Hmm, What DOES Happen When People Get Microchips In Their Brains?

Now that artificial intelligence has arrived (it hasn’t) and its sad-but-inevitable replacement of useless food-eaters has begun (it hasn’t), the Cabal is sounding the preemptive alarm over the use of behavior-altering microchips manufactured by anybody else. Trust the !Scientists!! The reason they’re so excited over microchips in your brain that they’re centrally regulating them before they even exist, is only for your safety and prosperity.

Just like the Drug War. And child trafficking. And international terrorism. And secret international networks of money-laundering banks. And vaccine production.

UN warns that implanting unregulated AI chips in your brain could threaten your mental privacy

h ttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/un-warns-implanting-unregulated-ai-200300572.html

By Katie Balevic, 16 July 2023

The United Nations has raised the alarm about “potentially harmful” advances in neurotechnology, suggesting that brain implants and scans could allow artificial intelligence to infringe on private, human thoughts, according to Agence France-Presse.

Noooo, really? The Cabal will never succeed at manipulating human thoughts, God will not allow it… but manipulating human emotions is a certainty because it’s already been achieved with drugs.

As artificial intelligence enhances the neurotech field, some are urging caution. The technology has “far-reaching and potentially harmful” capabilities, Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s assistant director general for social and human sciences, told AFP.

“We are on a path to a world in which algorithms will enable us to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions, and decisions,” Ramos said, according to AFP.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the tech was “advancing at warp speed,” AFP reported.

Warp speed, he says.

The last time I heard that phrase, the people who trusted the science had their very humanity violated in ghastly ways…

While the technology can be life-altering, it may come at a cost, UN officials suggested. UNESCO spoke with Hannah Galvin, a woman with epilepsy who had a neurotech device installed in her brain to detect seizures and notify patients of when to lie down.

The device ultimately made life worse for Galvin, who said she was having as many as 100 seizures a day — which constantly activated the device.

“I felt like there was someone in my head, and it wasn’t me. And I just got more and more depressed. I didn’t like it at all,” Galvin, who eventually had the device removed, told UNESCO.

…and nothing has changed.

Why do these spiteful mutants and male feminists keep referencing Star Trek? It’s like they and I watched different shows at the same time. I saw campy-but-usually fun scifi. They saw a totalitarian government in which everything worked, as represented by a heavily armed starship torpedoing every authority figure it could find on behalf of nonhumans everywhere.

(I almost said “nonhuman gender nonconformists” but Captain Kirk  always stopped that nonsense before the commercial break.)

I bet their favorite episodes are the ones I skipped. I can’t be certain because when I try to recall those SHUT UP, WESLEY yeah, that happens.

The technology could be “fantastic” for other people, however, allowing blind people to see or those with paralysis to walk, Squicciarini said, according to AFP.

Neither of which would require brain implants. This shouldn’t be hard. Medical science should focus on restoring lost function, never adding new capability. Forget subscription-as-a-service.

“Neurotechnology could help solve many health issues…”

Lost function.

“…but it could also access and manipulate people’s brains, and produce information about our identities, and our emotions.”

New capability. See? Easy peasy.

“It could threaten our rights to human dignity, freedom of thought, and privacy,” UNESCO’s director-general, Audrey Azoulay, said in June, when she proposed a “common ethical framework at the international level.“

Anybody who knows anything about the ethics of world government, knows that THEM regulating brain-altering microchips is the ethical worst-case scenario.

But my interest is up. Sooo, microchips have already been being implanted in people for lesser reasons than a cyberpunk-style datajack. How’s that been working out?

I felt like there was someone in my head, and it wasn’t me.

h ttps://www.unesco.org/en/articles/i-felt-there-was-someone-my-head-and-it-wasnt-me

10 July 2023

Since the early 2000s clinical trials of devices which issue a warning signal when they detect that an epilepsy attack is imminent have been conducted. This signal allows the sufferer time to lie down on a bed or sofa, to ensure they are not badly hurt or injured when the physical convulsions of the epilepsy attack begins.

Hannah [Galvin] was 16 when she developed epilepsy. Her seizures became so strong that she was forced to give up on her dream of becoming a ballet dancer. To regain control of her life, she opted to have an invasive neurological device installed inside her skull on the surface of her brain. But the device didn’t behave as she expected, and she soon felt she had ‘someone inside her head.’

When do you first hear there could be treatment that included neurotechnology?

I still wanted to be a ballet dancer. I would have jumped at anything, just for the opportunity to get my dance career happening again. The brain operation was supposed to fix me. It was an EEG (electroencephalogram), but on the brain, not just on your head. Then there was a tube down your throat to a device in your chest that would gather the data. And there was another a device outside the body that had three lights that would beep and flash red before a seizure. So you knew when it’s time to go and lie on a couch.

What were your first impressions when you had it fitted?

I didn’t like it from the get go, because it was flashing too much for me. I didn’t realise how many seizures I was having. The device would beep for me every two seconds. The red light went on, I’d take the device out and turn it off, and it just went off again. It made me depressed at university. I didn’t tell any of my lecturers that I had it, I started hiding my epilepsy. And the depression got worse and worse and worse.

I felt like there was someone in my head, and it wasn’t me. And I just got more and more depressed. I didn’t like it at all.

That was an ominous comment, but finding more about it took effort. Turns out, the human brain is capable of detecting even a passive implant’s presence and reacting to it. That may be what Galvin is referring to. More in a minute.

When did you think about getting it removed?

I didn’t believe that it was working, because it was going off all the time. I went into hospital, and they checked it, and the device was fine. That’s when they realised how many seizures I was actually having. When I realised I was having more than 100 seizures a day, I wanted to throw the thing out the window. I just hated it, and wanted it gone.

That’s a legit reason for the device not working for her. Who wouldn’t get depressed about “you aren’t having seizures every few days, you’re having them every few minutes”? and being reminded of it a hundred times a day?

Let’s hear more.

Do Brain Implants Change Your Identity?

h ttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/do-brain-implants-change-your-identity

By Christine Kenneally, 19 April 2021

[Rita] Leggett was forty-nine years old and had suffered from epilepsy since she was born. During the operation, her surgeon, Andrew Morokoff, had placed an experimental device inside her skull, part of a brain-computer interface that, it was hoped, would be able to predict when she was about to have a seizure. The device, developed by a Seattle company called NeuroVista, had entered a trial stage known in medical research as “first in human.” A research team drawn from three prominent epilepsy centers based in Melbourne had selected fifteen patients to test the device. Leggett was Patient 14.

Her seizures had taken many forms. At school, she would zone out, coming to only when a teacher threw something at her or her classmates jeered. Once, as an adult, she was drying dishes when, with a small shout and no warning, she sent a dinner plate flying into the air and then, oddly, managed to catch it again. Not all the seizures were so mild. There was a time when she fell down some stairs and awoke days later in the hospital, her jaw so badly broken that surgeons had had to take a piece of her rib to reconstruct it. Leggett was a single mother of four children, and, another time that she was hospitalized after a violent seizure, her teen-age sons were accused of having beaten her up.

Yay feminism.

When Leggett’s neurologist asked if she wanted to participate in the NeuroVista trial, she didn’t hesitate. Two months later, she was in the operating room having a small hole drilled in her skull. Morokoff had carefully braided her hair, so that she would lose as little as possible. Once he had made the hole, he slid a cross-shaped silicone strip inside and laid it across the surface of her brain. The strip was studded with sixteen electrodes, and Morokoff ran wires from them under Leggett’s skin, behind her ear and down her neck to connect with a device that he implanted in her chest. This device would receive the data recording Leggett’s neural activity and transmit it wirelessly to an external processing unit, which she was supposed to keep with her at all times.

The external unit was the size of two flip phones stacked together, and it took some getting used to. If the system predicted that a seizure was imminent, the unit would warn her with a red light and a beep, though she found the beep uncomfortably loud and turned the sound off. The company had her try carrying the device on a shoulder strap, which bothered her, or in a little holster on a belt, which worked better. She was told to keep a diary, noting every time she experienced a seizure.

While Leggett acclimated herself to the device, the device was, in effect, acclimatizing itself to her. The electrical signals detected by the apparatus in her head were transmitted to a lab, where a cluster of computers started to read the patterns of her neural activity, constructing an algorithm tailored to her needs.

Initially, the readings recorded by NeuroVista patients’ devices were so strange—unlike either normal brain activity or the patterns that were typical of epilepsy—that the trial was almost abandoned. Later, the researchers realized that the brain was simply reacting to having been tampered with—the electrical equivalent of a postoperative wound. This disturbance settled down after a couple of months, and then the system’s learning began. Once the device had recorded perhaps half a dozen of Leggett’s typical seizures, the researchers were able to fine-tune the algorithm to the unique electrical signatures of her brain, readying the interface to move from observation to prediction.

Hence my speculation regarding Galvin’s “somebody else in my head” comment.

The first time the device sent an alert, Leggett was at the hairdresser, a couple of blocks from her home. The external unit displayed a white light, and then a red one. She still remembers the shock of it—the strangeness of having a machine communicate with her and advise her what was about to happen in her head. She’d been told that the device would be able to warn her about fifteen minutes before a seizure hit. This gave her time to leave the hairdresser and get safely into bed at home.

Scientifically, the NeuroVista trial was a success, validating its underlying concept and generating a wealth of useful data. It was a success for Leggett, too, but in a way that was deeper and more complex than either she or the researchers had anticipated. The goal had been simple: to improve her life by giving her more control over her condition. The effect, though, had been to make Leggett feel like an entirely new person. She had never had a self that she could trust before. When I talked to her, she spoke of the device as if it were a partner. “We were calibrated together,” she said. “We became one.”

Having control over an embarrassing and dangerous condition can definitely improve one’s self-confidence.

For three years after her operation, Leggett lived happily with her device. But in 2013 her neurologist gave her some bad news. NeuroVista had run out of funding and ceased operations. Leggett’s neural device would have to come out.

Ouch. Your grey matter is no longer supported… please update your firmware…

For neurologists, predicting seizures has long been an elusive goal. They occur once a year for some people, many times a day for others, and it’s common for sufferers to be unable to say whether they’ve had one or not. Before the NeuroVista trial, there was no consensus that prediction was even possible. Yet the new device was remarkably effective for three of the ten patients who completed the trial, and Leggett was one of them.

Sounds like a “Big Data” application. Detect as much brain activity as you can, then mine it for a pattern. A brute-force approach, in other words, but brute force always works if you use enough of it.

During the years she had it, she said, the device “told me what I needed to know, and it did that well.” If the warning light came on, she took anti-seizure medication; the algorithm’s predictive power was such that there was enough time for the medication to be absorbed. As a result, she didn’t have seizures.

When I met Leggett, she had been without the NeuroVista brain-computer interface for six years, but, as soon as I began asking how she felt about it, she looked out the window and started to weep. “I miss my device,” she said. Leggett felt grateful that everyone involved was sympathetic to her plight. They let her keep the implant as long as possible. But the demise of NeuroVista—after spending seventy million dollars to develop the technology and conduct the trial, it struggled to find further investors—made removal inevitable. If the battery ran out, or a lead broke, or the site of implantation became infected, the company would no longer be there to provide support.

Let’s put “right to repair” on the ethics requirements of anything long-term implantable. It’ll prevent your body from ever being discontinued.

How odd that NeuroVista went broke after successfully developing the device. Perhaps 30% of severe epileptics was not a large enough client population. That’s long been the problem with treating rare disorders, there’s just no market for a fix. Or, perhaps the investor money went in a different direction…

It is almost a quarter of a century since the F.D.A. first approved the use of a deep-brain-stimulation device—to treat essential tremor and advanced Parkinson’s disease. Today, at least two hundred thousand people worldwide, suffering from a wide range of conditions, live with a neural implant of some kind. In recent years, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bryan Johnson, the founder of the payment-processing company Braintree, all announced neurotechnology projects for restoring or even enhancing human abilities.

Big mistake, man. You want to be a god? Then follow Christ. He’ll teach you how and appoint you to one of His many vacancies. The only catch: you have to believe that godhood is NOT all about your bodily appetites or one-upping your neighbor.

As we enter this new era of extra-human intelligence…

Could we please have an era of common sense first? Just one?

…it’s becoming apparent that many people develop an intense relationship with their device, often with profound effects on their sense of identity. These effects, though still little studied, are emerging as crucial to a treatment’s success.

That was in the early two-thousands, around the time that the F.D.A. extended its approval of deep-brain stimulation as a general treatment for Parkinson’s. Research into brain-computer interfaces, much of it by the Department of Defense, was advancing rapidly.

Along with gain-of-function bioresearch, brain-computer interfacing is not a legitimate military field of interest. There’s an unbridgeable moral gulf between giving your soldiers weapons, and turning them into weapons. To say nothing about gaining the ability to violate peoples’ very minds. That way lies Totalism.

The field had fascinating implications for [the work of Frederic Gilbert, a philosopher at the University of Tasmania specializing in applied ethics]. Suppose that someone whose brain was artificially stimulated committed a crime: were they responsible for their actions?

Suppose, hell. We’ve been watching those wind-up toys. Wondering what makes them tick.

For the great majority of patients, deep-brain stimulation was beneficial and life-changing, but there were occasional reports of strange behavioral reactions, such as hypomania and hypersexuality. Then, in 2006, a French team published a study about the unexpected consequences of otherwise successful implantations. Two years after a brain implant, sixty-five per cent of patients had a breakdown in their marriages or relationships, and sixty-four per cent wanted to leave their careers. Their intellect and their levels of anxiety and depression were the same as before, or, in the case of anxiety, had even improved, but they seemed to experience a fundamental estrangement from themselves. One felt like an electronic doll. Another said he felt like RoboCop, under remote control.

That’s comparable to schizophrenia.

Many people reported that the person they were after treatment was entirely different from the one they’d been when they had only dreamed of relief from their symptoms. Some experienced an uncharacteristic buoyancy and confidence. One woman felt fifteen years younger and tried to lift a pool table, rupturing a disk in her back. One man noticed that his newfound confidence was making life hard for his wife; he was too “full-on.” Another woman became impulsive, walking ten kilometres to a psychologist’s appointment nine days after her surgery. She was unrecognizable to her family. They told her that they grieved for the old her.

Unacceptable.

As different as Galvin’s and Leggett’s reactions to the device were, they shared a sense that experiences like theirs are something that the field needs to learn from. Gilbert, too, believes that patients’ perspectives are vital, and that we are only just starting to understand how a person’s selfhood can affect—and be affected by—an intelligent neural device. Observing a number of first-in-human trials, he has noticed that he sometimes stops hearing from patients for whom the results were poor. He knows of a number of patients who killed themselves after an implant.

Ethical issues are in constant danger of being overshadowed because of how rapidly technologies are developing. So far, the F.D.A. has approved deep-brain stimulation for a variety of conditions that affect movement, but Gilbert said that trials are under way that will test intelligent neural devices on patients with dementia and psychiatric conditions including anorexia, schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Tourette’s syndrome.

Devices known to cause schizophrenia, are being used on the mentally ill?

Gilbert believes that the medical-device industry has too much influence on how trials have been run. Most published papers don’t mention ethics or risk, and, he said, because companies have no obligation to publish the outcomes of failed trials, the results over all appear to be ninety-nine per cent positive.

Do you think “you only need to report the successful stuff” is an accident? An honest mistake in reporting requirements that will soon be corrected?

Me neither. And to his credit, neither does Gilbert.

Gilbert has been working on protocols to prevent harm: Neurosurgeons must declare financial interests. The risks described on consent forms need to be better articulated. Participants in early trials must understand that irreversible consequences of the trial might prevent them from receiving the better therapy they are helping to develop. All trials should express interest in the autonomy of a patient after implantation and after explantation. International research projects must also contend with national differences in ethical standards. A few years ago, Gilbert withdrew from a project with a Chinese team after learning that one of the researchers had previously carried out surgery on women with anorexia, resecting a part of their brains associated with pleasure.

An ethicist acted ethically? Gilbert is atheist so that’s doubly impressive.

Gilbert worries most about the coercion of vulnerable people. In 2013, a woman wrote to him saying that she had been implanted with a neural device as part of a trial that used deep-brain stimulation to treat depression. Launched in 2008 and known as the broaden trial (an acronym derived from the brain region it targeted), it was poorly managed and eventually shut down. The woman told Gilbert that, after her surgery, she had experienced a dramatic feeling of depersonalization and soon became suicidal. Her doctors, alarmed, wanted to remove her implant, but the woman was unwilling; she believed that she hadn’t yet had a chance to experience all its potential benefits. Her doctors told her that she was not competent to make the decision, and yet the long e-mails she wrote to Gilbert seemed perfectly coherent and rational. In such a situation, Gilbert thought, the removal of the device was arguably a violation of human rights. After a year, the woman stopped writing to Gilbert. He looked for her online for years afterward but was never able to find her.

Sigh, I take back my respect. The Hippocratic Oath means the device comes out if it makes the patient suicidal. That’s not a difficult ethics question.

Much-Hyped Brain-Implant Treatment for Depression Suffers Setback

h ttps://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/much-hyped-brain-implant-treatment-for-depression-suffers-setback/

By John Horgan on March 11, 2014

All of us—researchers, journalists, patients and their loved ones–are desperate for genuine progress in treatments for severe mental illness. But if the history of such treatments teaches us anything, it is that we must view claims of dramatic progress with skepticism, or we will fall prey to false hopes.

Case in point: a depression treatment, pioneered by neurologist Helen Mayberg of Emory University, that involves electrically stimulating the brain with electrodes inserted through holes drilled in the skull. In 2005, Mayberg and colleagues reported that stimulating a region called Brodmann area 25 can relieve severe, intractable depression in two out of three patients.

((Tribe)) is likely but not confirmed. She graduated from the University of Southern California, known locally as the University of Spoiled Children, went straight to the top and despite (or because of) what you’re about to read, is the founding director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics.

Depression is rarely a brain malfunction. It’s usually a response to something. A stereotypical scene:

Psychiatrist: “You have depression. Let’s see if we can figure out what triggered it. When did it start?”

Patient: “Well… I lost interest in food and sleep about the time that my wife poisoned my children against me in order to get a bigger child support settlement from the divorce she initiated after I ordered her to end her OnlyFans account. I’d feel lots better if you could help with that?”

Doctor: “Uh… sorry… but here’s a pill to help you feel better.”

Patient: “It worked! My life is shit but I don’t feed as bad about it now.”

Doctor: “SUCCESS! Science cured depression!”

Patient: “Hey, this fentanyl stuff makes me feel better, too.”

The problem with depression is that the problem is usually not the depression itself. The best that Mayberg & company could do in a laboratory about depression, would be the equivalent of correcting a car tire imbalance by attaching a spring to the driver’s wheel in order to make the car drive straight again.

Since then, many journalists and scientists have lauded Mayberg’s research. In 2005, National Public Radio called her treatment “revolutionary.” In 2006, the journalist David Dobbs, in a glowing profile of Mayberg in The New York Times Magazine, said her “incredible” results were “already changing how neuroscientists and psychiatrists think about depression.”

She, and the rest of her profession, have no idea how the brain works. They have still not progressed beyond poking it with a stick and large-scale fuzzy logic applied to brain scans:

More recently, her linkage of depression to area 25 has been praised by heavyweights such as Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia and Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Last October, James Gorman of The New York Times cited Mayberg’s research in a report on how the Pentagon plans to “spend more than $70 million over five years to jump to the next level of brain implants.”

Mayberg continues to report promising results, most recently at a lecture that I attended yesterday at New York University. The most powerful part of her presentation consisted of depressed patients describing how their mood lifted after implants stimulated their brains.

But Mayberg “buried the lead,” as we journalists like to say. Midway through her talk, she mentioned that a multi-center, controlled trial of her method of deep-brain stimulation has halted.

Mayberg’s research was praised by physician Sanjay Gupta on CNN in 2012 and by journalist Andrew Solomon on National Public Radio this month. So far, no prominent journalist has mentioned the suspension of the BROADEN trial.

All of that pings my radar like a cursed game of Missile Command.

Mayberg, who did not participate in the trial, did not know why exactly it had stopped. But she suspected that either subjects receiving stimulation of area 25 did worse than expected, or controls receiving “sham” surgery did better than expected, or both. Mayberg later told me by email that the so-called BROADEN (BROdmann Area 25 DEep brain Neuromodulation) trial was was overseen by St. Jude Medical Inc., for which she consults.

BULLSHIT. She didn’t know why the clinical trial validating her award-winning research, run be a hospital that she consults for, was halted? One would think a !scientist! would have a little !curiosity! about that.

According to Neurotech Business Reports, an industry newsletter, the FDA suspended the BROADEN trial last fall because it failed a “futility analysis,” which considers whether an experimental treatment has a reasonable chance of improving upon current treatments.

I’ve always had doubts about Mayberg’s claims. Her implant experiments have involved small numbers of patients (six in her 2005 study and 17 in a 2012 trial). I’m also troubled by Mayberg’s links to medical-device manufacturers, such as St. Jude. Mayberg’s potential conflicts of interest have been explored by one of her rare critics, journalist Alison Bass.

Moreover, I’ve delved into the history of deep-brain stimulation, so I know that it has inspired unfulfilled hopes in the past. (See my 2005 Scientific American article on brain-implant pioneer Jose Delgado.) Although the technology has become more refined, deep brain stimulation is still “associated with surgical risks (e.g., hemorrhage) and psychiatric complications (suicidal attenuation, hypomania) as well as high costs,” according to a recent review in Nature.

Delgado is a memory-holed nightmare of a Doctor Moreau who actively promoted using radio waves and implants to invasively control human behavior. Only to civilize us, of course. Here’s a video.

Contra the video’s claim, he did experiment on 25 inmates of a Rhode Island insane asylum.

Segue

h ttps://cognitive-liberty.online/jose-delgado-implants-and-electromagnetic-mind-control-stopping-the-furious-bull/

He was invited to write his book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society as the forty-first volume in a series entitled World Perspectives edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. In it Rodríguez Delgado has discussed how we have managed to tame and civilize our surrounding nature, arguing that now it was time to civilize our inner being.

Anshen is Russian Jewish while Delgado is Spanish Communist.

End segue

In a post last September, I expressed doubts about Mayberg’s work and criticized the reporting on her by David Dobbs. In a comment on my post, Dobbs vigorously defended Mayberg and himself, accusing me of desiring not “to inform, answer, or illuminate, but to deceive, darken, and distract.”

That sounds familiar. Hello, Cabal.

My guess is that Dobbs, in spite of the suspended BROADEN trial, will double down on his support of Mayberg’s approach to depression. At NYU, Mayberg admitted that she has to wonder why her implant studies show better results than the BROADEN trial apparently did. “Do my patients want to please me?” she asked.

Or, did she falsify the research? One of these two possibilities explains why she wasn’t interested in why her “celebrated research” failed when independently tested. A third possibility is that her research was actually a cover story for what she was really trying to accomplish. Perhaps emotional control?

She nonetheless remained upbeat. She told me by email: “The field will hopefully continue to move forward independently as it is doing, and hopefully companies will see the value of pursuing this approach given the research results.”

The question is, at what point does hope do more harm than good?

The better question is, at what point does hope do more EVIL than good? Research into brain implants should not proceed without the explicit, public admission, that many of humanity’s rulers intend to use such technology to mind-rape and subjugate their peoples. No potential medical benefit can ever justify creating that possibility.

That UNESCO article that I started with? They aren’t proposing any punishments for misuse of brain implants, or gain-of-function research like what the Pentagon is funding. They didn’t name any names, and I found half a dozen just researching this post. I don’t want to hear about raising awareness or getting more informed (as opposed to misinformed). I want Cabalists doing perp walks.

The general refusal to make moral judgments of “scientists” is reaching an existential level for technological Progressives. There’s no “some people benefit while others stop feeling in control of their own bodies”. There’s no “we made her suicidal but she still feels better”. There’s no “we need a mind-machine interface because fingers and voices are too crude”.

Most of all, there are no technological solutions to moral problems. Some mental illness is hardwired… epilepsy, as we’ve seen here… but most of it derives from how we behave towards ourselves and each other. Children of divorce wouldn’t need pills or therapy if Skankie Wifey had simply honored her husband.

Correcting the grosser, mechanical malfunctions of the brain is a legitimate purpose for medicine, but most of the mind’s emotional and social malfunctions are downhill from individual and society-level moral conduct.