
US diplomats' brains were shrunk by sonic attacks at Cuban embassy, study finds - new_guy
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/23/us-diplomats-brains-shrunk-sonic-attacks-cuban-embassy-scientific/
======
sandino
Rather than simply having "shrunk" these brains -- according to at least on
other summary article, the team's findings were rather less conclusive:

 _But the medical team that performed the scans said the findings were not
conclusive. They do not match what is normally seen in brain injuries and the
severity of symptoms did not vary with the extent of the brain differences
spotted._

 _“It’s a unique presentation that we have not seen before,” said Ragini
Verma, a professor of biomedical imaging on the team at the University of
Pennsylvania. “What caused it? I’m completely unequipped to answer that.”_

 _Independent experts agreed the findings were inconclusive and said it was
still unclear whether the diplomats were victims of any attack or had suffered
related brain injuries. The apparent abnormalities might have pre-dated the
attacks, they said, and could have more mundane explanations such as anxiety
or depression. One said the study did not meet the usual standards for
publication._

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/23/brain-
scans-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/23/brain-scans-of-us-
embassy-staff-to-cuba-show-abnormalities)

------
Someone1234
The real take-away from this article is: These people are legitimately ill.
But we still are no closer to knowing what caused it or by whom. The
previously released sound recordings are likely made by Indies short-tailed
crickets.

There's been a lot of finger pointing, but until we know HOW this was done it
may be hard to figure out WHO conducted it, or even if it was man-made at all
(e.g. disease).

------
noipv4
Was it a sonic attack? or some drug which destroys brain tissue, and as a side
effect messes with sound processing parts of the brain too.

~~~
Canadauni
This is an interesting theory. Probably one of the more plausible ones. I
imagine some sort of biological or toxicological attack could cause some sound
processing related symptoms.

On the wild end of things one could imagine it being a combination of sonic
and chemical attack where the an innocuous chemical structure became active as
a result of high frequency sound.

~~~
emeraldd
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonochemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonochemistry)
I have no idea about that application, but the idea of using sound in
chemistry seems to actually be a thing ...

~~~
Canadauni
At risk of oversimplification, sound is just energy and given the right amount
of energy chemical changes can be carried out.

------
Johnny555
That headline seems inaccurate -- I was surprised when it seemed to point to
"sonic attacks" being the definitive cause of the brain abnormality, but it's
not:

 _“The study supports the validity of the patients report of symptoms, but
doesn’t answer the question of whether they have had a brain injury or not or
whether the exposure they report is relevant. "_

So something happened, but no one knows what caused it.

------
david_draco
Most academic literature attributes the complaints (which are inconsistent
with each other and span ambassadors of some countries but not others), to a
mass psychogenic event. You can find out more here:
[https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4603](https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4603)

~~~
erentz
And this is shaping up to be yet another case where doctors and researchers
ignored what their patients were telling them and labelled an illness as
psychogenic when it wasn't.

Through history doctors have all too often assumed their current testing
capabilities were perfect and there was nothing more to learn. Thus if a
patient looks normal on tests of the day then they must be imagining the
problem and they label it psychogenic. Then this can't be disproved until new
technology or research reveals how wrong this label was.

People should think about the amount of grief these people and others through
history have suffered due to this.

~~~
david_draco
> Different people reported different symptoms. Most people did not report
> hearing any particular sounds. Of those who did, they said they heard very
> different sounds, and at different times and places. None of the sounds bore
> any similarity to sonic weapons. Only one person reported permanent hearing
> loss; and as nobody else did, we can safely assume that it was likely due to
> natural causes for that person. One reported a concussion with no apparent
> cause, but nobody else did either. So if we are looking for some external
> cause for these symptoms, we learn that it was probably not any one cause.
> It was a number of different causes, suggesting that these people were
> suffering from various unrelated problems.

The point is that this event is inconsistent with any known diseases or
injuries, including sonic devices, but completely consistent with other events
of (self-reinforcing) mass hallucinations. No one is saying the affected have
not suffered.

~~~
erentz
But isn’t this just saying: “we have no existing evidence or test _today_
showing a physiological illness so therefore we are going to call it this
other imagined thing for which we also can’t prove, yet which has been
repeatedly disproven over history.”

All illness have at some time been “inconsistent with any known diseases or
injuries”, MS, epilepsy, CFS, etc. What’s more likely at this point.

I think lack of evidence in medicine shouldn’t be used as evidence for
“psychogenic illness.” Just as lack of evidence for something in physics
shouldn’t be used as evidence for “god put it there.”

Doctors should get used to saying “we don’t know what’s wrong with these
people yet” instead of trying to force an answer where there currently isn’t
one. It’s far more correct and much kinder.

------
trhway
my favorite theory of those sounds - the people hearing (and affected by) them
is just a sideeffect of the sound attack on electronics by generating suitable
intermodulation distortion (IMD) :

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-
reve...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reverse-
engineered-the-cuban-sonic-weapon-attack)

"Computer science researchers have explored the physics of IMD. In the
DolphinAttack paper, we used ultrasonic signals to trick a smartphone’s voice-
recognition assistant. Because of nonlinearity in the smartphone’s microphone,
the ultrasound produced by-products at audible frequencies inside the
circuitry of the microphone. Thus, the IMD signal remains inaudible to humans,
but the smartphone hears voices. In an early 2017 paper, Nirupam Roy, Haitham
Hassanieh, and Romit Roy Choudhury at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign described their BackDoor system [PDF] for using ultrasound and IMD
to jam spy microphones, watermark music played at live concerts, and otherwise
create “shadow” sounds."

Your Siri is talking to the voices in her head... Conspiracy theory wise i'd
think (ie. hope that "at least some of my tax dollars at work") that NSA uses
such tools too, and this is why everybody is so mum about it.

~~~
phy6
I wonder if there could be a mashup between IMD and BadBIOS/ultrasonic
communication
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03422.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03422.pdf)

------
webmobdev
How do they know that their brains weren't small to begin with? Are they
measuring against an average?

~~~
diggan
Seems to be refering to this study:
[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-
abstract/27385...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-
abstract/2738552)

> Design, Setting, and Participants: Forty government personnel (patients) who
> were potentially exposed and experienced neurological symptoms underwent
> evaluation at a US academic medical center from August 21, 2017, to June 8,
> 2018, including advanced structural and functional magnetic resonance
> imaging analytics. Findings were compared with imaging findings of 48
> demographically similar healthy controls.

------
squidproquo
What I don't understand is how these "studies" seem to find things that would
require a baseline to compare with. Results like, brain damage was suffered,
cognitive impairment, brain-shrinkage, all would require the subjects to have
some baseline snapshot before the "sonic attacks" occurred.

------
wysifnwyg
I never expected to see a headline like this. This is certainly an exciting
dystopian future we're living in.

~~~
deminature
I'm not sure the affected parties would agree with the descriptor 'exciting'.

------
threezero
Assuming that there was in fact shrinking, could that be caused by being in a
warm climate for an extended period of time? Studies have shown that heat
affects cognitive ability, but has anyone ever studied if there’s a temporary
efect on brain size?
[https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002605)

~~~
jryb
I think someone would have noticed, for example, the entire population of
Cuba.

------
lightbyte
I remember listening to a segment on NPR where it was claimed this was already
solved and the "sonic attacks" were actually caused by a specific species of
cricket:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2019/03/25/7049036...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2019/03/25/704903613/doubts-rise-about-evidence-that-u-s-diplomats-in-
cuba-were-attacked)

~~~
zamalek
The article covers this.

------
tim333
They say sonic attacks but reading the various articles is seems quite likely
it was microwaves [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-
cuba...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba-
microwave.html?module=inline)

I wonder if microwave damage would be consistent with the effects found.

------
groestl
What about sleep deprivation and stress (possibly caused by the sounds)?

