Head Space
( Ocarte
)
Transcript
VANCE PACKARD:
I feel particular concern and apprehension in connection with these operations of the manipulators, their growing boldness in invading the privacy of our minds.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That was Vance Packard speaking in 1958. Subliminal advertising may have only been a potent myth, but the potential for violating the privacy of our minds for profit is alive and well.
Last week, we visited a billboard on Prince Street in New York City that is among the first of its kind to find a way past the indifference of even the most detached New Yorker. The billboard is flanked by devices that look like speakers but which direct highly focused sound at unsuspecting persons who trigger a sensor by walking by.
The sound is sent at a frequency that can only be heard by them. That's because the transmitter uses the skull as a speaker and so the sound resonates inside the head.
[AMBIENT SOUND]
ELECTRONIC VOICE WHISPERING:
It's not your imagination. Who is that? Who's there?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The billboard is advertising a new paranormal series on A&E, and though the speakers weren't working when we went by, it's been effective enough to scare even the person who was being paid to answer questions about it.
MAN:
And as I was walking by, I heard a loud noise. I didn't know what it was, and I ran. I just didn't know where it was coming from. And people have been coming by all day, saying, where is this sound coming from? Every time I walk by, I feel like it's in my head.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Prince Street may be the frontier when it comes to in head advertising, but technology writer Clive Thompson explains that it's part of a wave of new devices with designs on your mind. After visiting the billboard, we sat down at a local cafe to talk with Clive about the larger implications of the new persuaders.
CLIVE THOMPSON:
This technology is part of a new legal area, ethical area that you could call the civil rights of the mind. It's an idea that was created by this organization down in California called the Center for Cognitive Liberties.
And essentially what they're concerned about is that a lot of technological innovations are eroding the sanctity of your mind, the privacy of your mind because you've got technologies that can read what's on your mind so it's no longer private, and you've got technologies that can put things inside your head, like this one.
It can literally say your head is not safe just for your own thoughts. We're going to make you hear voices. And you can't cover your ears to not hear it, because the way the technology works is that it's making your body resonate and become the device for making noise.
And so they're essentially very concerned about the fact that we're developing technologies faster than we're updating our legal and moral and ethical ways of thinking about it, because up until now, we've been accustomed to the idea that the one truly private place is inside your own head.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Can you give me a couple of quick examples of how what's inside your head is no longer private because of technological advances?
CLIVE THOMPSON:
So, one example of reading what's inside your head is the increasing use of MRIs to do lie detection. And obviously that's something you sort of have to volunteer for, because you have to be lying down with your head inside an MRI tube. But there's a lot of development of technologies that can do it without you knowing that they're doing it.
There's a bunch of scientists that I've spoken to that have been working on using infrared light to essentially shine it at your forehead, and they read the blood activity in your prefrontal cortex. And what they've discovered is that by seeing what the blood activity, the amount of oxygen being carried to your prefrontal cortex is, they can tell whether or not you're sort of in [LAUGHS] it's a lovely phrase mental anguish.
And they've noticed and it's true that you experience a lot of mental anguish, for example, a millisecond before you formulate a lie. In fact, I've experienced this myself. I've had this infrared beam shot into my skull, and I've seen the scans, and you can tell, milliseconds before I even know that I'm going to lie, that I'm going to lie.
The scientists that are working on that are developing techniques for doing it at a distance, maybe, you know, eight or nine or ten feet, so that they could conceivably do it without you knowing it's being done to you like, for example, in an airport. You would be scanned not just for the presence of explosives but for the presence of mental anguish.
Again, you know, the idea is that your thoughts are supposed to be private. And if your thoughts become unprivate, where do you stop? Is it possible to peer inside your head at all and only look at part of what you're doing?
These are really, really deep questions that are being accelerated, because a lot of this technology, it's in the lab right now but it's starting to come out of the lab, like the hypersonic sound projections.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's talk about the hypersonic sound projections. This makes an attempt to put something in your head. In this case, it's just an awareness of a TV show that purports to follow real life Ghostbuster like people around.
CLIVE THOMPSON:
The thing about hypersonic sound transmission is that there actually are a lot of really interesting "good" ways to use it. People have talked about using it as a car dashboard enhancement, right? So instead of having to take your eyes off the road, the car can just beam information directly into your head so you're hearing it really well and clearly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Can't you simply do that by having your dashboard talk to you the way they do now?
CLIVE THOMPSON:
It's really a question of clarity. It could help overwhelm a lot of other acoustic sound inside the car that you might not hear it over, like, for example, the radio and whatnot. Like say, you know, you're really going too fast.
Or you could have simply fun applications you know, kids beaming messages to each other's heads, you know. You could have it in certain search and rescue situations. It's very hard to communicate with people over a long distance in a loud environment. The ability to sort of beam a message directly to someone in a focused way, like a laser point, from hundreds of feet away could be incredibly useful.
But there's a lot of significantly scary ways it could be used. It could be used by the military. They're already looking at deploying it I think that in some cases they probably already have as a crowd control technique.
One can imagine a way in that you could, you know, pick certain people out of a crowd and just blast incredibly loud noise just at them. Everyone around him, you know, won't have any problem and there's one guy who's writhing on the ground.
So there's a lot of very, very unsettling ways to use the technology.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It reminds me of that scene in Minority Report, the Spielberg film, where Tom Cruise is walking through a futuristic mall and the sign says, you know, how did those turtlenecks work out for you, Mr. So and So? And obviously they're beaming specifically targeted signs to everybody walking through that crowded mall.
CLIVE THOMPSON:
Obviously, the marketing [LAUGHS] and advertising potentials for the technology are pretty big. And they're sort of I mean, I guess you could say they're kind of in the gray area between evil and good. Exactly, because, like, even the most, you know, seemingly invasive forms of advertising can actually be useful for you as a consumer, and you could imagine situations in which you actually do want to be sort of picked out and told something specific.
I'm not really sure I want to be the first one, you know, experiencing that, and, overall, my sense is I would find it personally invasive and creepy. But, you know, I'm 39. Maybe I'm too old for this stuff.
Maybe, you know, like 21 year olds, you know, when they're 30, they'll be just completely accepting of the fact that as you walk down the street you have targeted messages speaking to you every once in a while.
It is also possible that the people that try to do this with marketing will just find that their customers are so annoyed at them that they'll stop doing it because it causes [LAUGHS] more annoyance than it causes sales.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Can you talk about it as an environmental issue?
CLIVE THOMPSON:
Sure. There's this whole other field, acoustic ecology, basically, which is, you know, the question as to are there any quiet places left in society. It's a global issue. There's actually people that are worried there's no places left on Earth pristine from mechanical sound.
In an urban sense, people have always been concerned about the increasing noise because it's been pretty clearly proven that when you're subject to noise that you can't control, it does bad things to you. It causes stress. IQ points drop off in kids. You get less ability to concentrate and do well in school when you have noise distraction.
All these problems are already there. And so if you start layering on other technology that says, okay, now we're going to start actively targeting not just something that's ambient, that you can sort of turn your head away from, but something that's actually inside your head, that's a significant problem. This is exactly why this stuff is both a technological issue and a marketing issue but also an ethical and a civil rights issue.
Does our legal tradition, does our Constitutional tradition have any answers for these types of technologies? These are open legal questions right now, as I understand it. They're going to have to be answered. And the question is, are they going to be answered before the technology is omnipresent or is the technology going to get ahead of our ability to think about what it means for our mental privacy?
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Wired.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD:
That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips and Nazanin Rafsanjani, and edited by Brooke. Jennifer Munson is our acting technical director and Paul Schneider our engineer. We had help from Jessica Magaldi and Ian Whitehead. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org. You can also post comments there and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield.
ELECTRONIC VOICE WHISPERING:
What was that? Who's there?
(FUNDING CREDITS)
I feel particular concern and apprehension in connection with these operations of the manipulators, their growing boldness in invading the privacy of our minds.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That was Vance Packard speaking in 1958. Subliminal advertising may have only been a potent myth, but the potential for violating the privacy of our minds for profit is alive and well.
Last week, we visited a billboard on Prince Street in New York City that is among the first of its kind to find a way past the indifference of even the most detached New Yorker. The billboard is flanked by devices that look like speakers but which direct highly focused sound at unsuspecting persons who trigger a sensor by walking by.
The sound is sent at a frequency that can only be heard by them. That's because the transmitter uses the skull as a speaker and so the sound resonates inside the head.
[AMBIENT SOUND]
ELECTRONIC VOICE WHISPERING:
It's not your imagination. Who is that? Who's there?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The billboard is advertising a new paranormal series on A&E, and though the speakers weren't working when we went by, it's been effective enough to scare even the person who was being paid to answer questions about it.
MAN:
And as I was walking by, I heard a loud noise. I didn't know what it was, and I ran. I just didn't know where it was coming from. And people have been coming by all day, saying, where is this sound coming from? Every time I walk by, I feel like it's in my head.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Prince Street may be the frontier when it comes to in head advertising, but technology writer Clive Thompson explains that it's part of a wave of new devices with designs on your mind. After visiting the billboard, we sat down at a local cafe to talk with Clive about the larger implications of the new persuaders.
CLIVE THOMPSON:
This technology is part of a new legal area, ethical area that you could call the civil rights of the mind. It's an idea that was created by this organization down in California called the Center for Cognitive Liberties.
And essentially what they're concerned about is that a lot of technological innovations are eroding the sanctity of your mind, the privacy of your mind because you've got technologies that can read what's on your mind so it's no longer private, and you've got technologies that can put things inside your head, like this one.
It can literally say your head is not safe just for your own thoughts. We're going to make you hear voices. And you can't cover your ears to not hear it, because the way the technology works is that it's making your body resonate and become the device for making noise.
And so they're essentially very concerned about the fact that we're developing technologies faster than we're updating our legal and moral and ethical ways of thinking about it, because up until now, we've been accustomed to the idea that the one truly private place is inside your own head.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Can you give me a couple of quick examples of how what's inside your head is no longer private because of technological advances?
CLIVE THOMPSON:
So, one example of reading what's inside your head is the increasing use of MRIs to do lie detection. And obviously that's something you sort of have to volunteer for, because you have to be lying down with your head inside an MRI tube. But there's a lot of development of technologies that can do it without you knowing that they're doing it.
There's a bunch of scientists that I've spoken to that have been working on using infrared light to essentially shine it at your forehead, and they read the blood activity in your prefrontal cortex. And what they've discovered is that by seeing what the blood activity, the amount of oxygen being carried to your prefrontal cortex is, they can tell whether or not you're sort of in [LAUGHS] it's a lovely phrase mental anguish.
And they've noticed and it's true that you experience a lot of mental anguish, for example, a millisecond before you formulate a lie. In fact, I've experienced this myself. I've had this infrared beam shot into my skull, and I've seen the scans, and you can tell, milliseconds before I even know that I'm going to lie, that I'm going to lie.
The scientists that are working on that are developing techniques for doing it at a distance, maybe, you know, eight or nine or ten feet, so that they could conceivably do it without you knowing it's being done to you like, for example, in an airport. You would be scanned not just for the presence of explosives but for the presence of mental anguish.
Again, you know, the idea is that your thoughts are supposed to be private. And if your thoughts become unprivate, where do you stop? Is it possible to peer inside your head at all and only look at part of what you're doing?
These are really, really deep questions that are being accelerated, because a lot of this technology, it's in the lab right now but it's starting to come out of the lab, like the hypersonic sound projections.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's talk about the hypersonic sound projections. This makes an attempt to put something in your head. In this case, it's just an awareness of a TV show that purports to follow real life Ghostbuster like people around.
CLIVE THOMPSON:
The thing about hypersonic sound transmission is that there actually are a lot of really interesting "good" ways to use it. People have talked about using it as a car dashboard enhancement, right? So instead of having to take your eyes off the road, the car can just beam information directly into your head so you're hearing it really well and clearly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Can't you simply do that by having your dashboard talk to you the way they do now?
CLIVE THOMPSON:
It's really a question of clarity. It could help overwhelm a lot of other acoustic sound inside the car that you might not hear it over, like, for example, the radio and whatnot. Like say, you know, you're really going too fast.
Or you could have simply fun applications you know, kids beaming messages to each other's heads, you know. You could have it in certain search and rescue situations. It's very hard to communicate with people over a long distance in a loud environment. The ability to sort of beam a message directly to someone in a focused way, like a laser point, from hundreds of feet away could be incredibly useful.
But there's a lot of significantly scary ways it could be used. It could be used by the military. They're already looking at deploying it I think that in some cases they probably already have as a crowd control technique.
One can imagine a way in that you could, you know, pick certain people out of a crowd and just blast incredibly loud noise just at them. Everyone around him, you know, won't have any problem and there's one guy who's writhing on the ground.
So there's a lot of very, very unsettling ways to use the technology.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It reminds me of that scene in Minority Report, the Spielberg film, where Tom Cruise is walking through a futuristic mall and the sign says, you know, how did those turtlenecks work out for you, Mr. So and So? And obviously they're beaming specifically targeted signs to everybody walking through that crowded mall.
CLIVE THOMPSON:
Obviously, the marketing [LAUGHS] and advertising potentials for the technology are pretty big. And they're sort of I mean, I guess you could say they're kind of in the gray area between evil and good. Exactly, because, like, even the most, you know, seemingly invasive forms of advertising can actually be useful for you as a consumer, and you could imagine situations in which you actually do want to be sort of picked out and told something specific.
I'm not really sure I want to be the first one, you know, experiencing that, and, overall, my sense is I would find it personally invasive and creepy. But, you know, I'm 39. Maybe I'm too old for this stuff.
Maybe, you know, like 21 year olds, you know, when they're 30, they'll be just completely accepting of the fact that as you walk down the street you have targeted messages speaking to you every once in a while.
It is also possible that the people that try to do this with marketing will just find that their customers are so annoyed at them that they'll stop doing it because it causes [LAUGHS] more annoyance than it causes sales.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Can you talk about it as an environmental issue?
CLIVE THOMPSON:
Sure. There's this whole other field, acoustic ecology, basically, which is, you know, the question as to are there any quiet places left in society. It's a global issue. There's actually people that are worried there's no places left on Earth pristine from mechanical sound.
In an urban sense, people have always been concerned about the increasing noise because it's been pretty clearly proven that when you're subject to noise that you can't control, it does bad things to you. It causes stress. IQ points drop off in kids. You get less ability to concentrate and do well in school when you have noise distraction.
All these problems are already there. And so if you start layering on other technology that says, okay, now we're going to start actively targeting not just something that's ambient, that you can sort of turn your head away from, but something that's actually inside your head, that's a significant problem. This is exactly why this stuff is both a technological issue and a marketing issue but also an ethical and a civil rights issue.
Does our legal tradition, does our Constitutional tradition have any answers for these types of technologies? These are open legal questions right now, as I understand it. They're going to have to be answered. And the question is, are they going to be answered before the technology is omnipresent or is the technology going to get ahead of our ability to think about what it means for our mental privacy?
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Wired.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD:
That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips and Nazanin Rafsanjani, and edited by Brooke. Jennifer Munson is our acting technical director and Paul Schneider our engineer. We had help from Jessica Magaldi and Ian Whitehead. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org. You can also post comments there and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield.
ELECTRONIC VOICE WHISPERING:
What was that? Who's there?
(FUNDING CREDITS)
Produced by WNYC Studios