Electromagnetic Cause Of Shell Shock

[FrankM]

A recent news article stated that the cause of shell shock had been identified. They identified the unique brain damage associated with the brain damage but did not identify the mechanism that caused it. Shell shock was quite prevalent in WWI, but not as prevalent in WWII, the Korean War and in Vietnam, at least for U.S. soldiers. The erratic emotional responses that are characteristic of a shell shock victim has reappeared in recent military engagements. There is a specific thread that links the cause of shell shock. Chemical explosions create a intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The military head protection gear is the common link. EMPs do not readily penetrate steel. http://vixra.org/abs/1501.0196 The paper is work in progress and a number of changes have been made, and these may or may not have been updated on the viXra site.

[Eclogite]

I was under the impression that shell shock was the old name for what we now post-traumatic stress disorder (PSD), a consequence of the exposure to the horrors of the battlefield. You appear to know something of the matter, so would you expand a little and discuss the relationship between PSD and shell shock?

[FrankM]

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the new term which includes multiple traumas that occur to members of the U.S. military. I note the difference in the report. I refer to shell shock as a hard trauma, there is physical damage, whereas others can be labelled as a soft trauma when there is no physical damage. I talked to some individuals at a VA facility recently about the issue and I have revised my viXra article based upon the comments I received. I just received notification that my revision has been posted on viXra.

edited - Took the doube-P out of PTSD. My revised paper will not be posted on viXra until tomorrow at the earliest.

Edited January 26, 2015 by FrankM

[CraigD]

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the new term which includes multiple traumas that occur to members of the U.S. military. I note the difference in the report. I refer to shell shock as a hard trauma, there is physical damage

You appear to be using your own definitions for these terms, Frank, rather than those used in professional or encyclopedic literature.

 

The Wikipedia article shell shock describes it and its history of use with the following

Shell shock was a term coined to describe the reaction of some soldiers in World War I to the trauma of battle

and

The term "shell shock" came into use to reflect an assumed link between the symptoms and the effects of explosions from artillery shells. The term was first published in 1915 in an article in The Lancet by Charles Myers

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), while not as old as the now deprecated term “shell shock”, is about 35 years old, appearing in the popular Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders its third revision (DSM-III), which was published in 1980. This US VA webpage gives a brief history of the diagnosis.

 

Koliatsos, Ryu, Xu, Pletnikova, Leri, Eberhart and Troncoso, of Johns Hopkins, who’s research in the subject of the independent.co.uk news article you include in your paper’s references, do use the term “shell shock” (enclosed in quotation marks) to refer to the distinct honeycomb patters they have found in molecular level probes of the brains of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans who survived blasts from IEDs, then died later of other causes. However, to avoid confusion with the 100 year old term, I recommend you use the other term they do, “blast neurotrauma”. (source: this 14 Jan 2015 Johns Hopkins news release)

 

The main claims in your paper “The Electromagnetic Cause of Shell Shock”,

Every munitions explosion emits a broadband pulse of electromagnetic energy. The electromagnetic energy pulse reaches the victim before the compression and particle components of the explosion. The characteristics of the head protection used by soldiers explains why the particular brain injury is as prevalent today as it was in World War I, but without the massive artillery barrages. The victims are receiving what can be termed an electric shock frontal lobotomy.

aren’t supported by any of the references you provide, or to the best of my knowledge, any scientific literature. Iraq war IEDs are usually improvised from artillery shells and land mines in which the explosives are contained in metal casing designed to enhance their effectiveness, either through fragmentation or by concentrating the blast in a narrow direction, and typically produce little visible spectrum EM radiation. There are studies (for example, this 1967 US Naval Ordinance Lab paper) of the spectra of the unenclosed explosion of high explosive like those used in IEDs. Although these spectra didn’t much follow that of a black body, they were bounded by it, so have little EM radiation outside of the visible band. Conventional explosives produce practically no current-inducing electromagnetic pulse.

 

Because IEDs are little different than the explosive shells used in earlier wars, I expect that the microscopic blast neurotrauma discovered by Koliatsos was present in veterans of wars for the past several centuries, though unless a well-preserved brain of a well-documented survivor of a blast from earlier wars could be examined using these new techniques, we can only guess that this is so.

[FrankM]

Craig, thanks for doing a lot of background research on the shell shock issue.

 

I look at the conclusions reached by researchers before the 1980s with skepticism, as the instruments available that could detect and properly record broadband microsecond EMP characteristics were not readily available. The conclusions reached in the 1967 US Naval Ordnance Lab (NOLC) paper would have to be tempered by limitations on the EM spectrum that could be detected and recorded at that time; I worked for that organization during that time period. The detection instruments that led to the conclusions made in the Glasstone and Nolan 1977 references in the wiki article were slightly better than those available to NOLC in 1967. Please note that I question the conclusions made in the LANL report because the references were all before 1992. It was in the mid-1990s that gamma and x ray emissions were identified in high altitude EM events; consider the instruments currently used to record the EM spectrum of sprites.

 

Every decade we get slightly better detection and recording instruments, thus one must be careful when making broad conclusions that are based upon incomplete information, the limitations of the measurement instruments of a given era.

 

I believe my term hard trauma is an appropriate description to differentiate the differences between other types of trauma where the victim has no obvious physical damage. Look how long it took to find the honeycomb type damage related to shell shock.

 

I consider my shell shock paper a work in progress. I am receiving other comments and I will revise my paper if I consider them technically relevant. I do intend to include the John Hopkins University (JHU) news release; it was not mentioned on the professors JHU page. I will not revise my paper "ad infinitum." I suspect my paper will prompt some reexamination of the EM spectrum produced by chemical explosions, all types.

 

 

[pgrmdave]

FrankM - in order to have a good discussion I think that we're going to need to all be on the same page as to what you're talking about with "shell shock". The term as used as psychological jargon in the specific is simply an outdated term for what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. However, you appear to be talking about a subset of PTSD. Without knowing exactly how you're defining "shell shock", it's difficult for any real conversation to be had. I am interested in what you have to say, but without a working definition of shell shock it's going to simply be us talking past each other.

[CraigD]

FrankM - in order to have a good discussion I think that we're going to need to all be on the same page as to what you're talking about with "shell shock".

Frank’s paper has as a reference a alternative news article about the research described in

this 14 Jan 2015 Johns Hopkins news release, which has a bulleted “fast fact” stating

The Johns Hopkins-led research team may have found the signature of “shell shock,” or blast neurotrauma, a mysterious ailment that has afflicted soldiers since World War I.

so I’m pretty sure that’s what Frank means by the phrase.

 

This research, which is based on microscopic examination of brains of bomb blast survivors who later die of other causes, described these microscopic

 

It’s interesting and important medical research, because it suggests that, because it strongly suggests PTSD and related mental illnesses in survivors of bomb blasts have are due in some or large part to physical brain damage, not entirely, as many therapists have assumed, anxieties, fears, and social alienation. I don’t think there is any known treatment for these kinds of brain injuries, but simply knowing that a physical injury is involved can be therapeutically valuable, if for no other reason than to reassure the patient that their condition is not “their fault” due to a personality or ethical failing.

 

None of this research shares Frank’s claim that these brain injuries are caused by radiation or strong changing magnetic fields (EMPs), or that changes in the kinds of helmets worn by soldiers have made them more likely.

 

It does suggest that these injuries may be reduced by improvements in helmets and other equipment, and new battlefield medicine techniques.

[FrankM]

Craig, thank you again for your well balanced comments.

 

The John Hopkins newsletter mentioned that the professor involved in the study had published a paper in Acta Neuropathologica Communications, an open access publication. The report is also available in epub format.

 

http://www.actaneurocomms.org/content/pdf/s40478-014-0153-3.pdf

 

 

None of this research shares Frank’s claim that these brain injuries are caused by radiation or strong changing magnetic fields (EMPs), or that changes in the kinds of helmets worn by soldiers have made them more likely.

 

 

 

EMP refers to electromagnetic pulse. It will need to be established whether the electric field, the magnetic field or both, of the propagating EMP waves are responsible for creating the damage to the axonal fibers. It is a moving magnetic field that creates a current in a conducting structure.

 

Unfortunately, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) report, cited in my paper, does not expand on the statement The emission of electromagnetic radiation from a chemical explosion is well established. Almost all munitions detonations create a prodigious amount of EM energy in the form of light and heat. It is unreasonable to assume that the high rate of change motion of electrons and ions created by the exothermic reaction do not produce broadband EM radiation. In a revision to my paper, I quoted a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) article that stated,

In the brief instant of a high-explosive detonation, some remarkable events take place: the shock wave produces pressure up to 500,000 times that of Earth's atmosphere, the detonation wave travels as fast as 10 kilometers per second, temperatures can soar to 5,500 kelvins, and power approaches 20 billion watts per square centimeter.

The report did not distinguish between how much of the 20 billion watts was due to EM or mechanical work. The 5,500 kelvins are referring to heat, an EM emission.

 

A steel helmet will seriously attenuate an EMP, but a composite helmet will provide little attenuation.

Edited January 31, 2015 by FrankM

[FrankM]

When I reviewed the LANL report, I found this statement, "The field components are transverse and the radiation pattern is

independent of r." If the sensor antennas LANL used are all oriented for receiving transverse modes that is exactly what one will expect when a signal is or is not detected. An explosion is a massive cloud of agitated electrons and ions, very unlike the method of using a conducting wire to create a propagating EM wave. It is the motion of charged particles that creates a propagating EM wave. All charged particles are not created equal. The following is a question I have submitted to two different IEEE editors-in-chief, "Does the magnetic moment of electrons and ions influence the polarization of propagated electromagnetic fields?"

 

I have submitted that question to knowledgeable individuals outside of IEEE, and so far I have a uniform answer. I have one editors answer. What is yours?

[FrankM]

I have found reports that identify the EM frequencies produced by a chemical explosion. I have revised my original paper to include this information.

http://vixra.org/abs/1502.0196

The brain damage produced by a cell phone is covered in my new version, see ref. (11). Is the damage identified in the Neuropathologica publication, ref. (4) equivalent what is shown in ref. (11)? I don't know how to compare the human brain damage to that of a rat. There should be more attenuation going through a human skull as compared to a rat, but an explosion puts out a lot more EM power than a cell phone. When referring to microwave radiation, the JRE report cited in my new version stated, "The intensity of this radiation much surpasses intensity of thermal radiation.” The EM intensity occurring in an explosion needs to be measured for specific spectrum bands.

 

The frequencies detected kept getting higher and higher as the various reports became more recent; there were improvements in the frequency detection instruments.

 

Everyone should learn why the term shell shock was banned by the Brits after WW1. Read ref (5), titled, "Traumatic Brain Injury, Shell Shock, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the Military —Past, Present, and Future"

[LisaL]

I don't think so, I've had many MRI scans that didn't short-circuit my brain. Human brains aren't desktop computers.

There must have been some advanced technology in WW1 if they had hybrid chemical/EMP grenades back then. 

Edited March 15, 2015 by LisaL

[FrankM]

MRI deals with hydrogen atoms and does not produce a broadband electromagnetic pulse as does a chemical explosion. Please read the paper "The Electromagnetic Cause of Shell Shock." vixra.org 1502.0196