Main Feature
Unintended Consequences: 5G Network Dangers
Paul H. LeMay, Vancouver
Volume 34 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: March 30, 2020
In the last three decades or so, modern communications technology has afforded us with a new level of personal convenience. Yet at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be bringing any concomitant increase in spiritual wisdom. Indeed, legendary Brave New World sci-fi author Aldous Huxley once wrote: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
So why is that? The old phrase “haste makes waste” sheds some insight into that, especially when it comes to how our human brains work. Buried deep within our skulls is a 100 million+ year-old brain structure known as the hippocampi.
Shaped like two forward pointing horseshoes, this structure is responsible for both short-term memory processing and spatial mapping of our perceived physical space.
In the last three decades or so, modern communications technology has afforded us with a new level of personal convenience. Yet at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be bringing any concomitant increase in spiritual wisdom. Indeed, legendary Brave New World sci-fi author Aldous Huxley once wrote: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
So why is that? The old phrase “haste makes waste” sheds some insight into that, especially when it comes to how our human brains work. Buried deep within our skulls is a 100 million+ year-old brain structure known as the hippocampi.
Shaped like two forward pointing horseshoes, this structure is responsible for both short-term memory processing and spatial mapping of our perceived physical space.
BRAIN SCIENCE
Back in 2010, brain scientist Sébastien Royer and colleagues discovered that the neurons found in the bottom prong of this structure had two distinct tracts. The top “ventral” tract was responsible for emotional information processing while the bottom “dorsal” one was responsible for spatial orientation and mental mapping.
What this finding implied was that our mind toggles between the two processing frames of reference to create a composite impression or understanding. What it told us is that our emotions are always encoded, experienced and remembered within a given context.
If nothing else, their finding helps to explain why something will strike us as uproariously funny in a given context, yet when we try to convey that to someone else who fails to see the humour, we say with a tinge of exasperation in our voices: “You had to be there.”
But here’s the thing: That same information processing feature in our heads can also create some very serious blind spots in both the quality of our thinking and our oft underused feeling function. [The feeling function is critical to our ability to both empathize and/or relate to another in terms of our compassion.]
Though so-called mirror neurons located in a higher region of our brains also perform a similar relating-to-other function, the hippocampi are more primary to how we process our world.
What’s especially important to know here is that some individuals are more inclined to process information in a more emotional way, while others, in a more emotionally devoid “matter-of-fact” way. And if you were to ask whether this very same information divide reflects the way females and males respectively see the world, you would not be wrong.
Later research by Mather and Lighthall from 2012 looking at risk and reward behaviours between females and males, not only showed that males took higher risks than females, but that the brain regions each sex used to assessed risk and reward also completely differed.
Males used more of their left insula, an area of the brain that assesses gain vs. loss; while females used more of the left putamen, an area associated with integrating sensorimotor, cognitive, motivational and emotional signals.
What all this suggests is that males are more prone to being more emotionally compromised when assessing the wider risks of their actions, while females are more attuned to integrating them in this regard. However, this also means that females are more prone to being emotionally overwhelmed when faced with high risk or high stress or fear-eliciting situations. This can cause them to hesitate and/or fail to take action when action is needed.
So what does all that mean for us in a world inundated with “modern communications” technology? Well for starters, echoing Aldous Huxley’s prescient quote, the always at-our-fingertips tech amplifies the tendency for brains to act more reflexively and less reflectively, which is to say, more unconsciously and not as wisely. Among youth, this is a real problem, since their impulse-control brain circuits are not fully wired until their early 20s. Yet the convenience of wireless tech also amplifies the differences in the way each sex reacts to thinking about information.
SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS
All of this has massive social implications, especially when it comes to the way we process information. One example of that is how we fail to comprehend the real health-compromising effects of non-ionizing radiation on living biological systems.
Here’s a case in point: In November of 2019, UBC’s student paper, The Ubyssey, printed a story about corporately-sponsored UBC researchers turning on a 5G wireless network on campus. Yet nowhere did the story mention whether the researchers or the university administration obtained the prior informed consent of either the student body or the unionized university staff members as a whole.
Nor was any mention made of any of the thousands of scientifically-documented health harms associated with exposures from existing microwave radio-frequency radiation (RFR), let alone the far more energetic 5G millimetre wave emissions, which have yet to be properly safety tested in North America. (Two studies from the 1970s were conducted in the former Soviet Union, both showing various forms of harm.)
Indeed, millimetre-wave technology is used by modern militaries around the world as non-lethal “active denial weapons” which can cause adversaries to drop their weapons and flee the battlefield.
So how is it that The Ubyssey’s news story failed to assess the wider scientific and ethical context? Is it the simple fact that The Ubyssey is just a university student paper? Maybe. But it’s worth pointing out that after surveying the coverage of the 5G topic by every other major Canadian mainstream newspaper and broadcaster such as the CBC, none appears to be engaged in any similar measure of journalistic due diligence. How is that even possible?
Existing ethical journalism practices generally require an appropriate balanced assessment of all the facts, but it seems something has seriously gone off the rails.
Could it be that we humans are actually being sabotaged by the information processing limitations found in our own brains? If so, then we really do need to give our heads a metaphoric shake because these short-comings appear to be perpetuating, if not accelerating moral and physical injury to us all.
Paul H. LeMay is an independent science writer specializing in mind-brain science and is the co-author of Primal Mind, Primal Games: Why We Do What We Do, which examines the basis of the victimization process endemic to our culture.
Paul H. LeMay, Vancouver