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In the 1983 film `Brainstorm', a brain-computer interface (BCI) was developed to read and process thoughts, which are then transferred to video tape to be shared with other people. This was used to share happy memories, but also to experience a fellow scientist's heart attack, and it was the target of the military interest for torture and brainwashing. The workings of the human brain is still largely a mystery. Electrodes can offer an insight but some fear a sinister intent. The idea of being able to read a person's thoughts and exert control over their thoughts and actions has been a rich seam of material for science fiction and the medical profession alike. Today, there are some insights into the brain, but they are limited. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans indicate brain activity by measuring the flow of blood to the brain, not what neurons in the brain are doing. Scientists are monitoring brain activity that controls the brain's speech regions to decode spoken words and phrases in real time. This work could eventually make it possible for people with speech loss to communicate via brain signals. Researchers at Harvard University are developing a flexible mesh of electrodes that could be implanted in the brain for targeted relief of symptoms of illness caused by neurodegeneration or ageing. Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk, is working on a project to implant thin, flexible threads into the brain to transfer data. To conclude, in a relatively short period of time, electrodes have moved from the surface of the head, to the surface of the brain, to being implanted mechanically into specific regions of the brain. The accumulation of this research, advances in materials and signal technology brings hope but also some concern - if knowledge is power, could the nightmare of Brainstorm await us?

Definitions for cultic and high demand groups are explicated, and characteristics are delineated, including Lifton's seminal research on thought reform. Literature is reviewed about common mental health issues which have been found to be associated with the experience of having been in a cultic/high demand/abusive group, including depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, and dissociation, and the specialist treatment approaches which have been efficacious, including psychoeducational interventions to understand the processes of coercive persuasion and undue influence. Characteristics of cults and mental health in other organisations is considered with recommendations for ethical organisational practice and recovery.

The personal papers of the neurophysiologist John C. Lilly at Stanford University hold a classified paper he wrote in the late 1950s on the behavioural modification and control of ‘human agents’. The paper provides an unnerving prognosis of the future application of Lilly’s research, then being carried out at the National Institute of Mental Health. Lilly claimed that the use of sensory isolation, electrostimulation of the brain, and the recording and mapping of brain activity could be used to gain ‘push-button’ control over motivation and behaviour. This research, wrote Lilly, could eventually lead to ‘master-slave controls directly of one brain over another’. The paper is an explicit example of Lilly’s preparedness to align his research towards Cold War military aims. It is not, however, the research for which Lilly is best known. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lilly developed cult status as a far-out guru of consciousness exploration, promoting the use of psychedelics and sensory isolation tanks. Lilly argued that, rather than being used as tools of brainwashing, these techniques could be employed by the individual to regain control of their own mind and retain a sense of agency over their thoughts and actions. This article examines the scientific, intellectual, and cultural relationship between the sciences of brainwashing and psychedelic mind alteration. Through an analysis of Lilly’s autobiographical writings, I also show how paranoid ideas about brainwashing and mind control provide an important lens for understanding the trajectory of Lilly’s research.

All anti-social phenomena that occur on a mass scale, especially such as extremism, terrorism, drug addiction/trafficking, etc. leave their traces in the information space. To counteract the intelligence agencies, mislead the population, recruit more and more adepts, and put pressure on the authorities, criminals use manipulative methods aimed at softening the edge of critical judgment, reducing criticality, and distorting public consciousness. The review of investigative and judicial practice shows, that traditionally there is a high percentage of programmers, political strategists, and psychologists with advanced knowledge of IT technologies in any illegal or semi-legitimate group of radicals (not to mention international scale terrorist structures). Many people (especially those disorganized, poorly educated, maladaptive, or easily suggestible) radically change their attitudes, life concepts, needs, and lose their positive social skills as a result of intensive informational and psychological brainwashing. In this article, the Author explores criminal informational and manipulative influences/impacts of an extremist orientation and analyzes the social and psychological qualities of criminals, who are the leaders of extremist groups and possess a pronounced manipulative potential. The author drew some conclusions, in particular, the fact that the manipulative effect of a criminal leader inside and outside a group depends both on the personal qualities of the leader himself, and the general social situation, the value orientations of the significant part of the population, the orientation of interests, and the results framework of addressees (recipients) living in a particular region.

From the end of World War II until roughly 1989, global leaders feared that cataclysmic war would break out between the world’s two superpower states, the Soviet Union and the United States. Though such a confrontation did not occur, the stalemate between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States—with its simmering fears, proxy battles, and psychological warfare—became known as the Cold War. Psychological expertise played an important role in the Cold War, especially within Western democracies like the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. In these countries, citizens tended to view the Cold War as a “battle for minds”: a fight against communist political ideology, totalitarianism, social conformity, and other threats to individual mental freedom. Anglo-American psychology flourished within this intellectual environment by finding new topics and applications for research, new sources of funding, and a new image as essential to the functioning of healthy democracy. Historians continue to debate how the Cold War influenced the field of psychology. Overall, the strategic partnership between psychology and the “military-industrial complex” was limited to certain initiatives. In some cases, Anglo-American psychologists who used their expertise to fight the Cold War were led into questionable pursuits, resulting in greater public scrutiny and even scandals for themselves and their profession. Nonetheless, the Cold War had a significant impact on Anglo-American psychology by making the relationship between psychological knowledge and democratic values a continual subject of public concern.

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our understanding of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science

Parental alienation syndrome (PAS), as defined by its creator Dr. Richard Gardner (2001), is a poorly defined, poorly researched, and controversial pseudoscientific construct arising primarily in the context of child custody disputes. The syndrome allegedly manifests as a non-rational and unjustified campaign of denigration against one parent during custody proceedings. It is purported to result from the combination of a parent’s “brainwashing” and indoctrination regarding the vilification of the target parent. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support that parental alienation represents a scientifically valid syndrome. There is no commonly recognized or empirically supported pathogenies, course, familiar pattern, or treatment selection indicated for the proposed symptoms of PAS. Additionally, it has been consistently excluded from both DSM-V and ICD-10, representing a near global rejection by the scientific community. When used in the legal context, PAS is exceptionally dangerous as it can conceal actual cases of abuse and cause children to be remanded into the custody of an abusive parent. Furthermore, it can be used as leverage to separate children from the caregiver that they are best suited to be with solely on the accusation of the non-preferred parent that they have been “alienated.” In the interest of improving the scientific quality of custody evaluations and the safety of children, pseudoscientific theories such as parental alienation syndrome should be eliminated from the custody decision making process.

The phenomenon of people and organizations using “undue influence” techniques to recruit and indoctrinate young (and old) people has reached epidemic proportions. While victim-centered approaches are now being discussed and utilized in trafficking realms, little attention has been given to the actual techniques and behavioral methods that can be used to enslave a person into a new “pseudo-identity” which is dependent and obedient to their controller.

The ‘dependency inducing practices’, sometimes called ‘brainwashing’, that are commonly alleged to occur in deviant “religious” groups such as a cult movements or new religious movements are not well understood and have promoted considerable debate. There is a general agreement that many of these groups are controlled environments in which conformity to behavioural, emotive, cognitive and social expectations as determined by leadership is expected and enforced; however, whether conformity is the result of normal processes of socialisation or deviant practices such as brainwashing that cause harm continues to be disputed. To gain an increased understanding of the conformity and commitment inducing practices that occur in ‘cult movements’, the accounts of group life of 23 former members of 11 different groups were analysed. A conceptualisation of ‘brainwashing’ as on a continuum of social influence is proposed, and some legal implications are discussed.

The term “executive control” refers to the implementation of mental functions, otherwise known as “executive functions”, that enable goal-directed thought and behaviour, including self-awareness, motivation, volition, initiation, planning, purposive action, and self-regulation, which relies on monitoring, shifting, inhibiting, and self-correcting, functions primarily attributed to the frontal lobes, specifically the prefrontal cortex. Torture-based mind control is practised by individuals and groups who seek to maximally control and exploit others, particularly children. Survivor accounts are the primary source material on torture-based mind control. Critics say this is untrustworthy data. The dissociated fear of torture is greater than the fear of executing the self-endangering behaviour desired by the programmer. Although never have evidence of torture-based mind control directly evolving from military electroshock treatments. Torture-based mind control, by most survivor reports, begins before four years of age, usually by age two, to make the psyche dissociation-prone and to serve as a foundation for later programming.

Transsexuals vary in the sacrifices that they make while transitioning to their cross-gender group. We suggest that one influence on the sacrifices they make is identity fusion. When people fuse with a group, a visceral and irrevocable feeling of oneness with the group develops. The personal self (the sense of "I" and "me") remains potent and combines synergistically with the social self to motivate behavior. We hypothesized that transsexuals who felt fused with the cross-gender group would be especially willing to make sacrifices while transitioning to that group. Our sample included 22 male-to-female (MtF) and 16 female-to-male (FtM) transsexuals. Consistent with expectation, those who were fused with their cross-gender group (1) expressed more willingness to sacrifice close relationships in the process of changing sex than non-fused transsexuals and (2) actually underwent irreversible surgical change of their primary sexual characteristics (vaginoplasty for MtF transsexuals and hysterectomy for FtM transsexuals). These outcomes were not predicted by a measure of "group identification," which occurs when membership in the group eclipses the personal self (the "I" and "me" is subsumed by the group; in the extreme case, brainwashing occurs). These findings confirm and extend earlier evidence that identity fusion is uniquely effective in tapping a propensity to make substantial sacrifices for the group. We discuss identity fusion as a social psychological determinant of the choices of transsexuals.

A culture accepting abortion has unconscious psychosocial “killing” superlatives throughout...or will have...Abortion kills empathy. No empathy, no heart, no mind. Death of another is not felt. Evil is internalized and desired...and acting out killing, one way or another, increases “self-worth” by the thoughtless acting out of emotions. All is denied of course, but living a lie is unlimited and becomes one lie after another...all “decreasing reality and being” (which is the definition of “evil”). TERRORISM,” all violence and virtuelessness are hate-full “ABORTIONISMO” today. Yes, The psychological acceptance of abortion (and contraception) have resulted, after about fifty years, in: (1) the acceptance of killing as a “solution” in the social structure, and “killing” pervades subliminally, which “kills America” in those for abortion, i.e., the Berkeley Campus un-Americans et al; (2) the destruction of childhood to the degree of selling children for sex use; (3) education became brainwashing and indoctrination to “kill” and no longer “how to think and reason” but only to imitate liberal professors; (4) the sex act changed from nature’s reproduction method, by the psychosocial pheromone known as “marriage” for humans, to an emotional excretory act which as a social construct has destroyed the meaning of human “gender” thereby emotionally deforming human relationships primarily into planetary pollution of global masturbation (“secretion”); (5) the turning of “journalism” into worthless sensational fantasies of false news, sex and violence which everyone should absolutely ignore and never pay for because, now, journalism will make you crazy; and (6) the loss of the basic Judeo-Christian virtuous raising of children which results in humanbeingness being replaced by drug use and criminality; all by suggestibility diseases. Abortionismo leads to sexismo which leads to replacement of liberty by hate and replacement of cultural decency (childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, and decent family life) by unnatural sex and violence, i.e., the people turn from class to trash--welcome to America over the last 50 years thanks to virtue less press & media.

Increasingly lawyers for children follow a model of “client centered” (as opposed to “best interests”) representation in child custody disputes in which the child client defines the objectives of the representation. The client-centered model, while appropriate in most cases to give voice to the child's preferences in a process that deeply impacts him or her, can create an ethical dilemma for the child's lawyer in cases where a child is truly alienated from the other parent by the actions of the alienating parent. Alienated children strongly and unreasonably express a preference for objectives of representation that might further damage the alienated parent's relationship with the child. The alienated child's objectives may be the result of a campaign of denigration and “brainwashing” by the alienating parent. This Note suggests that when a child is truly alienated from a parent, as diagnosed by a mental health expert, the child may have “diminished capacity” and therefore, the client-directed model of representation is not adequate. This Note proposes that the Child's Attorney must determine whether the child is of diminished capacity under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and, if so, must treat the client accordingly under Rule 1.14. Specifically, the attorney may, if all other remedial measures are inadequate, override the child's wishes and advocate a position that the child would take, but for the brainwashing of the child used to alienate him or her from a parent.

This chapter describes and discusses some of the central research into conspiracy theories as related to new religious movements. The first part outlines the area of conspiracy and conspiracy theory. Thereafter, the chapter considers some general and specific topics related to conspiracy theoriesaboutandinnew religious movements, with reference to both recent and earlier theories, movements, and research.

Unable to comprehend the appeal of New Religious Movements, many observers concluded that the leaders of such groups has discovered a special form of social control which enabled them to recruit their followers in non-ordinary ways, and, more particularly, to short-circuit their rational, questioning minds by keeping them locked in special trance states. A handful of professionals, mostly psychologists and psychiatrists with sentiments for the anti-cult movement, attempted to provide scientific grounding for this notion of cultic brainwashing/mind control, in part by referring back to studies of Korean War POWs who had been ‘brainwashed’ by their captors. This chapter revisits anti-cultism’s implicit ideological assumptions and the empirical studies indicating that conversions to contemporary new religions result from garden-variety sociological and psychological factors rather than from esoteric ‘mind control’ techniques.

A paradox in the study of violent radicalization is that while each of the empirical findings can be explained with multiple theories, very few theories can explain a relevant number of these findings simultaneously. This paper conducts a functional behavior assessment of violent radical behavior, investigating the factors responsible for its initial learning and subsequent maintenance. Specifically, a model of radicalization is proposed that can explain a wide range of observed phenomena, accommodate apparent exceptions, and obtain testable consequences. It also challenges some firmly rooted ideas, as the alleged existence of aggressive influence practices, or brainwashing. Finally, the model can also provide valuable predictions for subsequent research, such as those related to the reversibility of the process of radicalization.

The entry traces the history of ‘brainwashing,’ focusing on developments related to Korean War POWs (Prisoners of War) and the communist takeover in China. Use of the term in conflicts over New Religious Movements (NRMs) in America and elsewhere is covered, where participation was defined by some as a mental disorder. Attempts to legitimize the brainwashing term are discussed, including insertion in the DSM-III but unsuccessfully seeking acceptance of brainwashing as a mental disorder by the American Psychological Association. Major court decisions involving the term are described, including key cases where such testimony was deemed inadmissible.

What if there was a drug that could reduce prejudice, should people take it? The central question here will come from ethics and philosophy, discussing whether it is morally acceptable (or not) to enhance normal human function. Pharmacological enhancement can be seen in many areas, for example in sports or academia. It will be discussed why people might have reservations about using pharmaceuticals. This might partly stem from the believe that drugs are unnatural or interfering with the brain, even though other means of enhancement, such as reading a book, also have an effect on the brain. The chapter will discuss cases of ‘brainwashing’ and other ways in which we all change our brain all the time. It is important to understand that we are our brain.

This study aimed to provide an in-depth description of the radicalization process, which is a very important step in terrorist activities. The author proposes a translational analysis that is first based on the author's experience in the psychological evaluation of terrorist behavior and second on an exhaustive review of the current literature. The search terms “terrorism,” “radicalization,” “social psychology,” and “psychopathology” were used to identify relevant studies in the following databases: Scopus, Medline, PubCentral, and Science Direct. Because of its importance, understanding radicalization process should be one of the priorities of behavioral scientists. International studies should be performed with a focus on several aspects, such as radicalization risk factors, brainwashing, the role of the media, and finally, in de-radicalization programs.

The relationship between music and medicine is generally understood in the benign context of music therapy, but, as this chapter shows, there is a long parallel history of medical theories that suggest that music can cause real physical and mental illness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of music as an expression of universal harmony was challenged by a more mechanistic model of nervous stimulation. By the 1790s, there was a substantial discourse on the dangers of musical overstimulation to health in medicine, literature, and etiquette books. During the nineteenth century, the sense of music as a pathogenic stimulant gained in influence. It was often linked to fears about sexuality, female gynecological health, and theories of hypnosis and degeneration. In the twentieth century, the debate on the medical perils of the wrong kinds of music became overtly politicized in Germany and the Soviet Union. Likewise, the opponents of jazz, particularly in the United States, often turned to medicine to fend off its supposed social, moral, and physical consequences. The Cold War saw an extensive discourse on the idea of musical "brainwashing," that rumbled on into the 1990s. Today, regular media panics about pathological music are mirrored by alarming evidence of the deliberate use of music to harm listeners in the context of the so-called War on Terror. Can music make you ill? Music therapy is a common if perhaps rather neglected part of medicine, but its diametric opposite, the notion that music might lead to real mental and physical illness, may seem improbable. In fact, over the last two hundred years, there have been many times when as much was written about the medical dangers of music as about its potential benefits. Since the eighteenth century, fears about music's effects on the nerves and the mind have created a remarkably extensive discourse on pathological music based on a view of both music and the causation of disease as matters of nervous stimulation (Kennaway, 2010, 2012a). From concerns about young ladies fainting from excessive stimulation while playing the keyboard in the Georgian period and Victorian panics about Wagner to the Nazi concept of "degenerate music" and Cold War anxieties about musical brainwashing, the debate on the medical dangers of music has generally combined a theoretical and terminological basis in the medicine of the period concerned with broader agendas about gender, sexuality, race, and social order. Each generation has tended to regard the music it grew up with as the epitome of rationality and healthy mindedness while ascribing hair-raising medical consequences to newer music. This debate has continued right up to the present day, with the depressing difference that, with the systematic use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror, the idea that music can be bad for you has become a much more realistic prospect. Although the debate about music's ill effects has largely been bogus, there are ways in which music can in fact adversely affect health. Most directly of all, there is of course the power of sheer volume to cause psychological strain and hearing damage. It was only really with the advent of the modern age, with its industrial noise, expanded orchestras, and amplified sound systems, that this became a widespread concern. Although the high-decibel sound can include music, it is not its character as music that causes health problems, so it falls rather outside our purview. Medical problems that do relate to specifically to music itself include the rare conditions of arousal-related arrhythmia and musicogenic epilepsy, but in both of these contexts, music is essentially a trigger rather than a fundamental cause of sickness (Sharp, 1997; Viskin, 2008; Wieser et al., 1997). There is a long history of medical accounts of musical hallucinations, which are certainly sometimes associated with serious medical conditions, but they are by no means always experienced as pathological (Berrios, 1990; Evers and Tanja, 2004). It should also be remembered that it is quite possible that many of the accounts of music causing disease refer to real physical symptoms and suffering, albeit generally with a psychosomatic rather than direct physiological explanation. This kind of psychological impact of music has meant it has been linked to a variety of culturally bound syndromes. Having said that, it is also clear that the most of the discourse on pathological music is basically fallacious. Over and over again, fundamentally moral objections to music relating to sexuality, gender, social order, and self-control have been clear beneath a veneer of medical language.

This essay examines how American magazines have portrayed new religions since the World War II. Media depictions have changed dramatically from the 1950s to the present. Specifically, journalists in the 1950s and early 1960s used the dual Cold War themes of exoticism and subversion to depict new religions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, subjects and themes began to change. Newsmagazines ambivalently reported on the gurus, Asian new religions, and occult spirituality attracting some in the burgeoning youth counterculture with a mixture of exoticism and wariness. By the mid-1970s, media images became more ominous. News, general interest, and entertainment media represented new religions as a growing “cult menace” and highlighted the dangers that brainwashing groups posed to unsuspecting followers. The 1978 Jonestown mass suicide seemed to confirm such negative cult stereotypes, leading to homogenous portrayals of new religions that continued through the 1990s. In explaining such changes over time, the essay ends by proposing five complimentary theses for understanding late-twentieth-century mass media representations of new religions.