 72 ITRON AMI smart meters were installed near me in my townhome complex, I heard a constant buzzing
01:03:04
Speaker
It's driving me crazy. It keeps me awake and it's hard to think. I'm not sure if it's an actual sound or if it's being generated inside my head, because when I put my fingers in my ears, I still hear it. In addition, about every 15 to 20 minutes, a more intense wine is added that lasts about 12 to 15 seconds. It gives me a mild headache. When I go outside to the state and regional parks around me where there are no smart meters for miles, I no longer hear the buzzing and my heart doesn't race. Sounds like tinnitus to me.
01:03:32
Speaker
It's hard to know what to make of some subjective reports like that. Yeah, exactly. And it's just weird to kind of bring that into the discussion of the Cuba attacks. It'd be interesting to, I mean, yeah, at the same time, it's like you could easily say, well, you just don't want to believe that these electromagnetic radiation effects are happening all around you all the time. We're killing ourselves with this stuff. Yeah, that's possible also.
01:04:01
Speaker
It would be a hard one to go back on if you had to cut out all microwave radiation in your life. It would be. So the other I thought the other thing I came up with when doing some research for this, some interesting histories in the study of microwave radiation, I have to say, and effects on humans, there were some great but weird studies on
01:04:29
Speaker
microwave radiation on rats where essentially some of these early studies are basically putting rats in microwave ovens and turning it on and seeing what happens. And then doing this is humans too. Well, not putting people in the microwave because I think that would be a little unethical. My favorite study was the study from 1955
01:04:58
Speaker
called reanimation of rats from body temperatures between zero and one degrees centigrade by microwave diathermy. Okay, so you freeze the rat. You freeze the rat. And then they're fine. Yep. Reanimation. They actually, yeah, it's actual reanimation. So they were dead. And now they're alive. Now they're reanimated. So it's a little Frankenstein-y. And
01:05:26
Speaker
Apparently, the advantage of this is the other main method. You can keep all your pet rats in the freezer while you're on vacation. That's the advantage, obviously. Yeah, save on food costs. When I was thinking food, I was thinking more just like, you know, you're, yeah, well, yeah, well, I see food for the rat, right? Yes. The main advantage is I understand
01:05:52
Speaker
is you can reanimate them by putting a warm spatula on their chest, but that causes a mark on them, a potentially painful mark. It's better to do it with a microwave. That's a practical tip. It is. What's the takeaway thought here? What do we think the implications of this are?
01:06:19
Speaker
Oh man, it's hard to know. Takeaway thought is, man, there's a lot of potential ideas about this Cuban embassy attack and there's no definite proof for any of them. A lot of people are convinced that one or the other is correct, but it's difficult to see total. I mean, the fact that you and I come away with this, with a different takeaway,
01:06:48
Speaker
that I might lean towards the fray effect as a cause and you think it's probably a psychogenic thing, it's difficult to figure this stuff out. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the takeaways for me that are super interesting is just, you know, learning about the fray effect and how that works and thinking more about the effects of electromagnetic radiation broadly on the brain.
01:07:15
Speaker
and how that might impact people or not. But then it's also I think the most interesting part is just how it really shows you, it's like a mirror that you hold up to yourself about what you think about different kinds of explanations. Yeah, how you integrate information about different explanations and when you accept one and when you look for evidence to support your own particular theory.
01:07:41
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, you can definitely see the news articles all have their interesting takes in that way.
Media Influence on Theories
01:07:50
Speaker
They're all definitely takes. They're all trying to present that this is what happened, and especially with the crickets one. That one definitely was, I don't think, very good journalism, to be honest with you. No, it doesn't seem like it. I think, well, we don't have to relitigate this one, but yeah.
01:08:09
Speaker
But yeah, even Dr. Gollum's article, which, again, I do think was quite good, had a very distinct perspective, which you need to have a perspective. But she was definitely looking for evidence for her theory, which, again, is a little bit, you have to do that almost. When you write an article, to write an article, you have to almost have a perspective to drive the narrative. But she also pointed out how another
01:08:39
Speaker
bias, which is the bias that industry people have for whatever their industry is. For example, studies of electromagnetic radiation, whether they cause damage to people's brains or not, there's some impact of whether or not your research was sponsored by, say, the telecom industry. Yeah, and it feels a bit like tobacco industry.
01:09:08
Speaker
and figuring out what the actual effects of smoking tobacco are. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I think those are all, it's all interesting. And at the end of the day, that does end up being a bit of a Rorschach test because that smoking gun is not there. Yeah, it takes a lot to maintain some skepticism and wait to accumulate enough evidence before being sure of something.
01:09:34
Speaker
And maybe we are just wishy-washy scientists who tend to do that naturally. Right. Exactly. Cool. But at the end of the day, super interesting phenomenon, really interesting intersection of neuroscience and politics, reportage, other pop culture elements. So all in all, a cool thing.
01:10:00
Speaker
And still in the thick of the story, so I'll wait further news if if further developments happen on this story. Definitely. Alright, I guess we'll end it there. Thanks for listening. Yeah, thanks for listening.