As I See It: Mind Hacks
May 20, 2024 Victor Rozek
When I first saw the video, it felt a bit like watching science fiction. There were rows of little children, sitting in a classroom, dressed identically, seemingly concentrating on their school work in compliant silence. It reminded me of 20th century newsreel footage of obedient Hitler youth, except that the kids were Asian. And it had a distinctly dystopian feel to it punctuated by an electronic headband on each child’s forehead.
But it wasn’t fiction. The headband monitored the children’s brainwave activity, to identify those who were concentrating and those who were not. The results were transmitted in real time to the teacher’s desktop computer, as well as their parents’ smart phones. Scrape away all the niceties about improving attentiveness and achieving superior educational outcomes, and it’s simply China’s latest effort at exercising womb-to-tomb control of its population.
For example, students in some schools have chips sewn into their uniforms to track their location. Cell phone monitoring is ubiquitous. A school in Hangzhou is using machine learning in the form of facial recognition to monitor and analyze how students are behaving and responding to their teachers. It even records such minutia as how many times they yawn. The technology is built into cameras and is called “smart eyes.”
It has been said that those who control the schools control the world. But China is no longer satisfied with controlling educational content and student behavior, they are taking steps to control children’s minds.
The headgear being introduced is comprised of three electrodes; two behind the ears and one on the forehead. It is designed to pick up electrical signals sent by neurons in the brain and records each student’s concentration levels at ten minute intervals. The base technology is electroencephalography or EEG for short, and is typically used in hospitals and labs. In scientific parlance, “artifacts” are something observed in scientific investigation or experimentation that is not naturally present, and EEG is notoriously susceptible to artifacts, or false readings.
Nonetheless, there is a strong possibility that the future of this generation of students will, in large part, be decided by the implication of these readings. One can well imagine children being funneled into blue collar or white collar curriculums based on their ability to concentrate. Whether they are forced to pursue a trade or a career in technology may well depend on how their brains develop in grammar school. Their preferences will become less relevant as time goes by. Late bloomers may be penalized for a lifetime, forced to embrace jobs that offer no personal fulfillment other than service to the state.
The additional pressure on children is neither surprising nor accidental. Students with high concentration scores are given red bandanas to wear, visually segregating them from “inferior” children. Further, children can be corrected or punished if they do not perform to expectations. Some students report being punished by parents for low attention scores. It’s not hard to imagine that parents could also be approached by authorities, accused and menaced for having inferior parenting skills. There are, of course, no privacy protections, so parents will be doubly persuaded to pressure their children, knowing that poor concentration scores may follow their kids for the rest of their lives.
But indications of low interest in math, for example, do not measure interest in the arts or humanities. The emphasis will be put on fields most useful to the state, meaning science and disciplines that support advanced technology, particularly AI. As a consequence, there are an alarming 200 million students who may be subjected to – and whose futures may be decide by – this experimental technology.
Of particular concern is that the underlying premise behind such testing is flawed, and will needlessly penalize a substantial percentage of students. Under authoritarian regimes, there is a narrow range of acceptable behavior. Everyone is expected to subsume their personal inclinations to the dictates of the state. That is especially true in the classroom where kids are expected to be silent, still, attentive, and obedient. But the model is more suited to indoctrination than learning.
The problem is that people do not have a single shared learning style. We are organized differently, and people learn best when information is presented in their preferred learning modality. There are three primary learning styles, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual learners prefer information presented through videos, charts, graphs, illustrations, displays, or other optical means. Without some form of visual representation, the information will lack tangibility, like trying to watch a movie without the video. Auditory learners prefer not only to hear information presented, but they also want to be heard. In environments where questions, comments, and participation are either not welcome or discouraged, the depth of their learning will suffer. Kinesthetic learners want to move, to touch, to physically interact with their learning environment, so they can get it in the muscle. They are often misdiagnosed as having attention deficit disorders and drugged to make them less fidgety.
Thus, there may be any number of reasons why a particular student appears to be inattentive, but among the most likely is that the information is not being presented in a modality that makes the most sense in their system.
Back in the 18th century, Jean Paul, (a pen name for German Romantic writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) observed that: “Memory is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away.” But that may be about to change.
How long before technology permits authoritarian regimes to wonder not only if their students are thinking, but what they are thinking about? How long before the headbands are required not just during school hours, but during waking hours? How long before they make their way into the general population? And what happens to the people who harbor too many unauthorized thoughts? If this sounds like the stuff of science fiction, consider that so much of today’s technology would have been considered fiction just a few decades ago.
About a century after Jean Paul penned his observation, John Lancaster Spalding, author and co-founder of Catholic University, added an addendum. “As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.”
In a time when privacy is increasingly difficult to achieve, when everything is recorded, stored, and analyzed. When the minutia of our lives is used without our permission for reasons that do not merit our approval, then our minds must assuredly remain our last, inviolate refuge.
The Chinese people have little choice about the degree to which their government violates their privacy. But Americans still do. So before Mind Hacks become yet another habitual intrusion, perhaps it is time to update the traditional American rallying cry for the protection of individual freedoms:
Don’t Tread IN Me.
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Kind of naive bias on China in your essay to say the least (a country I recall produces many goods consumed by USA and EU for example and detains also a lot of their country bonds/financing).
Cradle-to-tomb style control of its population you critique on them is also used i.e. in USA by the pharmaceutical industry, with a poor food chain, diabetes type 2 numbers speaks clearly on the overall health of a nation.
Yes, stuff in veins and pills are less visible than showy frankenstein-like electrodes on – oh! look! – poor innocent child.
In EU, just a little time ago, you couldn’t work if you didn’t possess a “health pass” issued on the ground of questionable and disproved scientific results.
Pretty in line with authoritarianism you describe above.
You don’t need cables to the brain to program people, you need words and ideas (read hundred years old Le Bon, still relevant…).
And maybe if we start to be vigilant on our own countries instead of continuing to criticize foreign ones… would be a better? Maybe we will prevent dystopia in ours?