? David Sylvian: Silver Moon | Main | We're here. We're superpowered. Get used to it. ?
June 01, 2006
Disinhibiting stimuli
I was on the return leg of a shopping trip to Yorkville when I spotted a woman wearing a tinfoil hat. My first thought was to wonder what she was doing in Yorkville and not the Annex. My second was to ask her if it really did cut off those pesky VALIS satellite signals. Unfortunately, she was on her cell phone and I was reluctant to interrupt. Fortunately, MIT tinfoil hat research answers the question for me (via Tim Blair).
Conspiracy theorists, beware: That aluminum foil beanie—headwear believed, since at least the 1950s, to stop brain-control rays—may make it easier for The Man to read your mind, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad students. Inspired by fringe beliefs that invasive radio signals can probe citizens’ thoughts and that wearing foil on your head may fend them off, an experiment by four Ph.D. candidates found that certain key frequencies—owned by the Feds, naturally—are actually enhanced by such “protection.”
Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 1, 2006 09:43 AM
