Since the early 20th century, the name of the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov has been associated with the idea of brainwashing. Pavlov’s experiments, in which he trained dogs to salivate in response to a signal such as a bell, showed that the mind could be conditioned to react automatically to stimuli. But he looked forward to a time when science could manipulate the brain directly. In a passage eerily accurate in describing today’s neural imaging, he wrote: “If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person…then we should see playing over the cerebral surface a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders, constantly fluctuating in size and form, and surrounded by a darkness, more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemispheres.”
We still don’t have a precise topography of the brain in terms of specific thoughts or feelings. It’s hard to imagine where one would begin if one wanted to surgically force someone to reveal a particular secret, or to persuade him or her to vote for a certain candidate. But since Pavlov’s time, science has moved much closer to enabling direct physical control of the brain. In this century, neuroscientists’ insights into memory, cognition, pleasure and pain may make coercive “mind control” a reality.
The psychologist James Olds (1922-76), one of the founders of modern neuroscience, conducted an experiment at McGill University in 1953 in which he implanted electrodes deep in the brains of rats and started observing their responses to electrical stimulation at various sites. His key observation resulted from an accident: He missed the desired anatomical site slightly on one particular rat. After recovering from surgery, the animal was placed in a special chamber. Every time it went to a corner of the chamber, it received a small electrical stimulus to the brain, with each corner stimulating a different site. The rat kept returning to one specific corner, even skipping eating to hang out there and get the brain stimulation.
Olds inferred that there was something pleasurable about receiving a shock at that site in the brain. Next he started training the rat to go to different parts of the box or to turn right or left before it could receive the desired electrical stimulation. Using this technique, Olds could elicit complex behaviors easily; Pavlov would have been envious about this shortcut to behavioral conditioning. Olds observed that “Left to itself in the apparatus, the animal…stimulated its own brain regularly,” up to 5,000 times an hour.
The mind-control possibilities for this intervention sounded almost limitless, but would it work on people? Psychiatrist Robert Heath (1915-99), of Tulane University, performed studies with human patients, including one code-named B-7, a 28-year-old man with severe narcolepsy. Heath implanted a series of electrodes in various areas of his brain and asked the patient what he felt after each area was stimulated. One area was so aversive that the patient intentionally broke the stimulus button so that he would never have to experience that sensation again.
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However, the feelings evoked by stimulating a different site were intensely pleasurable. The patient learned that he could block an incipient narcoleptic attack by self-stimulating; he was able to control his symptoms so well that for the first time he was able to get a job. On the rare occasion that he fell asleep too rapidly to press the button, his friends knew that they could promptly wake him up by pressing it for him.
At one point the CIA approached Heath, asking if he would work with the agency to study the brain’s pleasure and pain system. He spurned the invitation, he told a New York Times reporter in 1977: “If I had wanted to be a spy, I would have been a spy. I wanted to be a doctor and practice medicine.” This kind of work, most of which was conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, has largely been shut down because of ethical concerns.
However, the underlying neurosurgical techniques have continued to evolve. Fifty years after Heath’s studies, procedures are less invasive, less risky and can be applied to very specific areas of the brain. Implanted deep-brain stimulators (DBS) are used by thousands of people with Parkinson’s disease to help control their muscle movements, as well as for other conditions such as pain and epilepsy. There is ongoing interest in using such interventions on different sites in the brain to treat patients with psychiatric disorders, particularly patients with treatment-resistant depression.
Deep-brain stimulation requires painstaking surgery and expensive equipment, suitable for an individual but hardly appropriate for group interventions. Is there a way of stimulating a group of people without implants? In her 1996 book “Cults in Our Midst,” Psychologist Margaret Singer described love bombing,” an indoctrination technique used by some cults in which recruits are given so much flattery and adulation that they feel welcome and safe.
The neuroendocrine equivalent involves a hormone called oxytocin that is manufactured deep in the brain. People release oxytocin when they are bonding with another; it is sometimes nicknamed the feel-good hormone. Early research found that it is increased during breast-feeding and during sexual intimacy. Subsequent research showed that oxytocin is also produced in other situations of closeness—prayer, team sports, even when dog owners interact with their pets.
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But there is a darker side to oxytocin. Experiments have found that it can stoke trust and cooperation within a group at the expense of distrust of people outside the group. Currently, the most effective way of administering oxytocin is through a nasal spray, but if it were possible to administer it orally or via aerosol, it could conceivably be used in group settings to increase attachment and thereby recruit new potential members of a cult or party. People might willingly join a group or adopt a new belief if it allowed them to receive pleasurable stimulation—after all, addicts aren’t particularly squeamish about what they need to do to obtain their drugs.
On the other side of the coin, people might repudiate their old beliefs or identities to turn off painful stimulation, the way patient B-7 broke his stimulus button. When the dystopian movie “A Clockwork Orange” was released in 1971, audiences were stunned by its portrayal of the power of aversive conditioning. The advance of neuroscience means that such techniques are no longer just fantasies. So far they have been kept in check only by government regulation and medical professionals’ sense of ethics. But governments are always seeking new weaponry, and history suggests that there will always be some researchers who close their eyes to the implications of their work or justify it as a way to protect society from looming threats. Their self-restraint may not always protect us from the dark potential of scientific coercion.
—Dr. Dimsdale is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Dark Coercion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media,” which will be published Aug. 16 by Yale University Press.