

by Cheryl Welsh

May 2013

This article is an in-depth version of the Torture essay; “Massive new brain projects."

Mind Justice Home Page

Question: "What facts are hidden in plain sight?"


The Electrochemical Brain




Classified Neuroscience research

Biophysics, Bioelectronics
Electrochemical Brain"Side view of one half of the human brain

Unclassified Neuroscience research

Molecular Biology, Biochemistry

The US atomic bomb exploded and the world discovered the existence of a formidable secret weapon. By contrast, Cold War mind control weapons that target the brain, today known as neuroweapons, are another formidable weapon whose power lies in their surreptitious use and keeping them secret forever. The consensus is that neuroweapons that could remotely target, communicate with and control the enemy’s brain is the ultimate weapon that major nations would want to develop, but technologies to provide better access the brain and a general theory for how the brain works must be developed first. However, the emerging history of neuroscience research, in particular the physics of the brain suggests that neuroweapons are more likely than not already developed. This paper briefly describes the physics of the brain and in particular, research on the brain as an electrical system and its importance of the research to US national security. This paper briefly explores some of the reasons why there is relatively little physics in neuroscience compared to the stunning success of molecular biology and biochemistry in neuroscience. Conclusions are given.


The physics of the brain                  


Beurle CitationProperties of a Mass of Cells Capable of Regenerating Pulse, R. L. Beurle. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B. Biological Sciences No. 669 Vol. 240 pp. 55-94, 23 August 1956. This paper by a physicist with the British Radar Research Establishment is an example of a 1950s idea about how the brain works that is still valid today, although simplistic. “Beurle hypothesized that information storage in the brain is based on interactions between waves of brain activity . . . Beurle presented a mathematical model for the way in which excitation processes reproduce themselves in a wave form through a neuron complex.” (Metaphors of Memory, Draaisma, 2000, p.170). This article is still relevant, for example it is cited in Gordon’s book Creating Modern Neuroscience

Solving how the brain works and developing neuroweapons are both a physics and also a biology problem. Physics is the study of matter and energy. Electricity, magnetism and electromagnetism are interconnected phenomena, including in the brain. In the nineteenth century, James Maxwell discovered that all physical phenomena, from energies to chemical and solid bodies are built on oscillations. With oscillation comes electromagnetic radiation (EMR). Maxwell discovered all waves are mathematically identical with relationships along a continuum known as the electromagnetic spectrum, for example microwaves, light and also the kilohertz oscillations by the neurons in the brain. (Telecosm, Gilder, 2000, p.16). The electricity of the brain communicates information to the brain with ionic currents, direct currents, semiconducting electricity, and tiny electromagnetic and magnetic waves which are given off and received by the brain. Therefore, the physics of the brain is fundamental to understanding how the brain works. So it is surprising that to a great extent, neuroscientists have not studied physics.


It becomes relevant that the physics of the brain is important to US national security for two main reasons; first, to develop neuroweapons, knowledge of neuroscience is essential. The brain is often described as the electrochemical brain because the brain consists of two essential and equally important properties —bioelectrical and biochemical. However, neuroscientists have focused mainly on molecular biology and biochemistry, not physics and bioelectricity. The second main reason that physics is important to national security is that only a physics approach--not a molecular biology or biochemistry approach--can lead to development of technologies for remote communication and surveillance of the brain.


The electricity of the brain is fundamental to understanding how the brain works for the following reasons:

[Scientists still] don’t understand how electrical activity in the brain corresponds to perception, pain, pleasure, or conscious awareness. There’s no doubt however, that electricity is at the root of it all. Electricity, or the movement of electrons and ions, is such a fundamental aspect of nature that it is woven into the fabric of life. . . . [E]lectrical signals provide the most efficient method of transmitting information within the body. No living creature could survive without electricity, because the body is, in essence, an electrical machine.

Without electricity, neurons could not communicate the signals that allow us to see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and move about, and even think. We need electricity to interact with the world around us as much as an electric motor requires electric power to function. Without it the motor is dead. The same holds true for human beings. Without electricity, there is no life. (Shattered Nerves, Chase, 2006, Introduction)


The brain as an electrical system and its importance to US national security


Since the 1950s, the US government monopolized a narrowly focused area of research--the brain as an electrical system. More than a brief introduction to the concept of the brain itself as an electrical system is beyond the scope of this paper. During the Cold War, unclassified research demonstrated that the brain is like a radio receiver that can transmit and receive electromagnetic signals,[1]and the brain has similarities to a hybrid analog and digital computer.[2]The brain also resembles a computer’s integrated circuits[3]with direct current (dc)[4]and semi-conduction.[5]This research is considered promising although nearly all of it remains unproven.[6]In the 1950s, government scientists would have realized the tremendous national security implications of this research—it is a likely scientific basis for some remote neuroweapons. Nevertheless, since the 1950s, the concept of the brain as an electrical system received little or no government funding for unclassified research and today, scientists conducting unclassified mainstream neuroscience research reject this concept as scientifically impossible, science fiction or worse.[7]


One example illustrates the point. John von Neuman, the mathematician and computer pioneer who conducted secret research on the atomic bomb wrote the 1957 book The Computer and the Brain. He predicted on logical and mathematical grounds that a hybridization of data transmission and control functions must exist in the biological world. Von Neuman and several prominent scientists hypothesized or conducted unclassified research that extended von Neuman’s prediction: There were two major brain signaling systems in the brain and the brain worked by a combination of analog and digital coding by means of the interaction of two types of brain cells, neurons and glia[8]. This research has never been proven; for decades, it has faced lack of interest or scientific dogma and some of research is known to be classified.


There are many reasons that the mainstream science establishment opposes conflicting concepts and ideas, including entrenched scientific turf and theories, perceived limitations in tools and methodology, and differential institutional power.[9] One likely reason is that the electrical brain is the indispensable area of physics research that is required to develop neuroweapons with remote targeting, communication and control capabilities. If the research on the physics of the brain can be demonstrated and compared to a radio receiver or a computer that can be communicated with and targeted remotely, then the physics behind the secret neuroweapons would be revealed. However, this general idea has been discredited or dismissed as only possible in the future


Furthermore, in his 2010 book, Creating modern neuroscience, The revolutionary 1950s, Gordon Shepherd wrote that a general theory of how the brain works could be based on 1950s revolutionary breakthroughs coupled with less revolutionary research after the 1950s establishing that the “microstructure of cognition” is the synapse of the neuron. (Gordon, p. 232). The synapse is the area where two neurons meet and communicate with biochemicals and electricity. The book received favorable reviews; it has not been contested by neuroscientists; and it is the basis of two Yale University courses on neuroscience. The book won a 2010 International Society for the History of Neurosciences award. Thus, contrary to the consensus, a strong case can be made that in the 1950s, the fundamental research required to develop a brain theory was available in the unclassified neuroscience literature.


It is notable that Gordon summarized the known research that could lead to understanding how the brain works and ended his book with this sentence: “One feels that von Neuman would be leading the way.” Von Neuman’s hypothesis on brain functioning, mentioned above, has yet to be proven but as Gordon strongly suggested, Von Neuman’s ideas are relevant today. Additionally, Von Neuman was cited in the 2013 edition of Fundamental Neuroscience edited by Larry Squire.


Neuroscientists and physicists don’t mix


It is well known that neuroscience literature includes few theories and voluminous research data and mostly physicists, not neuroscientists describe technologies needed for future neuroscience developments or neuroweapons. Some of the reasons that neuroscientists and physics don’t collaborate are the vastly different scientific approaches of biologists-- which would include neuroscientists--and physicists:

Physicists are reductionists. Physicists make simplifications, idealizations and abstractions that can be solved by a mathematical problem. Physicists theorize while biologists do not. Biology is more of an empirical science than physics because its concepts are closer to observed facts. Biologists deal with living things and rarely go below the level where life is relevant. One exception is modern molecular biology, where physics, biology and chemistry have merged. (The Discoveries, Lightman, 2005 p. xii-xiii).


Notably, in brain research, the application of physics in molecular biology has not included bioelectronics or the electricity of the brain other than the neuron and its action potential, as explained below. Additionally, physicists have contributed to the lack of physics in neuroscience. For decades, the American Physical Society (APS) has maintained the policy that EMR does not interact with human biology including the brain. (Resource Letter, Hafemeister, American Journal of Physics 64.8, 1996, p. 974). The basis of the APS argument is that there is no proven physical mechanism to explain bioeffects of EMR so there can’t be any EMR bioeffects except heating, as in a microwave oven. This reasoning has been criticized on the grounds that mechanisms to explain EMR bioeffects may exist even though physicists haven’t discovered them yet. (Driving Force, Livingston 1997, p. 249). Research on EMR interactions with the brain system has been scientifically established although not definitively proven or accepted in mainstream neuroscience.


The history of bioelectricity in neuroscience is about extreme controversy and limits


Electricity in medicine and bioelectricity in neuroscience have faced extreme controversy. Since the eighteen century, when Benjamin Franklin investigated electricity in medicine and concluded it was a charlatan’s game, it has remained highly controversial. However, some medical electricity has been established as valid. A more recent example is the following: In the early 1960s, a science director called a routine meeting of hospital directors and medical school chairmen of the departments of biochemistry and physiology to review a research proposal. Robert Becker was the researcher who proposed to study electrical currents of injury in the salamander. The group’s spokesman stated:

We have a very grave basic concern over your proposal. This notion that electricity has anything to do with living things was totally discredited some time ago. It has absolutely no validity, and the new scientific evidence you’re citing is worthless. The whole idea was based on its appeal to quacks and the gullible public. I will not stand idly by and see this medical school associated with such a charlatanistic, unscientific project. (Body Electric, Becker, p. 70).


However, to his credit, the director referred the proposal to an expert in regeneration research and the project was approved. Becker’s experimental results were published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, the most prestigious orthopedic journal in the world at the time.


Likewise, bioelectricity in brain research has a long history of controversy and marginalization. In the twentieth century, the neuron doctrine was a guiding principle of brain research; that the brain cell called the neuron is the primary functional signaling unit of the brain and connects with other neurons. This is also the principle behind the so-called connectionist model. In the 1950s, the ionic hypothesis in the 1950s was discovered by Hodgkin, Huxley and Eccles who jointly won the 1963 Nobel Prize. The hypothesis states that the action potential of the neuron is the ionic current of potassium, sodium and chloride ions passing through pores in the neuron’s membrane. (Neuroscience, Kandel, Science, 10 Nov. 2000).




By contrast, other much lesser known brain communication systems have also been discovered. For example, the brain consists of far more brain cells called glia than neurons. Glia have been considered the brain’s housekeeping cells, however today research is confirming what a few prominent scientists hypothesized as early as the 1950s; glia are equally important as neurons in brain communication and neurons and glia work together cooperatively. (The Other Brain, Fields, 2011). However, mainstream neuroscience has yet to embrace this research and neuroscientists have confined their physics research methods to neuron action potentials. Regarding the electricity of the brain; little else is accepted as valid in mainstream neuroscience today.


The neuron doctrine and the connectionist model limits the bioelectricity approach


Brain implants and the EEG have been surrounded in controversy but both are now well established although relatively simplistic tools used to measure electrical activity in the brain. For example, one prominent neuroscientist described the messy human side of neuroscience, that two groups of scientists disparaged each other over competing science ideas. One group studied action potentials of neurons and ignored the slow potentials they found while another group of scientists studied the compound field potentials of a population of neurons but could not explain this in terms of the neuron. Both findings were important, nevertheless, mainstream neuroscience continues to ignore the slow potentials and compound field potentials and the neuron doctrine’s grip over neuroscience remains nearly absolute. (Neural integration at the mesoscopic level, Bullock, Jo. Hist. Neurosci, 1995, p. 231).


In this way, valid and important science ideas can be lost in the competition of research. In the late 1950s, the Nobel laureate mentioned above, John Eccles, wrongly advised one neuroscientist, Ross Adey that “the brain’s electrical activity as observed in the electroencephalogram [EEG] is nothing more than the noise of the brain’s motor. Concentrate on the study of neuroanatomical connections and someday these will show us how the brain is wired for thought.” (Adey, Bioelectromagnetics, 11:2, 1990). Adey established that the weak oscillations seemed to be the basis of an information exchange between brain cells and other related research supported the link between brain biology and behavior. This was a valid scientific challenge to the limits of the neuron doctrine and the connectionist model promoted by Eccles, nevertheless it had little effect.


In January 2013, the EU officially announced a decade long multi-billion dollar project to build a silicon brain—now the world’s largest program on brain research. In his state of the Union address, Obama announced the 2013 Brain Mapping Project proposal with a different research focus than the EU brain project. Obama’s project is an example of the application of the neuron doctrine and the connectionist model. An interview of one of the authors of the brain project, Columbia University’s Raphael Yuste, included this description of the project:


Said map would amount to much more than what is often referred to as a "static" model — a wiring diagram that charts how neurons connect with one another. A "functional" model, Yuste emphasized, would go much further, by allowing researchers to see not just the connections between the tens of billions of neurons that comprise a human brain, but the individual action of every cell in a given neural circuit. (Available at http://io9.com/heres-how-obamas-brain-mapping-project-will-actually-5986161


It becomes clear that the neuron doctrine and the connectionist model are still fundamental to neuroscience today and in future research.


In the 1960s, molecular biology flourished and biophysics disappeared

Physics dominated the first half of the twentieth century and much has been written about physicists who left atomic research for biophysics research of life, including brain research. This contributed to a biophysics boom of the 1950s which included multidisciplinary research by physicists and biologist on the study of nerve and brain function. A.V. Hill, D.W. Bronk and F.O. Schmitt were all prominent neurophysiologists, scientific administrators and military advisors who believed in and promoted the importance of biophysics. In the mid-1950s, Francis Schmitt, a director in the US National Institute of Health, (NIH) unsuccessfully attempted to implement biophysics research but government documents indicate that NIH biochemists rejected this approach in various ways. In the late 1950s, biochemists included physical chemistry in their research and this seems to have contributed to the disappearance of biophysics research in the 1960s. (Picture Control, Rasmussen, p. 195).




The result was that the great interest in biophysics did not last through the 1960s. (Rasmussen, The midcentury biophysics bubble: Hiroshima and the biological revolution in America, revisited", History of Science 35: 245, 1997). Instead it was absorbed by molecular biology which culminated in the Human Genome Project, as well as by biochemistry and modern neuroscience. Molecular biology is one major area of science that has dominated neuroscience research. (Squire, Fundamental Neuroscience, Fourth edition, 2013, p. 9)


In the early 1960s, Schmitt was instrumental in establishing the field of modern neuroscience. Schmitt described promising future research that included biophysics and most of the concepts of the brain as an electrical system:

Coupled with the search for solid-state quantum-chemical and “bionic” . . . models, should be the simultaneous investigations of the microcomponentry of neurons and satellite cells [glia] by . . . biophysical and biochemical methods. If one could investigate (with millimicro-electrodes) the electrical properties of macromolecular substructure of brain cells . . . one might discover high fields across intercellular interfaces . . . and possibly highly specific transient phenomena of electrostatic or electromagnetic nature associated with such fields. (Psychophysics considered at the Molecular and Submolecular levels, Schmitt, in Kasha, Horizons in Biochemistry, 1962, p.453).


Gyorgi CitationThe Study of Energy-Levels in Biochemistry, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nature, No 3745. August 9, 1941, p. 157. This paper on semiconductivity in biological systems caused a sensation at the time. The idea was immediately rejected as a “dead duck” on theoretical grounds but today biological semiconductivity has proven to be scientifically valid.

Significantly, Schmitt cited and praised Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi for his research on solid state physics and semiconduction in biological systems. In the early 1940s, Szent-Gyorgyi proposed an idea that was published in Science and Nature; proteins may be semiconductors and that this might prove to be the basis of the phenomenon of life. Nevertheless, it was totally rejected by experts because no proteins had ever shown a sign of being a conductor of electricity. (Free Radical, Moss, 1988, p. 244). But in 1977, Szent-Gyorgyi wrote that it was overlooked that crystalline proteins have to belong to the soluble group and so cannot be expected to be semiconductors. The structures are semiconductors and cannot be crystalized. (The Living State and Cancer, Szent-Gyorgyi, 1978 p. 4). Szent-Gyorgyi was referring to complicated, highly integrated systems of molecules which perform functions of life such as motion, secretion, and nervous activity. Such integrated systems are, by definition, rigid structures and insoluble. (Moss, p. 244) Additionally, in the late 1970s, Szent-Gyorgyi wrote:

To sum up, there are four dimensions with which the biologist must be concerned: macroscopic, microscopic, molecular, and submolecular or electronic. Biology readily followed physics into the first three, but took practically no cognizance of the fourth. (Szent-Gyorgyi, p. 4).


So it is not surprising that Schmitt’s recommendations have not been followed up in unclassified neuroscience research to any significant extent. As Dr. Ichiji Tasaki wrote in his 1982 book, Physiology and electrochemistry of nerve fibers: “One of the difficulties encountered in writing this book has been that many students of biology and medicine are not sufficiently familiar with the basic concepts in thermodynamics and electrochemistry.” Without a doubt, physics and bioelectronics have not become a part of mainstream neuroscience and neuroscientists do not study physics.


Technologies to access the brain provide further clues of secret neuroweapons


NY Post"December 29, 1939 New York Post,



It becomes relevant that today, unclassified neuroscience lacks technologies that can access the brain remotely although such tools are based on well-known physics principles. I. I. Rabi won the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics for his resonance method or radiofrequency spectroscopy. Rabi was one of nine scientists--mostly physicists—who played a role in the development of the MRI, a machine that can scan the brain at a distance, although with huge magnets nearby. Notably, Raymond Damadian, contributed to the development of MRI and described his uphill battle to prove his idea:

The theory that each part of the body is composed of atoms led to the idea that by using a magnetic field these atoms give off radio signals at their own frequency. One can get an “atomic broadcast of what is going on inside the tissues of the body. . . . Dr. Damadian’s concept would be derided, ridiculed, mocked and snickered at by many in the scientific community. See http://www.downstate.edu/alumni/pdf/damadian.pdf.


New scientific ideas often face controversy. In the case of the science of the brain as an electrical system, some of the research has been classified, all of it lacks significant government funding and it too has been derided, ridiculed, mocked and snickered at by many in the scientific community. A decade after the MRI became available to patients, Alan Frey, an exception to the rule in that he was a neuroscientist with a strong physics background, wrote:

[L]iving beings are electrochemical systems that use very low frequency electromagnetic fields in everything from protein folding through cellular communication to nervous system function. To model how em [EMR] fields affect living beings, one might compare them to the radio we use to listen to music.

The em signal the radio picks up and transduces into the sound of music is almost unmeasurably weak. At the same time there are, in toto, strong em fields impinging on the radio. We don’t notice the stronger em signals because they are not the appropriate frequency or modulation. Thus, they don’t disturb the music we hear. However, if you impose on the radio an appropriately tuned em field or harmonic, even if it is very weak, it will interfere with the music. Similarly, if we impose a very weak em signal on a living being, it has the possibility of interfering with normal function if it is properly tuned.

This is the model that much biological data and theory tell us to use, not a toxicology model. . . . It appears possible that an organism’s response to a low frequency modulated field is the same as its response to exposure to a high frequency field which is acting as a carrier for low frequency modulation. (On the nature of electromagnetic field interactions with biological systems, Frey, 1994, p.4).


Furthermore, Obama’s Brain Mapping Project is focused on molecular biology and does not include plans for technologies to access the brain remotely even though the preference is for noninvasive remote methods. For example, invasive surgeries performed on healthy human subjects in experiments is unethical. There is no dispute that the electrochemical brain communicates with electrical, electromagnetic and magnetic signals as well as chemical signals; both are essential to understanding brain function. However, the brain can only be accessed remotely by electrical, electromagnetic and magnetic signals which can mimic, interfere with or directly communicate with brain cells. The brain cannot be accessed remotely by chemical signaling.


Since the 1950s, only the US government has been developing remote access to the brain to any significant extent, for example in 1976 the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) reported to Congress that mind-reading machines were beginning to decipher a person’s brain waves or EEG, with remote capabilities in the planning stages. While unclassified neuroscience research has focused on developing an electronic technology such as nanoprobes or implants to interface with the brain, classified research such as the DARPA EEG research is based on the concept that the brain itself is an electrical system. This difference is obviously having far reaching results. Furthermore, given that most Cold War physics remains classified, physics is not likely to be the focus of future neuroscience research.








Highly relevant facts are now converging and helping to make sense of the bizarre paradox of physics and neuroscience; first, neuroweapons with remote targeting, communication and control capabilities would make for the ultimate surreptitious weapon system that major countries would develop if a general theory for how the brain works was available; and the revolutionary 1950s neuroscience was the basis for a theory of the brain—according to Gordon, a prominent neuroscientist—a theory was available; second, by chance and design, unclassified neuroscience developed in an extremely skewed pattern with a focus on molecular biology and biochemistry and a lack of physics; third, in particular, in the 1950s, the US government would have known about research on the brain as an electrical system and its great importance for developing remote advanced neuroweapons; fourth research on the brain as an electrical system remains promising although completely missing from mainstream neuroscience; fifth, classified physics research including neuroweapons research has flourished in complete secrecy since the 1950s, even before the study of the brain became the scientific field called modern neuroscience in the 1960s; therefore the research essential for developing neuroweapons almost certainly was classified before unclassified neuroscientists could ever discover it. In this way, even the neuroscientists conducting unclassified research were left in the dark for decades.








[1]  William Ross Adey, 1989 Recipient of the d’Arsonval Medal, Bioelectromagnetics 11:1-11 (1990). See also Ivan Oransky, Obituary William Ross Adey, Lancet 364:232 (July 17, 2004).

[2] Theodore Bullock, Neural integration at the mesoscopic level: the advent of some ideas in the last half century, J. Hist. Neurosci. 4 No.3-4: 231.

[3]  Obituary: Dr. Ichiji Tasaki, Neuroscience Research, 64 (2009) 1, 2. For brain with transistor characteristics, see John Lear, A primitive human guidance system?, 273 New Scientist 316 (February 8, 1962).

[4] A.A.P. Leao, Further observations on the spreading depression of activity in the cerebral cortex, J. Neurophysiol. 10:409 (November 1947). See also B. Libet, & R.W. Gerard, Steady potential fields and neurone activity, J.Neurophysiol. 4:438 (September 1941).

[5]  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, [Nobel laureate, 1937], The study of energy-levels in biochemistry, Nature, 3745:157 (August 9, 1941). See also, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Introduction to submolecular biology (Academic Press, 1960).

[6] For brain/electromagnetic radiation (EMR) interactions, see R.H.W. Funk et al., Electromagnetic effects, from cell biology to medicine, Progress in Histochemistry and Cytochemistry 43:185,189 (2009).

[7]  For dc brain currents, see Robert Becker, Electromagnetic forces and life processes, Technology Review 38 (December, 1972). For advances in dc brain research, see Michael Nitsche et al., Transcranial direct current stimulation: State of the art, (Elsevier, 2008) 206.

For semi-conduction, see Janos Ladik, Solid state physics of biological macromolecules: The legacy of Albert Szent-Györgyi, Theochem, 666-667:1 (December 2003).

For analog digital brain communication, see George Gilder, The silicon eye, (W.W. Norton, 2005) 141. See also George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, the origins of the digital universe, (Pantheon, 2012) 280, 81.

For one example of scientific dogma, see Douglas Martin, Robert Galambos, neuroscientist who showed how bats navigate, dies at 96, New York Times, (July 15, 2010). Available at: nytimes.com/2010/07/16/science/16galambos.html

For criticism on classified directed energy research for antipersonnel purposes, see Editorial, Secret Weapons, Nature, 489:177,178 (September 13, 2012)

[8]  Robert Becker, Body Electric, (Harper, 1985) 88,89. See also Fn.9 Bullock at 219,223, 228,231. See also Yousheng Shu, Andrea Hasenstaub et al., Brain communicates in analog and digital modes simultaneously, Science Daily, (April 13, 2006).  See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060412223937.htm

[9]  Stanley Finger, Minds behind the brain, a history of the pioneers and their discoveries, (Oxford University Press, 2000) 306.


Contents | Top

Mind Justice Home Page