"Havana Syndrome" - seriously, WTF?

Skeptoid did an episode on this back in December, somewhat persuasively arguing that it was an example of mass, "psychogenic" delusion:

quote:

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The more they believe it's happening, the worse their actual physical symptoms get, and the stronger their belief in the misinterpreted affliction becomes. Just as this can happen to an individual, it can also happen to a group who spend a lot of time together and share the same environments and stressors.

This also explains why it happened only to Americans (plus a few Canadians) and not to the local Cubans in the same houses and buildings. We would expect a mass psychogenic event to not affect the Cuban neighbors and employees. As Cubans, they have no reason to think they'd be targeted, and they lack the stress of being from the enemy country.

It's a solid explanation with numerous precedents from recent history. It fits nicely with Occam's Razor, in that it's an ordinary explanation that does not require us to make any changes to our understanding of physics or biology. Of course we don't know that this is in fact what happened, but unless some evidence emerges showing a physical cause, it's the best supported explanation.

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But the long New Yorker article from this week seems to convincingly argue that a major medical event happened to numerous people, essentially inflicting detectable brain injury:

quote:

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In early February, 2017, Michael Hoffer, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Miami, received a call from a State Department doctor, who told him, “We have a problem.” Hoffer—who had worked with the military to treat head traumas, and had kept his security clearance—agreed to help. He soon saw one of the victims, and in the following months others flew to Miami. Hoffer ran a battery of tests, which confirmed that the C.I.A. officers had sustained serious injuries.

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Seriously, WTF?

LINK