Found two relatively new science articles that inspired some Delta Green ideas. I am also including a declassified article from the Department of Defense from October 1966 on the subject of hypnosis, along with my thoughts on a recent review (2024) on the possible mechanisms of hypnosis, because why not.
The subheading reads, “A brain–computer interface decodes in near-real time the imagined speech of people who have difficulty enunciating words.”
But is that really what the research news shows? What defines “imagined speech” and how is it measured? Is it really thoughts that are being read by the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)?
To drill down and answer some of these questions I investigated the original research paper in Cell that the science news story is based off of. The title of the research paper is Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses by Kunz et al.
In the paper, four people with specific BCIs called "BrainGate2" who also had trouble speaking, one because of a stroke and three because of motor neuron disease, had microelectrodes placed in their brain's motor cortex. The BrainGate2 implant was able to pick up words and numbers thought, by the patients, during "inner speech", as well as during perceived speech and silent reading.
In addition, the researchers used AI "...to recognize phonemes, the smallest units of speech, in the neural recordings. The team used language models to stitch these phonemes together to form words and sentences in real time, drawn from a vocabulary of 125,000 words."
The researchers stated the following about decoding sentences thought by participants with the real-time inner-speech decoder when describing data in Figure S5:
“To further investigate scenarios in which decoding private inner speech may be possible, participants were prompted to reflect on verbal or autobiographical details (e.g., “think about your favorite quote from a movie” versus “think about your favorite food”) or to “clear your mind.” Neural activity during thinking was decoded offline using the real-time inner-speech decoder from the same day. Significantly more words were decoded during verbal thought prompt responses than when prompted to “clear your mind” (Figure S5). Although most decoded sentences were largely gibberish with occasional plausible phrases, we refrain from reporting the specific outputs given the uncertainty about their representativeness of the participants’ actual thoughts.”
So, if the AI is trained correctly and the implant is in the right place (motor cortex) then inner speech of the subject can be translated into sentences in real time. Mind reading. At least of surface thoughts.
In the Delta Green world, one can imagine this technology, or its next iteration, would be great when paired with enhanced interrogation techniques on a recalcitrant human subject.
I can imagine two Delta Green scenarios featuring the mind-reading BrainGate 2 implant. In the first scenario, some shadowy DoD project is being implemented overseas in a warzone or black site, using terrorists or enemy combatants as test subjects for improving the device by forcible implantation. Perhaps the researchers unwittingly unleash the undiscovered Pineal gland in one of the unwilling subjects and he makes a deal with the Entities he can now perceive. Blood and chaos ensue in the overseas black site and Delta Green needs to clean up the area now haunted by extradimensional invisible creatures (see the HPL short story From Beyond) and figure out what happened.
In the second scenario, I am taking a page from Cyberpunk Red or Shadowrun corporate wars. One could imagine March Tech already has competing brain-to-speech technology from Mi-go braincase physical examples and research. Perhaps March Tech was waiting to introduce mind reading implants to secure lucrative DoD government contracts but the researchers behind the BrainGate 2 implant formed a corporation and just gained first mover advantage. Perhaps March Tech taps Delta Green agents in The Program to go investigate the BrainGate 2 implant research corporation.
Or perhaps on the other side of the equation, March Tech sent out security from the paramilitary group the Breckenridge Corporation (see Handler’s Guide page 98) to suppress or destroy their mundane competitor's research. In this case Delta Green could be brought in to investigate the mundane competitor’s mind-reading research to see if there is any Mythos taint, and then backtrack on the Breckenridge raid to find March Tech is up to the real Mythos research.
Great. From the Department of New and Interesting Ways to Surveil Everyone comes this science article about how your breath can also convey your physical and mental state. Like anxiety or depression. The Nature news article was based on the paper in the journal Current Biology titled Humans have nasal respiratory fingerprints.
97 participants wore a nasal respiratory device and researchers tracked their breathing over 24 hours. After a machine-learning algorithm was trained on the breathing data, and a second measurement was taken and analyzed, the algorithm could identify people from their breath patterns with 96.8% accuracy.
Now how could this information be useful in the covert world of Delta Green? Imagine a subsection of March Tech that functions like Q Division in the James Bond world and gives Delta Green agents of The Program experimental devices for surveillance/counter-surveillance. Spy-tech if you will.
Now imagine a contact lens generated by this Q Division that automatically calculates breathing patterns of people you focus on and provides a digital readout to the wearer. It could identify people the agent has already seen before, cutting through disguises, or perhaps give the agent a mechanical bonus to social checks because the agent is informed if the subject is depressed or anxious based on their nasal breathing patterns. I could see such a device being used by the CIA or cutting-edge Delta Green agents in good standing with the Program.
When I bounced this science news story off of members of the Sci-Fi RPG Collective discord, a short scenario idea was suggested by Sammy J.
What if, in the race to find the most secure biometrics to replace password logins, nasal respiratory breathprints were used by a startup company as the method to replace personal data identifiers. The idea being that the raw data for these breathprints could be stored in such a way that it would be very difficult to match a breathprint with an individual without specific proprietary analytic software. The startup company acquires investors and establishes itself in a US small city because they claim if there is a data breech of the breathprint data it would be almost impossible to doxx their users.
Now what if the startup founders had found an ancient Mythos manuscript that described cultivation of the human soul through the study of breath. The manuscript mentions Qigong and other breathing techniques and capturing the soul through knowing how someone breathes.
The Mythos-minded startup company, with their breathprint data, develops or implements a ritual to steal soul energy (POW in Delta Green mechanics) subtly and gently from those members who use their own breathprint as a biometric password. Think of this as a penny rounding scheme done en mass to all individuals enrolled in the company’s breathprint database. A penny rounding scheme is a popular urban legend (for example seen in the movies Office Space and Superman 3) in which a programmer alters a program at a bank so it diverts fractions of a cent from every transaction to another account so he can collect it later.
Where the Mythos-minded company is storing the soul-energy or for what ends is left as an exercise for the reader. However, Delta Green could detect something nefarious is going on in the city where the breathprints are being stored by the company by identifying a measured uptick in suicides and insanity incidents caused by the massive POW fractional drain on the population. Enter your favorite group of Delta Green agents. Perhaps the agents could diagnose the source of the widespread Mythos malaise by interviewing afflicted people and uncovering common images in dreams about maze-like office corridors, incense filled server rooms, a humming radio tower on top of the Mythos corporate building or other evocative images that point to the epicenter.
Thanks to Sammy J, Mangoes and MobiusTrobius on the Sci-Fi RPG Collective discord for discussion and feedback for these ideas.
Hypnosis in Intelligence
A declassified confidential report from October 1966 indicates that the Department of Defense (DoD), was researching hypnosis and how to use it to control human behavior in the context of warfare and intelligence work. Their exploration had two goals: to identify if hypnosis could be used to strengthen the will of captives and if it could be used to “gain compliance from otherwise uncooperative persons.”
The document starts out with an exploration of the history of hypnosis that references Anton Mesmer’s work as “mesmerism” (Mesmer first explored animal magnetism in 1774), goes into the methods of inducing trance including waking hypnosis and a focus on the “Sensorimotor Method” attributed to the psychiatrist Harold Rosen, discusses posthypnotic suggestion, and autosuggestion.
The document is 33 pages and I will leave mining all the details of hypnosis as an operational aide to readers in the audience. I will mention, there is an interesting section on hypnosis and drugs as well as a few paragraphs on the “defensive uses of hypnosis” and one section on hypnosis to enhance recall.
What’s important for the next paper I will discuss is that as early as 1966, it was recognized that a hypnotized subject under trance (called somnambulism in the DoD report) could respond positively to the following suggestions: catalepsy and rigidity, a positive hallucination (subject sees persons or objects who are not there), negative hallucinations (subject fails to see persons or objects present), analgesia (inability to feel pain), and amnesia for events in hypnosis.
Since hypnosis is pretty outside my field, and I was curious as to what hypnosis researchers thought, I did some digging on pubmed as to the current mechanism theorized for how hypnosis functions. I found a free, recent (2024) review article on the subject with references back to 1959. It is titled How hypnotic suggestions work – A systematic review of prominent theories of hypnosis and it is quite fascinating.
The review discusses hypnotic suggestions and presents current theories (at least 10 distinct theories including multicomponent theories) by which researchers hypothesize hypnosis works.
Several elements of hypnotic suggestion that have been researched in the literature since 2024 are discussed. I will describe just a few. The authors state that a hypnotic suggestion can be induced in a relaxed environment or during strenuous physical activity. I was not aware of the idea that hypnosis could be carried out through strenuous physical activity. It made me wonder, if one is on a triathlon, or even leading a group of military men on an extreme march, could hypnotic suggestions be implanted?
The review goes on to explain that there are three broad phases of hypnosis: an induction phase (orienting or disorienting), an intermediary phase consisting of suggestions (hypnotic or post-hypnotic suggestions), and a termination phase (de-induction).
It was then discussed that the changes that the hypnosis procedure can induce in subjects are generally only well-learned or well-known responses. This is regardless of whether the suggestion is implanted in the hypnotic or posthypnotic manner. A classical example of this from research published in the 1940s suggest that when participants think of a movement or a well-known stimulus and its effects, then the result is participants usually execute that movement thought of.
In the hypnosis nomenclature, changes in perception are commonly called “hallucinations.” Now, by examining the 1966 DoD report on hypnosis we went over the concept of positive and negative hallucinations. So that is old news to hypnosis researchers. What is new in the review, however were documented examples of positive and negative hallucinations. For example, a typical positive hallucination that can be induced is a color hallucination where subjects report seeing a grayscale in different colors when suggested to do so. An example of a negative hallucination is “the hypnosis-induced elimination or reduction of pain inflicted by noxious stimuli.”
In addition to positive and negative hallucinations, the review reports “hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestions can affect long-term memory.” Specifically posthypnotic suggestions can induce amnesia. This induced amnesia is very specific; about when, where, and how knowledge has been acquired. To me this just codifies the classical example that hypnosis could be used to implant a suggestion in the subject and then wipe or muddle the hypnotist and the hypnotic situation from the subject’s memory. At least for a time.
Hypnosis in the world of Delta Green
So, there is a lot here on hypnosis to use operationally for intelligence work or warfare in Delta Green or modern-day focused RPGs.
One of the more immediate thoughts I had for the use of hypnotism in a Delta Green game is the inclusion of inducing positive or negative hallucinations or amnesia in NPCs. A Delta Green trained hypnotist might be crucial for ensuring coverups of indemnifying evidence (that could lead back to the conspiracy) or attempting to have subjects ignore memories of traumatic supernatural events. DG hypnotists could achieve these goals by inducing negative hallucinations, in say police investigators, to coerce the subject to ignore an important name on a bit of paperwork or to suggest positive hallucinations where the subject is sure they saw a video tape even though DG teams absconded with it.
Now personally I do not think that mechanically any Sanity roll in Delta Green should be mitigated by hypnosis, or exposure to the unnatural Mythos can be “healed” by methods devised by humans, including hypnosis. The Mythos by its fundamental nature is corrosive, and humans are biologically not equipped to deal with entities from other dimensions, other parts of space, or other times. I think the Mythos impacts humanity on a genetic, atomic, or even deeper level currently unknown to science, in a way that unravels or erodes the fundamental essence of what is humanity in a person.
Regaining points of Sanity in a meager manner by a Delta Green agent going to therapy and being honest in Downtime, I see as humans telling each other lies about themselves so they can function for a little bit longer in society; not as “healing” a psychic wound with human invented psychological tricks. After all, the more in the Unnatural skill the player has mechanically, the less maximum Sanity they have; indicating that understanding the Mythos is utterly antithetical to human mental stability.
Having said all that I would find it interesting if mechanically a DG Game Master ruled that, pre-hypnotized Delta Green (or Majestic-12) agents could delay the onset of Sanity damage taken by an encounter with the Mythos, because the agents were implanted with reinforced positive and/or negative hallucinations. Your game, your rules.
In terms of using hypnosis antagonistically against a Delta Green team, I can think of two interesting examples from media. The first is the X-files episode Pusher. Incidentally Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad fame wrote this episode and it aired in 1996. In Pusher (spoilers follow), the antagonist is arrested by the police at the beginning of the show. Mysteriously, the antagonist repeatedly chants that “cerulean blue is a gentle breeze.” This subsequently causes the police car to collide with the truck which allows the antagonist to escape. The implication here is that the antagonist hypnotized the driver of the police car and his captor into a negative hallucination of not seeing a semi-trailer truck the color of “cerulean blue.”
We learn later that a brain tumor may be responsible for enhancing the antagonists’ hypnosis ability to supernatural levels, which allows him to earn a living as a hit-man by inducing people to commit suicide or homicide through suggestion. Granted this speculative use of hypnosis is not backed up by the real-life literature at all, but in the Delta Green world, fighting an antagonistic hypnotist may be an interesting change of pace for the agents.
Secondly, there is the example of the use of hypnosis in Jeff VanderMeer’s book Annihilation. Spoilers for that book follow. I cannot say if the following discussion applies to the movie Annihilation (2018), because I have not seen it. In the book, the main character the biologist increasingly becomes suspicious of her regimen of training under hypnosis that the mysterious Southern Reach organization has been subjecting her to before she started her mission into Area X. After learning she is now resistant to hypnotic suggestion, she finds evidence that her perceptions were thoroughly compromised by hypnosis (i.e. not seeing the real truth of what a tower is made out of) and she finds that her psychologist “minder” had a series of post-hypnotic suggestion keywords on her to induce paralysis, induce acceptance, compel obedience or attempt to induce immediate suicidal actions in the biologists or any other member of the team. Again, like the X-files show Pusher, we leave the world of real hypnosis research and jump into the realm of fantasy, but said fantasy is perfect for inspiration and fodder for Delta Green conspiracy-horror games.
