“Wireheads
By Mike Jay
Yale, 288 pages, $30
Elon Musk's company Neuralink recently released a video showing a man telling his wife he loves her. The man, who is unable to speak due to Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), is communicating via a brain-implant chip and a speech synthesizer. Mr. Musk has promised, perhaps optimistically, that within six to 12 months Neuralink will have a device capable of transmitting visual data into the brains of people born blind. He has even suggested that the company may eventually enable users to beam music straight into their gray matter.
Tech enthusiasts are eager for us to merge with machines: Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and inventor, thinks that nanotech brain implants will make us godlike. Mr. Musk promises that healthy users of Neuralink will process information so quickly that attempting conversation with normal people will feel "like talking to a tree." As Mike Jay, a historian of science, medicine and culture, shows us in his superb "Wireheads," the idea of controlling the brain through newfangled technology has a long history, as both a dream and a nightmare.
James Tilly Matthews, a tea trader confined to London's Bethlem Royal Hospital (aka Bedlam) in 1797, was convinced that his brain was receiving instructions via a magnet implanted in his head. These messages, Matthews insisted, were being sent through a machine he called an air loom by French Jacobin extremists intent on manipulating British politics. Among those being manipulated, Matthews insisted, was Prime Minister William Pitt. "When Pitt and his ministers spoke in Parliament, urging the nation to war against the French enemy," Mr. Jay writes of Matthews's account, "they were in reality brainwashed puppets doing the bidding of their supposed adversary."
Such stories always keep up with the latest technology. At the end of the 19th century, another asylum inmate was certain that people were using the newly discovered Roentgen rays, or what we today call X-rays, to put "all sorts of wrong ideas into his head." These ideas, however, were not unique to those suffering paranoid illness. Nikola Tesla, the physics genius after whom one of Mr. Musk's companies is named, proposed in the early 20th century "to electrify the walls of a local schoolroom with a high-frequency electric coil" in the expectation that "the brains of the children will receive artificial stimulation to such an extent that they will be transformed from dunces to star pupils." (An earlier experiment in Sweden had claimed to show that such a "magnetized" schoolroom improved pupils' learning, and also made them grow taller.)
The discovery of electromagnetic brainwaves led to the invention, in 1924, of the electroencephalograph, or EEG, which in turn led to the idea that, if brainwaves could be read by an EEG, then perhaps they could be disrupted by signals flowing the other way. So began the midcentury craze for the key to mind control pursued by, among others, the CIA. John Lilly, a neurophysiologist, promised to give the agency "push-button control over the totality of motivation and consciousness" via electrical means. He did not attain this goal, but he did drive dolphins to apparent suicide by dosing them with LSD.
In 1964 a Spanish researcher named Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado successfully demonstrated his stimoceiver, a device implanted in a bull's brain that allowed the user to command the beast by remote control, preventing it, for instance, from charging a matador. By such means Delgado hoped that men's aggressive instincts could be tamed.
In subsequent decades, deep-brain stimulation, using electrodes implanted into the cortex, was used to treat the symptoms of Parkinson's and epilepsy, while noninvasive repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) began to help manage depression and pain. Now there are wearable technologies -- such as headbands designed to aid meditation or sleep -- whose effectiveness remains debatable. As Mr. Jay observes, these devices belong to "the long history of spiritual technologies, the twenty-first century's prayer wheels or shaman's drums."
Just because you're paranoid, however, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. In 1905 Jacob Mohr, a German schizophrenic, believed that he was being targeted by an "oscillatory wave transmission device" and was found, on admission to hospital, to be wearing sheets of tinfoil under his clothes. ("An early version," Mr. Jay reminds us, "of what has since become the derisive shorthand for electrical paranoia, the 'tin-foil hat.'") But, as the author shows, there are surprising nuggets of truth even in such hackneyed ideas. It is sometimes possible, for example, to pick up radio transmissions through fillings in your teeth, as Lucille Ball claimed to have done during World War II. It's also possible, through directed microwave radiation, to cause people to hear sounds directly in their brains. (This is known as the Frey effect.)
In 2016 staff at the U.S. Embassy in Havana began reporting strange sounds and feelings of nausea and brain fog, a cluster of symptoms that became known as Havana syndrome. Was it caused by Russian agents wielding an unknown technology? Mr. Jay reports both sides of the controversy: Essentially, the military suspects a real attack, while the medical establishment generally diagnoses psychogenic illness, one with no physical cause. What is certain is that such powers have long been sought by militaries and spy agencies throughout the world. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has, Mr. Jay tells us, "developed low-frequency acoustic or sonic weapons that can burst eardrums, vibrate eyeballs and cause damaging vibrations in the torso."
The idea that invisible waves might be controlling our minds or making us sick -- known as influencing-machine delusions -- remains surprisingly widespread. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently pledged to look into the phenomenon of electromagnetic sensitivity, as increasing numbers of people claim they are being sickened by radio waves. Mr. Kennedy said in 2024 that "Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier." There is no evidence that it does. But given the covert history that Mr. Jay narrates so enjoyably, you can hardly blame people for being suspicious.
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Mr. Poole is the author of "Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas."” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Wiring the Ghost in the Machine. Poole, Steven. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 Oct 2026: C8.
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