Okay I'm skeptical.
On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons. That narrative conveniently fuels paranoia and makes for good reading. Alternative explanations exist, based on well established medicine, which I think need air time, link below.
Now, I'm all for exciting stories but this one keeps being resurrected without evidence I'd find compelling (namely lesions on MRI, quantifiable deficits in function, or signs and symptoms that prove neural damage). Indeed all the features of this particular syndrome appear better explained by functional, rather than structural, disease.
Of course the possiblility of acoustic or electromagnetic weapons being used exists until proven otherwise, but in light of what is known, it seems unlikely to me.
Your link is the first time I hear of mass psychogenic illness. Quite an interesting phenomenon. I particularly liked the case below from 1972. It seems MPI could very well explain these incidents.
«In a mid-western university town of over 50,000 population, a strange case of "gas poisoning" occurred on a Wednesday morning early in March, 1972. Approximately thirty-five female workers at the University's data processing center were exposed to a mysterious gas "from an unknown source" that caused dizziness, vomiting, nausea, and fainting among a number of the employees. So severe were the symptoms that 10 of the workers were taken to the University's Medical Center for emergency treatment; all of the employees at the Data Center were evacuated.
The Center was temporarily closed allowing for a group of environmental specialists to examine the building. During the remainder of that day and into the night, samples of the air obtained from the building were tested. Extensive blood and urine tests of affected workers were conducted in order to locate traces of the noxious "gas." Although traces of the substance could not 'be found, several workers again became ill upon returning to work Thursday morning. The Data Center was closed and evacuated for the second time. Additional environmental ;and physiological tests were conducted; still no physical reason for the episode could be located.
When the Center resumed operation on Friday a group of specialists from the University met with the workers to explain that they thought an "atmospheric inversion" was the cause of their symptoms. This explanation was calculated to reduce the high level of anxiety that had surrounded the activities of the two previous days; the explanation seemed to meet its objective. The incident was "closed" as far as both the workers and the scientists were concerned despite the fact that traditional biomedical explanations had failed to explain the events.»
Doesn't this contradict the notion that these diplomats experienced mass psychogenic illness?
What you describe is a temporary disturbance highly susceptible to (and terminated by) the power of suggestion, no? It sounds like what the diplomats experienced is different in both respects.
>On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons.
If someone were trying to sour US-Cuban relations, then it would make sense that only Americans in Cuba were targeted.
It seems highly unlikely that 21 diplomats with the same symptoms (plus those in China) were afflicted with an innocuous medical condition. None of the doctors who wrote letters of dissent physically examined the patients. Though the specific nature of the cause may be up for debate, I highly doubt there was no adversary here.
I agree that it seems suspicious and this sort of weapon has loomed as a likely culprit from early on. There are very good reasons why someone would carry this out.
That said, I feel it would be irresponsible to deny the possibility of a collective delusion. Particularly in an environment where folks are in constant close contact and under a feeling of stress. In my opinion, it's less than highly unlikely.
I would believe diplomats would be somewhat resistant against mass delusion, considering their selection (and possibly training).
Mass delusion has also been one of the leading hypothesis from the very first story on this phenomenon. Being aware of the concept would tend to dispel it, which apparently did not happen.
I'm sure those with more information have considered that possibility. The ongoing investigation leads me to believe they are not quite as sure of it as the HN crowd is. Maybe some of the cases appeared independently?
"A score in the bottom 5% would typically mean there is a problem. But Shura pointed out that the diplomats were found to be “impaired” if they scored in the bottom 40% in any one of the tests. In their letter, the doctors said it was “inappropriate” to conclude that any of the patients were impaired. "
It’s unfortunately quite challenging to diagnose cognitive impairment based on neuropsychological assessment at a single point in time post-injury. That’s because we don’t know what the person’s level of cognitive function was before the injury. If a person had cognitive function 1 standard deviation above the mean pre-injury (equivalent to an IQ of 115, speaking loosely) and suffered a 1 standard deviation loss as a result of the injury, they would then test in the normal range - but still clearly have suffered damage.
The response articles calling for a 5th percentile measure to diagnose impairment are in a sense statistically appropriate - you’d like to see very significant impairment to diagnose it from a single measure - but not sensitive - they will miss a lot of true cases of mild impairment. For example, that threshold would miss virtually all cases of concussion, chemobrain, cognitive impairment in MS, etc.
What these doctors are missing is the power of statistical correlation to separate signal from noise. Yes, a single individual testing below 40% means nothing, but 20 people (or however many it was) all from the same office testing below 40% is starting to be significant.
Especially knowing the USA has been a thorn in Cuba's side since the 50's, repeatedly trying to kill Castro and undermine their economic system.
Americans live under constant propaganda from their own government, deployed by their own mainstream newspapers and TV media. Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' is an eye opening look into the continuous war/regime change drum that's beating inside the USA.
This is just more the same, NY Times writing anti-Cuban articles as propaganda, with no evidence to back up their nonsense claims.
Cuba has been led by a dictatorship regime so I can see why US would like to change it. You don't need propaganda to see for yourself that Cuba has no free elections. So far US used sanctions instead of war and it seems it didn't work.
I believe people want to promote/support their values and it's the same with the governments. U.S. always tried to install democracies (i.e after ww2, Afganistan) but I've never seen a dictatorship installing or promoting democracies.
I believe that as the leader of the free world U.S has certain responsibilities that go beyond its borders. If it can do something good (i.e overthrow a dictator) and perhaps
serves its interests as well(make new friends) I don't see why it shouldn't do that. It's a win-win. See South and North Korea situation to understand what difference it makes a successful intervention.
> You don't need propaganda to see for yourself that Cuba has no free elections.
So far I'm with you. But so what? You seem to be implying that if a country's political system is non-democratic, then third parties are justified in intervening.
I would have thought that the whole concept of national sovereignty implied precisely the opposite: that each nation can decide for itself what system of political representation is best suited to its particular history and culture.
The "nation" can't decide its political system if the government imprisons and kills the opposition.
It's like saying that slavery should have been left legal until the slaves decide to change the law. All humans should have human rights.
More restraint was exercised after Soviet support for the Castro government solidified, but regime change by unconventional means was not abandoned as a policy even then.
A free election doesn't mean people -- even powerful or rich people -- can't campaign against you. It doesn't mean political parties can't internally organize their candidate nomination procedures. And surely it doesn't mean that the candidate who got fewer votes (as Sanders did) is obligated to win.
Sanders entered the race polling at 2%, campaigned like hell, got close to winning, and had a material impact on the party's policy trajectory. And he did this despite taking deliberate steps throughout his career to make it harder for himself to take power within a political party -- for example, by not joining the party until he declared his intent to run for its leadership, by not doing much to work with anyone in the party on legislation or fundraising, and generally by keeping a low national profile before deciding to run.
Debbie Whatshername emailed saying she was in the tank for Clinton? Yes, duh. Party elders and professional leadership are permitted to have an opinion about who they want to win, If you show up at a club you've been trash-talking for years and expect to take it over, you can't reasonably be mad when the people who have been running it for years have their
The idea that the elections aren't free is also undermined by the scattershot way in which Sanders supporters defend institutional design choices. For example, Sanders performed better in states with caucuses than primaries. Caucuses are less democratic, because they induce low turnout because of the high barrier to participation. But Sanders' campaign and his supporters like caucuses. Sanders performed worse in states that did not allow independents to participate in the Democratic party. But Sanders' campaign and his supporters view this rule as an offensive affront to democracy. The common element is not the institutional design ex ante, it's the ex post impact of that design on Sanders' chances.
None of the arguments Sanders made about getting a bum rap are evidence of institutional dysfunction. There is no country on earth that has institutions that don't have these characteristics. Many very healthy democracies have internal party leadership conventions that look much like U.S. nominations pre-1968 (only party elders vote, byzantine favor trading to get the nomination) let alone what they look like today, which are much more open and democratic. America has made more progress reforming its primary elections and generally elicits broader participation in them than almost any country.
But set aside all this and it's is not even a good case study. If your position is that the system is rigged so that outsider candidates don't win, how do you explain Clinton losing to game theory in the early stages of 2008? How do you explain Trump winning in 2016? Primaries result in outsider candidates winning. This has been one of the main challenges for political scientists, who want to seriously study institutional design. Before 2016, the canonical text on primaries was "The Party Decides" -- that party elites, through endorsement, cross-fundraising, ballot access, and the "invisible primary" decide the outcome of elections. No one is reading "The Party Decides" in 2018 because, well, you see the hell we live in.
Disclaimer: I live in America but can't vote here, and I would have voted for Sanders, not Clinton, in the primary. It's not because I'm a neoliberal shill, it's because your post reminded me of a first-year student I taught once who argued that the U.S. isn't a democracy because "Monsanto, maaaaan".
> Cuba has been led by a dictatorship regime so I can see why US would like to change it.
US has a gun control problem so I can see why the rest of the world would like to change it.
Edit: Just to clarify, it is just an analogy to say that I disapprove of countries interfering domestic issues. I don't intend to go into flamewars on either issues.
“In dictatorships, you often have factions that think nothing of going against the general policy if it suits their needs. I think that’s a perfectly viable explanation.”
Frey.
I’m not sure that’s a thing unique to dictatorships at all.
> For all helmets, we noticed a 30 db __amplification__ at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz, regardless of the position of the antenna on the cranium. In addition, all helmets exhibited a marked 20 db attenuation at around 1.5 Ghz, with no significant attenuation beyond 10 db anywhere else.
Full electromagnetic shielding of the entire building perhaps? Like those at the NSA headquarter. It should give you a heavy attenuation on the microwave frequency.
BTW, why don't the intelligence agencies install a software-defined radio in suspected US embassies to log the entire microwave spectrum? It will definitely yield something.
Back in (one of?) the very first paper(s?) on this stuff, Frey actually pointed out that a 2x2 piece of flyscreen (of some density, I forgot which) on the temporal lobes blocks the EM/RF hearing effect. But, as I pointed out in another comment, two distinct effects exist:
One that induces EM/RF hearing, and one that induces tissue damage.
For detection, yes, it can be done by an extremely simple circuit. But you would need the raw I/Q sample data over a broad frequency range to perform a technical analysis to identify the nature of the microwave. Here's when a SDR comes handy.
The LED just reveals power (detection of radiation over many visible orders of magnitude) ... it doesn't need to detect coherent I/Q, because I don't think neural effects are sensitive to phase either. Selectively cooking a brain would require relatively high power and beam forming, but not high data rate. Audio frequencies are visible (use multiple band pass filters if you like) .
You'd also want a controlled test source so you'd know if the attacker had burned it out.
With the Schottky you will get better low power detection (lower forward voltage 0.18V vs 1.8V), but it doesn't inherently indicate activation (you'd want an electret or piezo speaker at least) with the same dynamic range as your eye is capable of with an LED. Of course if you have an RMS power meter with uW resolution it will be OK... but LEDs are really good.
I’m not sure that tin foil hat can protect you from lousy journalism based on speculations without any evidence or even clues.
They say that some experts in somewhat related field now agree that the previous speculations based on non-evidence might be somewhat plausible. You’re going to need some military grade tin foil hat for that.
I would guess a faraday cage or faraday helmet would work for sure, maybe even just special screens on the outside of the building or in the walls/windows.
In my limited experience with RF (from ham radio, which includes microwave work though I haven't done any personally) it's very easy to block radio signals even inadvertently, let alone when you really put your mind to it.
I would imagine the negative health effects caused by long-term exposure of the brain to microwaves strong enough to produce the desired effect might be a factor.
There is a point to bring: during the WWII and later cold war, Soviets were extremely vocal about untouchability of top political leadership, and immunities provided by Vienna convention being absolute. And they uphold that dearly.
Now my Western friends, try spending some time to think why they did so.
"The 9th division of the KGB (responsible for the safety of all the members of Politburo, including the leader of the USSR) had 3000 personnel."
"After the fall of the USSR, the president (Boris Yeltsin) had a private guard of 18,000 personnel. Far more government leaders were guarded than they were during the USSR."
Quotes above from "From the KGB to the FSB" by Eugene Michalevich
If you are interested, there is a biography by Victor Medvedev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Medvedev) about his time guarding various leaders of the USSR. If the book is to be believed, security was very light.
>If the book is to be believed, security was very light.
Light compared to what? Numerically, yes. It was making no sense to have more than a regiment of them in a country where the total number of 3 letter agencies staff was comparable to standing army. But the level of paranoia was not light whatsoever.
Yeltsin on the other hand had to live under a constant threat of armed uprising by the same three letter agencies. The internal threat had an entirely different nature.
Light compared to virtually any "important" person today.
"Yeltsin on the other hand had to live under a constant threat of armed uprising by the same three letter agencies. The internal threat had an entirely different nature."
Shouldn't have disbanded Vympel because they refused to storm the white house and risk a ton of casualties. Yeltsin was a drunk, useless coward.
Oh, and he also re-organized the KGB/MVD/FSB 3+ times.
It's a series of fairly unlikely assertions backed with plausible looking narrative and interviews. Pretty typical for the NYT these days, and very sad.
IEEE Spectrum did a series of articles on this; I thought the mostly likely explanation was ultrasound jammers and intermodulation distortion. Aka defective gear; which is why the same thing seems to have happened in China as well as Cuba.
Why wouldn’t this create news coverage? Regardless of its factual merits, it almost reads like a plot from a spy thriller, of course people are gonna read articles discussing it. I’d be far more surprised if the opposite was true.
Because we have 24 hour news cycles that are heavily dependent on providing entertainment masquerading as news to generate revenue. And this has all the makings of a cliched spy novel. Super secret weapons, forces covertly attacking each other to no apparent ends, and a good deal of conspiracy and paranoia all around.
The fact that such alleged attacks are reported both in Cuba and in China, which nations have very little history of technical collaboration, makes it more likely that the alleged weapon was actually used by elements of USA bureaucracy. USA diplomats are the common thread here, no matter what purpose is assumed. It will certainly not be the first case of those serving the military-industrial complex being directly victimized by same.
If Russia had just wanted to play with their new toy while victimizing people with no local sympathy, they could have hit e.g. guest workers in Dubai and Western expats in Thailand. Actually they have lots of isolated communities in Siberia they could have observed more easily while staying out of the news completely.
Even if the "what", "where", and "when" ends up conforming to current "journalistic" speculation in these cases, the "how", "why", and "who" will probably never be really known. It's fine to be suspicious when Russian media are blaming USA, because they are "rivals". In the reversed case, why wouldn't one retain that suspicion?
That's an interesting article, but in fairness it's at least as general as TFA. Yes that is one plausible explanation, but verifiable facts are so hard to come by on this topic, and there are so many powerful interests involved, that we ought to be quite skeptical of everything we see.
RF/Microwave EE here. I actually tried this on myself several years ago with no effect. Specifically 20W at C-band into a 10 dBi standard gain horn a few feet away, pulse mod to 1 kHz. That was still not near enough power density.
While it’s plausible, it would take a big effort to affect this many people. The peak power densities, as described in the paper, would be tens of W/cm^2; e.g. radar transmitters and big antennas.
To direct this power, you’d have to track someone with a high gain antenna, and once you are non line of sight, it would attenuate greatly. That, or you’d have to place covert equipment in close proximity, in many locations.
It would also be very easy to detect with basic test equipment, as the desired peak power levels are huge.
Maybe there could be some organ resonance effect with mmWaves, such as bones in the ear, but that is sketchy too.
1) 'The fundamental frequency of RF induced sounds is independent of the frequency of the radiowaves but dependent upon head dimensions.'
2) 'RF hearing has been reported at frequencies ranging from 2.4 to 10 000 MHz (see Table 1). Although Ingalls [1967] mentioned 10 000 MHz as an effective frequency, other investigators found that lower frequencies (8900 and 9500 MHz) at very high exposure levels did not induce RF sounds
In Table 2 the experimental frequency range appears to have been 900MHz to 3GHz so C-band at 4 – 8 GHz (7.5 – 3.75 cm) may have be a too short a wavelength to elicit the effect.
- but ham radio operators should be worried :-)
Ha ha, probably so. It wasn’t research, I was just testing some equipment and figured I try it. It probably works best starting at 1/2 wavelength resonance of the brain, then maybe higher modes where a certain region may be stimulated. Just a hunch.
Great comment. I was also wondering about detection--it ought to be trivial. I'm surprised that government buildings in places like this don't already have simple sensor arrays up and running, especially knowing of the potential for RF use in espionage (information transfer) etc.
Ham, yes. EME no (yet). Putting fingers down on 0.5 mm traces carrying 50W at S-band will char your skin. Just tuning amps with golf tees and copper lead frames.
Moreover, that would've certainly affected all unshielded electronics. Even older GSM phones had enough power to some times hang well shielded desktop PCs. And at the time all laptops were plasticky unshielded contraptions, that was even more evident.
That's interesting. Certainly, we've all been cued by the sound of our hard disks that something in our code was wrong or that our computer is up to something unexpected; now that disks are getting quieter and/or replaced by SSDs we lose that important "feature." As code-relevant hardware gets more complex (GPUs and other outboard processors, interaction with robotics or media headsets, etc what-have-you) that sort of hardware-level diagnostic should become more useful, rather than less. Has anyone tried to get this to happen on purpose? E.g., little electrical taps on relevant bus cables, with an audio jack.
>> It would also be very easy to detect with basic test equipment
Like laptops, cellphones not working. Sparks from coke cans. Chocolate bars melting in pockets. I'd think the fire risk would be too great to attempt this in an uncontrolled public space.
It doesn’t take THAT much power. The paper says effects took an average power of ~1 mW/cm^2, with a 0.0001 duty factor. That’s not much from a heating standpoint, but extremely strong for detectability. That average power is about what your phone delivers to your head.
The peak power is massive, but it doesn’t last long, so the energy is weak. To get the equivalent peak power, you’d have to put 10k phones against your head.
If you put your head in a 1 kW microwave oven, and pulse modulated the magnetron, your could maybe get the effect. It would make an entertaining YouTube video.
> If you put your head in a 1 kW microwave oven, and pulse modulated the magnetron, your could maybe get the effect. It would make an entertaining YouTube video.
I'll quote Allan H. Frey, who more-or-less(preceeded by some italian engineers, iirc) invented the entire field, from 1996 on usenet:
>There is a microwave hearing effect that occurs at very low power densities and a skull vibration effect that occurs when very high energies are applied to the head. There is some confusion in the literature because the vibration effect has often been referred to as a microwave hearing effect, but it is not the same phenomena.
And, quoting from a different page:
>In fact, Frey and Hackett said the microwave hearing effect does not occur with millimeter waves (which range from 3 to 300 GHz).
>
>"On the other hand, if your millimeter waves have enough energy density, are powerful enough, there are other phenomena where you could cause sort of a concussion kind of effect which could conceivably be heard by bone conduction. It would transfer through skin to bone and bone into the inner ear," Frey said. He said it might be possible to modulate such energy to create the perception of some intelligible sounds. "But off hand, I can't tell you what kind of power levels you might need to do that," he said. Hackett dismissed the idea of transmitting intelligible sounds to the head with MMWs as pure speculation.
Note how the mythbusters episode where they 'busted' that myth seems like an (unintentional) sham:
They used a 9.4 GHz radar dish (courtesy of the DoD) with ultra short impulses spread out over long periods. That fits NEITHER of the above.
Someone, on, OF FUCKING COURSE, /r/conspiracy, quite a while ago, pointed out something related:
Which points out that the boxspring mattresses used in many Hotels might strongly amplify the ability to induce tissue damage, which would explain this part:
"The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he’d walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room."
>For example, after my colleagues and I published in 1975 that exposure to very weak microwave radiation opens the regulatory interface known as the blood brain barrier (bbb), a critical protection for the brain, the Brooks AFB group selected a contractor to supposedly replicate our experiment. For 2 years, this contractor presented data at scientific conferences stating that microwave radiation had no effect on the bbb. After much pressure from the scientific community, he finally revealed that he had not, in fact, replicated our work. We had injected dye into the femoral vein of lab rats after exposure to microwaves and observed the dye in the brain within 5 minutes. The Brooks contractor had stuck a needle into the animals’ bellies and sprayed the dye onto their intestines. Thus it is no surprise that when he looked at the brain 5 minutes later, he did not see any dye; the dye had yet to make it into the circulatory system.
Of course, EVERYTHING surrounding this (but NOT the subject matter ITSELF) involves a hell of a lot of:
* conspiracy theory
* fringe science (aka protoscience)
* pseudoscience
levels of insanity, as you can likely tell from some of the above. This makes it extremely hard to filter through any of this. The EU did a large report on RF safety a while ago:
If you check it, Frey's papers on this remain oddly absent from it.
Oh and... We could likely find a lot more existing discussion on this, but unfortunately, the emf-bio archives got expunged from ftp://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/usenet/bionet/emf-bio without explanation. If anyone at the University of Indiana wants to go digging into backup tapes, I'd appreciate it.
I have this notion that surrounding a subject with basket case conspiracy theories would be a good way to get people not to take it seriously :) Of course, there's many feedback loops that allow believers to have their beliefs bolstered by negations.
>I have this notion that surrounding a subject with basket case conspiracy theories would be a good way to get people not to take it seriously :)
Indeed, it would. A lot of clever people have discussed the issue of disinfo & FUD, you might wish to:
* Watch this talk from FOSDEM '14 by Poul-Henning Kamp [Contextually, one important tidbit to keep in mind while watching it: At the time phk gave the talk, the heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL wasn't yet known!]:
* and, perhaps, read these two blog posts, but tread carefully with those two, as, unlike the above video, the below edges MOST dangerously close to basket case conspiracy theory territory - arguably, it doesn't get there, but I can definitely say that if one slips while looking into the below, one'll immediately end up in basket case territory:
However, having said this & pointed out all of the above, before going down any of the above lanes, keep something else in mind:
1. Take a look at when some of these links got first published online. Multi-decade gap vs. original date of publication. Something unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature.
2. Most of Frey's original papers from the 60s are still behind a HARD paywall. Again, unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature.
3. The whole classified Radar tech research aspect of it (This whole avenue of research got started out when radar techs in the 60s started complaining about headaches when working in front of big damn radar dishes!)
Curious if you know, what's the low down on 5g? Is it safe? What about rural ares where they can jack up the range? Lots of conspiracy theories floating around there, some vaguely concerned. My cause for concern is zero precautionary principle approach to the technology.
The mmWaves can easily be wave guided into the inner ear, as 1/2 wavelength at 60 GHz is 2.5 mm.
I read a few years ago about electric fields of very high dV/dt being used to temporarily open cell walls. The patients blood was transfused through the apparatus. This was used to enhance chemotherapy, and provided some benefit.
I just want to point out that this is an exceptionally well-researched and cited article, didn't expect that (which is funny - I just realized I set a lower standard for mainstream media than the tech blog posts I read that people write in their free time).
I'm told that there's a great deal of automatically generated sports reporting. Good reporting is actually much rarer these days, because no one online wants to pay for it. Recent years have also seen the rise of Buzzfeed and Breitbart. The journalists seem to think that there's a journalism crisis. I might suggest that you have been confining yourself to high-quality news sources, to where you don't see that this is a problem, but I don't think many of those exist. If you have strong feelings about the image of programming in tech-pop, you may reflect upon the varying levels at which people might value such a thing, and try to be constructive in your criticism.
(In response to your aside - if someone's writing about something in their free time they probably care about it so expecting a higher standard than you'd expect for someone grinding out a dime does make sense.)
I’m not a fan of standard media, but I think that’s an unfair assumption. The least it is too general. I’m sure there are many journalists who care deeply about topics they write about.
Maybe my phrasing was imprecise - I didn't mean they don't care about it at all, just that after the initial rush has worn off, often you do your job because you have to, while you work on your personal projects only when you're impassioned.
It’s a newspaper not a scientific journal. What makes you think they would have access to any evidence? They are merely summarizing the research that others have done.
I keep reading about quantum entanglement - and how it has been used in practice to transmit secure messages. Seems like it is a technology that might somehow be used to induce frequencies without leaving any evidence. A lot of that works is secret, so it's hard to tell what is really being done.
Now, I'm all for exciting stories but this one keeps being resurrected without evidence I'd find compelling (namely lesions on MRI, quantifiable deficits in function, or signs and symptoms that prove neural damage). Indeed all the features of this particular syndrome appear better explained by functional, rather than structural, disease.
Of course the possiblility of acoustic or electromagnetic weapons being used exists until proven otherwise, but in light of what is known, it seems unlikely to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/14/cuban-acoustic...
Declaration of interests: I've worked with Prof. Stone.