Media environment, technology alter human perception, attention span: Media ecologist

James Martinez, a US media ecologist, has said that human perception is altered through media environments and that is how intelligence agencies utilized technology to alter and steer human perception and attention span.

Martinez made the comments in an exclusive interview with Press TV broadcast on Sunday, while expounding on a secret LSD-fuelled experiment, known as MK-Ultra, led by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the 50s and 60s.

“Human perception is altered through media environments, such as the television, books, and the computer; any media extension of the human psyche alters it and all intelligence agencies figured it all out in the 50s, and slowly utilized technology to alter and steer human perception and attention span, because now we are an attention economy,” Martinez said.

During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies, which according to Martinez was very successful.

“We knew in the early 90s when they began to outer the inner of the central nervous system outside of the body via the computer – the media extension of our central nervous system or handheld computers – that was the beginning of the end, and human perception would be altered forever because of that.”

He hastened to add it was all planned quite some time ago by the military-industrial complex and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development organization within the United States Department of Defense.

“We knew in 1990 that free will, freedom of speech, and cognitive liberty would be the biggest issues on the planet and this is what we are at today because we are now in the process of merging our central nervous system with technology. And this is as part of a very dangerous place for the whole human race at this point,” he warned.

To counter these mind control techniques, which according to Martinez were utilized against the public to capture America and then the world, he proposes what he calls a “media fast by design” and “unplugging” from everything.

“And that is what you need to do to be able to survive in a post-information environment where everything now is inverted, information is moving in the speed of light. Everything changes every second, human perception is being engineered and designed,” he said.

If you do not address these issues, he continued, you are not going to have freedom, and you are not going to have a right to rule and create the future that you want.

“This is the crossroads of either the beginning and liberation of the human condition or the complete total slavery of it. So I would suggest everybody start to examine it and take a real close look at it and start taking action from themselves,” Martinez concluded.

MKUltra: CIA Operation Mind Control

Around 2 a.m on the morning of Saturday, November 28, 1953, something rather strange happened at a New York City hotel.

MK-ULTRA was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer spent several years investigating the program.

Kinzer describes the operation as the “most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control.”

Some of Gottlieb’s experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines.

Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer’s research.

The project ended in 1973, when Richard Helms, the then director of the CIA, was removed by President Richard Nixon.

Almost all records of MK-ULTRA were destroyed. However, it turns out that there were some records that had not been destroyed which were enough to reconstruct some of what Gottlieb did.

Like their counterparts at the CIA, DARPA-funded researchers have spent decades investigating how the human mind can be altered. In 1965, DARPA launched the project Pandora, which studied the possibility of using microwave radiation to control human behavior. The project reportedly ended in 1969. But DARPA’s investigation of how machines can affect and possibly control the brain continues to this day.

Today some believe that while brain-machine interface (BMI) has many applications in both civilian and military life, they could also be used by DARPA as a new form of mind control.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.ir