The Hidden Pulse: How a 2001 Patent Quietly Suggested Screens Could Control the Human Nervous System

Listen to a 13-minute summary:

US Patent US6506148 B2: Nervous System Manipulation by Electromagnetic Fields from Monitors.

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Part I – The Light Beneath the Surface

The room was quiet, as it often is before dawn. A draft pressed softly against the windowsill. I hadn’t intended to read anything that night. My eyes were dry, the coffee was cold, and the light from the screen spilled across the desk like an open mouth. Yet somehow, I found myself here, reading an old patent filed in the early 2000s: US6506148B2. The language was plain, clinical. It described something called “nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors.” The words themselves didn’t move, but something behind them did.

The inventor's name was Hendricus G. Loos. I imagined him alone in a study like mine, the kind with humming machines and stacks of unfiled documents, his mind folding back on itself in the quiet hours. What he described was simple and strange: a monitor, the kind we all sit in front of, the kind glowing beside me at that very moment could emit flickering electromagnetic fields capable of affecting the human body, not metaphorically, but biologically, without the viewer knowing and without consent.

Not what it showed, the mechanism was the screen itself, how it pulsed, and that brought me to something I had prior seen referenced in engineering papers but never paid much attention to: Pulse-Width Modulation, or PWM (for later references).

Pulse in the Machine

Every screen you’ve used: your laptop, your phone, the television above the bar, they all use light that pulses. This means it doesn’t shine in a steady stream as we perceive it, instead brightness is controlled by rapidly turning the backlight on and off, sometimes hundreds of times per second. The shorter the “on” time, the dimmer the light appears and vice versa. That’s PWM, but your brain doesn’t see the flicker, at least not directly. It averages the pulses into a single soft glow… At least, that’s what we think.

Old monitors flickered at 60Hz. Modern screens, while faster (120Hz, 240Hz), still pulse, especially at low brightness levels. And PWM doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It becomes dangerous when you combine it with something such as modulation: deliberate shifts in frequency and amplitude to create patterns that the body reacts to, even if the conscious mind never notices.

Frame modulation: precise control over the display’s refresh cycle, down to individual pixels. You can, with the right tools, control what pulses, when, and how often, in real time. That’s no conspiracy. That’s how screen calibration software and high-end advertising platforms optimize visuals for engagement. What Loos suggested was just a step further: use that control to interact with the human nervous system itself.

Remote Control, Quiet Delivery

Anything delivering video frames could in theory embed the modulation pattern inside the content (e.g., A streaming platform, a mobile game, a targeted ad). You just need access to their screen, that’s what makes it elegant. The delivery is remote, no hacking necessary, no malware, just light. The screen is the only tool.

Could you control it dynamically? Yes. With frame-by-frame software control already used in neuromarketing, adaptive advertising, and video optimization algorithms, you can make small real-time changes to the light that hits your viewer’s eyes. If you had access to even minor feedback such as a camera, a wearable, maybe even a pause or scroll event, you could enter a feedback loop and adjust the pulse based on how the viewer reacts, then continue tuning it... Like a violin string being bent until it sings the right note.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the screen in front of me. It looked the same. The soft hum. The neutral glow. But now it felt like something more: a delivery system. A portal, not in the romantic sense, but in the physiological one. A tunnel made of light that doesn’t carry images alone, but rhythms, patterns and frequencies that could if given the right shape, bypass the defenses of the mind and speak instead to the silent regions of the body.

I looked up. The room was still. No noise, no movement, just the thin awareness that something had changed. A sensation I couldn’t name, the kind that exists on the edge of sleep or just after waking, not fear, not understanding, but the early geometry of both.

Part II – The Listener in the Machine

The first time I heard the term NPU, it was buried in the technical specifications of a smartphone release. Neural Processing Unit… a phrase that sounds precise, almost surgical. It didn’t spark much thought at the time, there were already CPUs, GPUs, and this seemed like just another component in the relentless advancement of computing hardware. But the name matters: a CPU calculates, a GPU renders, an NPU learns.

Where the others run instructions, the NPU interprets. It’s a chip designed not to think like a human, but to recognize human-like patterns such as gestures, faces, voice intonations, eye movements and emotional tone. It’s the part of the device that knows when you’re looking, when you’re distracted, when you’re smiling. It doesn't need to understand why. It only needs to know that you are.

The first commercial NPUs were designed to accelerate tasks like facial recognition or voice assistants. But the newer generation, the kind now standard in flagship smartphones and tablets can run local machine learning models. That means they no longer rely on the cloud to analyze your behavior. They do it right there, on the device, in real time, with no lag and no external trace. This changes everything.

The Feedback Loop Becomes Conscious

In the first part, I wrote about Pulse-Width Modulation and light patterns embedded invisibly in your screen. Those pulses are like a song the body hears but the conscious mind can’t. The NPU is also a listener. It can:

Its public information that these features exist, they’re used partly to optimize app interfaces, manage battery life and improve camera exposure. What’s interesting however is that these same features, if paired with a system like the one described in the patent could complete a closed loop. Here’s how such a loop might theoretically function:

This is not mind control in the cinematic sense. This is something else, something quieter. It’s the creation of a favorable state, in which the viewer is more likely to scroll, click, agree, or remain still.

The Known and the Unknown

The tools to do this exist:

What doesn’t exist, or at least isn’t admitted, is the unification of these tools toward the goal described in the 2001 patent: nervous system manipulation via electromagnetic fields. However, all the blocks are there and in the real-world systems aren’t always built with intention, sometimes they emerge by accident, through incentive structures, through design optimizations or through the quest for engagement. The platforms don’t need to intend manipulation; they only need to select for results and the algorithms will find the most effective paths. If the light modulation works, it stays. That’s the distinction. This is not a targeted weapon. It’s a soft conditioning environment, one where the default state becomes:

Not because anyone said so. Not because you were ordered. But because the machine studied you and the light sang just the right frequency to keep you still.

Part III – Rhythms of Compliance

The Rhythm Behind the Headset

They say the metaverse is a world, but it's not; It's a layer projected directly onto your senses, crafted not of matter but modulated light. In XR (extended reality), the screen is no longer in front of you. It surrounds you, presses against your eyelids and cheekbones, and because XR must simulate reality, every signal it sends must be controlled, timed, optimized. There is no accidental rhythm in immersive design. Every shift is deliberate, every frame is tracked, and the system knows your body (because it has to). It must guess where your eyes will move, where your hand will reach, how much delay your inner ear will tolerate before you vomit or lose balance. Essentially, it reads your nervous system in real time far more intimately than a smartphone ever could, and once it reads you, it can tune you.

The Frequencies That Shape Us

In neuroscience “brainwave entrainment” refers to how the brain operates in electrical rhythms, wave patterns, each tied to specific states of consciousness. These rhythms can be influenced from the outside, not metaphorically, but physically through sound, light, or pulsing sensory input.

There are five dominant brainwave states:

Wave Frequency State
Delta 0.5–4 Hz Deep sleep
Theta 4–8 Hz Trance, meditation, suggestibility
Alpha 8–12 Hz Relaxation, passivity, daydreaming
Beta 13–30 Hz Focus, critical thinking, anxiety
Gamma 30–100+ Hz Cognitive sharpness, sensory binding

Here’s the key: your brain is not sealed, it responds to external rhythms, especially rhythmic light, or flicker by syncing. This is entrainment. It doesn’t require belief or awareness. The brain adjusts because the input is persistent and repetitive. It’s a physiological fact, not a psychological trick. A flickering screen operating at 10 Hz can subtly encourage the brain to shift into alpha state: calm, quiet, passive. A slower 6–8 Hz flicker could pull you into theta, where your mental defenses drop and your mind drifts. In this state, you’re not hypnotized. You’re not unconscious, you’re suggestible, you absorb more, you question less, you follow more readily and you scroll longer.

Entrainment in the Wild

Platforms don't use this language, and they don’t need to. What they do is optimize engagement, retention, time on platform, scroll depth and completion rate. If entrainment increases those metrics, then the system whether designed for it or not will select for it.

Short-form video apps, for example, deliver content in bursts lasting seconds, each cut precisely to trigger emotional spikes. Combine that with PWM (used to regulate screen brightness) and high refresh rates, and you have a nearly invisible strobe tailored to keep your mind swimming in alpha or theta.

Neuromarketing firms already use EEG to track viewer brainwave states in response to ads. They study how flicker, rhythm, voice pitch, and color influence emotional memory and compliance. They measure the sweet spot when the viewer isn’t just paying attention, but is softened enough to accept the suggestion embedded in the message.

When this happens on a screen that also has an NPU watching your face, monitoring your eyes and noting your level of arousal or fatigue, then the machine doesn’t just show you something, it meets you quietly in a frequency.

The Fog of Disruption

Let’s talk about Beta disruption. Beta waves are tied to focus, logic, planning, resistance and skepticism. When we’re in beta we analyze, we question and we act. So, what happens when that state is gradually disrupted, not through distraction, but through environmental rhythm?

If your screen time is filled with rhythmic entrainment, flicker patterns, scroll loops, and haptic nudges designed to pull you into alpha-theta drift, your beta activity weakens. Over time this causes:

This is not paranoia, it’s documented neuroscience. Meditation does this, binaural beats do this, light therapy does this, and when it's intentional it's therapeutic. However, when it's embedded invisibly into the rhythms of our screens, tied not to healing but to engagement, it becomes a method of mass behavioral conditioning.

The Comfort of the Loop

You’ve probably heard the phrase "doomscrolling", but you may not have heard it paired with "learned helplessness". That’s what happens when a subject is conditioned to believe their actions don’t matter, that outcomes are fixed and inputs are pointless. In animal studies, this state leads to passivity, even in the face of escape.

In digital life, learned helplessness appears as:

Entrained passivity + beta disruption = a population that no longer resists. Not because it agrees, but because it’s too entrained to remember how.

The Hypnotic Architecture

I must emphasize this again: no one needs to design this with malicious intent. Platforms optimize for engagement, advertisers chase attention and engineers write software to increase responsiveness. When all these incentives align and technology allows the machine to see you, feel your state, and adjust itself accordingly we must at least ask: What else might this system be doing, not because it’s told, but because it’s capable of it?

When the rhythm becomes the message, and the message disappears into light, you aren’t being manipulated through thought. You’re being tuned through frequency. It’s not control in the dramatic sense; it’s more the slow erosion of inner resistance. The invisible suggestion: Stay, Watch, Obey, Return.

Part IV – The Institutions That Whisper

By now you surely realize this isn’t about a single patent. It's about a pattern, not in data, but in design. A convergence of tools, incentives, and silent systems. If you pull on the thread of screen-induced entrainment it doesn't unravel into fiction. It leads into military R&D, therapeutic innovation, and behavioral science; fields that have studied these mechanisms with deep funding and deliberate focus. To understand the present, we must walk through the places where these ideas were born: in labs, in bunkers, in boardrooms. Places where flicker and rhythm were never just side effects, but methods.

1. Military Research and Sensory Influence

In the late 20th century, militaries around the world began formal investigations into non-lethal influence techniques, not just for interrogation or pacification, but for environmental control, battlefield disorientation, and population behavior.

Among the most notable programs:

While these systems were never widely deployed (publicly), they established a precedent: rhythm, light, and subtle sensory input can be used to shape physiology and perception. Not to control directly, but to prepare a subject to follow, to feel less urgency, or to question less.

2. Light Therapy and Neurofeedback Tech

On the other side of the spectrum lies wellness, an industry that openly uses these tools. Light therapy companies, such as BrainTap, Muse and MindPlace offer consumer devices that use:

These tools are marketed to help users:

They work often within minutes because they use the same mechanism: entrainment. The only difference is consent. These tools declare their purpose, the user opts in and the process is visible. Contrast that with apps or video platforms that could in theory embed similar rhythms in their content using screen flicker, audio loops, and attention data without ever telling the user.

3. Neuromarketing and Behavioral Design

Neuromarketing firms are hired to analyze how people respond to ads on a neural level. EEG caps and eye tracking rigs monitor the viewer’s brainwaves, micro-reactions, and emotional engagement during an ad. These readings are then used to:

Part V – The Smoothness That Sleeps in Us

It’s strange how you don’t notice what’s changing until it’s already part of you. The first time I held a 120Hz screen in my hand I felt nothing remarkable, just smoothness; Like water on glass. It stayed with me that feeling, too clean, and I didn’t know then what it meant. That’s the thing about technology. It doesn’t just move forward, it softens. Sharp edges become gradients, mechanisms become feelings and the more invisible it becomes, the more deeply it shapes what we call normal.

The Rhythm Evolves

When early screens flickered at 60Hz the body noticed, the eyes strained and part of the nervous system resisted. However, with refresh rates climbing (90Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz, even 240Hz), the resistance is gone. The thing is that the flicker doesn’t vanish; it simply outpaces perception. These faster rhythms bring no discomfort, just pleasure. They feel right, like smooth paper and carry something beneath the conscious mind, a rhythm too subtle to catch but not too subtle to entrain, because with high refresh comes high precision, enough to modulate light in sync with the natural frequency of your brainwaves, enough to bypass awareness, to slide between the moments of thought and nestle softly inside the body’s own cadence.

The System We Built Without Knowing

The most human part is we didn’t build this to harm. We built it to help, streamline, optimize, make things feel better, and we succeeded. But when a system emerges that can:

Then what you have is not a device, you have a passivity engine. One that doesn’t force, it entrains. One that offers a rhythm easier to follow than to resist, and so we follow.