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Astrocloud · 05-04-2004, 05:56 AM

This was recently in the news
from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3682773.stm

Made up

So is mind control myth or reality? "'Mind control' is a made-up term", says Professor E Mark Stern of Iona Collage in New York, author of The Other Side of the Couch. "But yes, it is possible to totally influence a person's inner world."

According to Stern, there can be good mind control and bad mind control. "In its best sense, mind control is akin to self-control, often used as a product of meditation. This can be helpful for pain management.

"But then there are things like cults - there, mind control happens when a cult wins over another person's consciousness through hypnotic-like inducements including 'love bombs', a form of praise, overseeing an inductee's every action, and eventually using shame and the threat of being expelled by the cult as a means of controlling them."

Mind control is a relatively recent concept. It first emerged in the aftermath of the Korean war, when it was claimed that the Chinese had carried out mind control experiments on US prisoners of war, as depicted in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate.

Since then mind control, or "brainwashing", has been used to explain many different phenomena, from our ad-led consumer culture to some people's willingness to ditch everything and sign up to weird millenarian cults.

There are various hypothetical techniques of mind control: among them

the use of drugs, such as "truth serum", to induce a more relaxed state of mind;
hypnosis, where an individual is put into a trance-like state usually in order to recover memories;
Pavlovian conditioning, named after experiments carried out by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov in the early 20th Century, where he described how we are "conditioned" into certain types of behaviour; and
indoctrination, where an authoritative body uses propaganda or the threat of force to shape individuals' minds and belief systems.

Yet among sociologists and psychologists mind control is a bitterly contested theory.

Some do not believe the human mind can ever fully be controlled by outside forces. While they accept that individuals can be made to behave in a certain way under duress or threat of force ("What wouldn't you do with a gun pressed to your head?" asked one recent article on the subject of mind control), they doubt that individuals can be manipulated against their will by sexy advertising, hypnotists or even cult leaders.

Massimo Introvigne, founder of the Center for Studies on New Religions, believes that mind control theorists leave out one important thing - free will, our ability to think for ourselves even under extreme circumstances.

Discredited

According to Introvigne, mind control, or "mental manipulation" or "mental destabilisation", are merely more scientific-sounding terms for the brainwashing.

"That label has been discredited by mental health scholars", he says, so now we say "mind control" to explain away behaviour we "don't quite understand".

Perhaps a beady eye should be kept on developments within the worlds of memory-controlling medicine and hypersonic messaging, but it might not be necessary to don Aluminium Foil Deflector Beanies just yet.

05-04-2004, 05:56 AM	#284 (permalink)
Astrocloud Apocalypse Nerd	This was recently in the news from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3682773.stm Made up So is mind control myth or reality? "'Mind control' is a made-up term", says Professor E Mark Stern of Iona Collage in New York, author of The Other Side of the Couch. "But yes, it is possible to totally influence a person's inner world." According to Stern, there can be good mind control and bad mind control. "In its best sense, mind control is akin to self-control, often used as a product of meditation. This can be helpful for pain management. "But then there are things like cults - there, mind control happens when a cult wins over another person's consciousness through hypnotic-like inducements including 'love bombs', a form of praise, overseeing an inductee's every action, and eventually using shame and the threat of being expelled by the cult as a means of controlling them." Mind control is a relatively recent concept. It first emerged in the aftermath of the Korean war, when it was claimed that the Chinese had carried out mind control experiments on US prisoners of war, as depicted in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. Since then mind control, or "brainwashing", has been used to explain many different phenomena, from our ad-led consumer culture to some people's willingness to ditch everything and sign up to weird millenarian cults. There are various hypothetical techniques of mind control: among them the use of drugs, such as "truth serum", to induce a more relaxed state of mind; hypnosis, where an individual is put into a trance-like state usually in order to recover memories; Pavlovian conditioning, named after experiments carried out by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov in the early 20th Century, where he described how we are "conditioned" into certain types of behaviour; and indoctrination, where an authoritative body uses propaganda or the threat of force to shape individuals' minds and belief systems. Yet among sociologists and psychologists mind control is a bitterly contested theory. Some do not believe the human mind can ever fully be controlled by outside forces. While they accept that individuals can be made to behave in a certain way under duress or threat of force ("What wouldn't you do with a gun pressed to your head?" asked one recent article on the subject of mind control), they doubt that individuals can be manipulated against their will by sexy advertising, hypnotists or even cult leaders. Massimo Introvigne, founder of the Center for Studies on New Religions, believes that mind control theorists leave out one important thing - free will, our ability to think for ourselves even under extreme circumstances. Discredited According to Introvigne, mind control, or "mental manipulation" or "mental destabilisation", are merely more scientific-sounding terms for the brainwashing. "That label has been discredited by mental health scholars", he says, so now we say "mind control" to explain away behaviour we "don't quite understand". Perhaps a beady eye should be kept on developments within the worlds of memory-controlling medicine and hypersonic messaging, but it might not be necessary to don Aluminium Foil Deflector Beanies just yet.