Mechanism is not new, exactly, and the physiological consequences of koran learning are severe - brought about by the necessary language itself. Arabic scr*ws with your brain.
That they’re mapping this out is actually very alarming, and a culmination of research that has been going on for a generation.
Arabic is just a language. It’s no worse or better than any other human language. It does just fine for bibles (yes there are Arabic bibles). The related Hebrew and Aramaic share some characteristics, though not looking quite as much like pen-plotter tests.
What would really screw with your mind would be Koran in any faithful translation. Those verses aren’t self consistent (of course) but they do lead along demonic trains of thought. Who stopped to think how bizarre it was that Jimmy Carter was so obsessed with these texts? In English! I mean I could see a naive attempt to try to reason with the then-new Taliban in their cultural idiom... but there’s no reasoning with this text. It’s the slippage from irrational folly to folly that the devil does well because the devil knows the dark side of the human mind.
Also on Arabic... some other languages use the Arabic script. Like Farsi. A friend of mine who hailed from Iran (Persia) and who was a devout Christian showed me a book of Christian praise songs in Farsi. I asked him if it was pen plotter tests :-). He almost conked me over the head with the book :-). The problem is not the Arabic. It’s the Koran, in any language.
I have seen somewhete, can’t recall at the moment, that there is a property of the Koran in spoken Arabic that induces an altered state of consciousness. Yes, the direct teaching of the Koran is against what we know is good. But the problem is how a teaching so contrary to the natural law can become so deeply ingrained in the minds of so many. Hence this theory that the spoken Arabic, combined with specific cadences provided in the Koran, induces a kind of hypnosis, bypassing the filter of natural reason.
BTW, if true, this process is facilitated by the theology of Islam, which, as I understand it, draws a unity between Allah and the Koran, that they are in some sense interchangeable, and that the altered state of consciousness during the reading of the Koran is viewed as a mystical experience validating the divine nature of the Koran. It is, to my understanding, a corruption of the new testament idea of Christ as the Logos. One could look at this and suspect a certain serpent to be behind it. It is well designed to produce great deception and therefore great evil in the world.