Hacking The Brain: What Is It?

While the preoccupation with politics is on the rise, as new ideologies arise or as more extreme ones gain acclaim, technology goes increasingly unnoticed. Yet perhaps we should fear a little more that technology makes it possible to hack the brain.

While it may sound like science fiction, hacking the brain is somehow possible. We believe in free will, we take it for granted that our feelings and thoughts are the result of individual freedom and, therefore, also of our actions. Yet this belief is unfounded.

There are many factors that affect the way we think, act and perceive. So, if our decisions are not free what conditions them?

The choices are not free

The decisions we make depend on biological and social conditions that we cannot control. For example, I can choose what to eat today, but I don’t know that this decision, free as it may seem, is conditioned by my genes: I can only eat what my body accepts.

Furthermore, the choice will depend on the resources at my disposal. I can’t eat a Florentine steak if I don’t have the money to pay for it.

Then there are the cultural factors: if my culture does not accept the consumption of dog meat, I will not choose to eat this type of meat.

Another example is love. Do we choose who to fall in love with? Usually not. These examples show that by evaluating the decisions we make in daily life we will realize that most of them are beyond our control. As a result, we don’t freely decide what to think, what to feel, and what to want. All this has a limit.

This belief in free will has a weighty consequence. If companies or governments manage to hack the brain, the easiest to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.

So to be able to hack the brain, three elements will be needed : solid biological skills, a lot of data and a great computer skills. With these three elements it may be possible to make predictions about the decisions we make and even manipulate human feelings.

Hack the brain

The so-called fake news are nothing more than another example of disguised freedom. When we read a fake news without knowing it and we believe it, we tend to think that we are free to believe it or not. We were actually hacked by someone.

The person who created the news is manipulating our brains to make us believe that a fake news is true. Here’s how it becomes possible to hack the brain.

To be more precise, with all the information we share on social networks it is possible to create algorithms that can predict our preferences.

Based on these preferences, fake news can be created, in line with what we think. Here it becomes possible to create fake personalized messages, which can also be very convincing.

Obviously there is nothing new: advertising has always done it. The difference is that today, with the boom of the internet and social networks, the number of personal data in circulation has grown and it is therefore possible to further personalize messages.

Also, we now know a few tricks. For example, the use made of fear, hatred and greed. So, if we hate a single person or a group, we will believe whatever bad things we are told about it.

What the future holds for us

But that is not all. Nowadays, more use is made of devices that measure heart rate. What would happen if users’ heart rate data were compared with the searches we do on the internet? Or with the fees charged to your credit card?

They could sell us any product or political ideology. In this situation, does the voter really know what is best for him or her and is the customer always right?

The reaction is to retreat. Instead of facing the challenge, we take refuge in even more remote illusions. We appeal to religious and nationalist fantasies increasingly distant from the scientific reality of our time.

Still, there is a way out and that is to know the flaw in this system. Computers are hacked because there are faulty strings of code, humans because they are made up of fears, hatred, prejudices and desires.

Pirates cannot create hatred and fear out of thin air. But when they discover that they are feelings that belong to a person, then it is easy for them to discover which keys to touch to feed them.