Something strange has happened to the world of images. In the era of algorithmic feeds, generative excess, and the attention economy, images have ceased to represent. Instead, they activate. Images have become synthetic stimuli, engineered to provoke targeted perceptual, emotional, and behavioral responses in both humans and machines. They’ve become highly refined, mind-altering substances. This lecture traces a genealogy of this shift, linking Cold War mind-control experiments and military psyops with stage magic, UFO mythologies, and contemporary neuro-AI research to expose the deep mechanisms shaping today’s visual culture.