Elephants on Acid (10 page)

Mary C. had the misfortune of coming under the care of Dr. Ewen Cameron, director of the Allan Memorial Clinic in Montreal, Canada. She became one of the hundreds of unwitting subjects in his CIA-funded “beneficial brainwashing” experiments.

Born in Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Cameron had clawed his way to the top, fueled by fierce ambition. By the late 1950s he was one of the most respected psychiatrists in the world. He had served as president of the Quebec, Canadian, and American Psychiatric Associations and would go on to cofound the World Psychiatric Association. But it vexed him that one treasure eluded his grasp—the Nobel Prize. He embarked on a program of experimentation to discover a cure for schizophrenia, sure this would net him the trophy. His patients served as his subjects, whether they wished to or not, and often whether they had schizophrenia or not.

The cure that Cameron dreamed up was a testament to his hubris. He haphazardly cobbled it together from bits and pieces of other experimental therapies. Whatever caught his eye, he tried, constructing a true Frankenstein’s creation.

The premise of his cure was to wipe schizophrenic patients’ minds clean, erasing all their memories, and then to insert new nonschizophrenic personalities into their empty brains. Drawing on Cold War imagery, he described this as beneficial brainwashing, capable of transforming the mentally ill into healthy
new
people. A modern analogy would be fixing a software error in a computer by erasing everything on the hard drive and installing an entirely new version of the operating system. Except, of course, the human brain is not like a computer. It cannot simply be erased and reformatted.

Step one was the Mind Wipe. Cameron euphemistically referred to this as “depatterning.” He stripped away the mind’s defenses and memories using electroshock therapy. Electroshock was widely used during the 1950s, but Cameron applied it far more aggressively than most doctors dared, administering it multiple times a day, at levels six times the normal charge. In essence, he fried his patients’ brains. And for good measure he topped this off with massive doses of mind-altering drugs such as LSD.

Reducing patients to walking zombies may seem like the kind of thing most physicians would not own up to in public, but remember that Cameron fully believed he was in the running for a Nobel Prize. So he voluntarily published the details. You can go to your local library and read about it in his own words. In the following description, taken from a 1960 article in the journal
Comprehensive Psychiatry
, Cameron itemized the effects of depatterning on one unlucky patient:

The patient loses all recollection of the fact that he formerly possessed a space-time image which served to explain the events of the day to him. With this loss, all anxiety also disappears. In the third stage, his conceptual span is limited to a few minutes and to entirely concrete events. He volunteers a few statements on questioning: He says he is sleepy or that he feels fine. He cannot conceptualize where he is, nor does he recognize those who treat him . . . What the patient talks about are only his sensations of the moment, and he talks about them almost exclusively in highly concrete terms. His remarks are entirely uninfluenced by previous recollections—nor are they governed in any way by his forward anticipations. He lives in the immediate present. All schizophrenic symptoms have disappeared. There is complete amnesia for all events of his life.

Having destroyed the mind, the next stage was to rebuild it. The hope was that some of the patient’s memories would spontaneously return as he recovered from the electroshock. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t. Meanwhile, Cameron labored to impose healthy thought patterns in place of the unhealthy, schizophrenic ones. To achieve this he used a process he called “psychic driving.”

The concept of psychic driving occurred to Cameron after he read about an American inventor, Max Sherover, who had created a sleep-learning machine—a modified record player that repeated messages as a person dreamed. The sleeping mind supposedly soaked up these messages, and the person woke knowing a foreign language or how to send a signal in Morse code. (We’ll encounter sleep learning again in chapter four.)

Cameron thought a modified version of this might be used to reprogram a patient’s mind. He experimented with the technique on its own, before pairing it with depatterning. He made neurotic patients wear headphones and listen to anxiety-provoking statements, in an attempt to force them to confront their fears. The statements repeated over and over until the patients couldn’t stand it any longer. Often they grew so enraged they flung the headphones across the room and stormed out the door.

Again, Cameron touted this in public as a cutting-edge therapy. He even invited the press to the clinic to witness a patient undergoing psychic driving. In the resulting article in Montreal’s
Weekend Magazine
in 1955, we find a picture of a woman on a bed squirming in discomfort while listening to a looping message. One of Cameron’s assistants stares at her impassively as he fiddles with a knob on the tape player.

Cameron’s ambitions for the uses of psychic driving quickly grew by leaps and bounds. He didn’t want patients merely to confront their anxieties—he wanted to violently drive messages into their psyche to reshape their very identities. He imagined exposing patients to a message all day for months on end. Of course, patients resisted listening for even a few minutes, so they weren’t about to lie still voluntarily as a message repeated hundreds of thousands of times. Therefore, Cameron devised ways to force them to listen. He injected patients with curare, a paralyzing South American plant toxin, compelling them to lie motionless in bed as a voice droned from speakers in their pillows. Or he drugged them with barbiturates, sending them into a deep sleep for weeks at a time as the tapes whispered in their ears. Or he confined them in a sensory-deprivation chamber—a soundproof cubicle—with goggles over their eyes, and restraints holding their arms in place.

Cameron encountered some unexpected problems. The engineer he hired to record some of the messages spoke with a strong Polish accent, and patients subsequently reported their thoughts were taking on a Polish cadence. Cameron corrected this by rerecording the messages in his own voice. Since he had a thick Scottish burr, this was probably not an improvement.

Patients were also prone to misunderstanding the message. According to one oft-repeated rumor, a woman came to Cameron complaining of an inability to feel sexually comfortable with her husband. On Cameron’s orders, she lay in bed for weeks listening to the phrase “Jane, you are at ease with your husband.” Only later did Cameron discover she thought the message was saying “Jane, you are a tease with your husband.”

Overall Cameron thought psychic driving showed great promise. In one test of the technique, he placed patients into a drugged sleep and made them listen to the message, “When you see a piece of paper, you want to pick it up.” Later he drove them to a local gymnasium. There, lying in the middle of the gym floor, was a single piece of paper. Reportedly many of them walked over to pick it up.

Thanks to his public boasts about the promise of beneficial brainwashing, Cameron came to the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. If he was going to develop a workable brainwashing technique, they wanted to know about it. In 1957 the agency began surreptitiously funneling money to him via one of its front organizations, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. But after a few years, despite Cameron’s enthusiastic progress reports, the agency realized his process simply didn’t work. They summarily ended his funding in 1961. Soon after, Cameron grudgingly conceded his experiments had been “a ten year trip down the wrong road.” Of course, he never bothered to apologize to the patients whose lives he had ruined. He did, however, shred their hospital records.

The CIA later came to regret getting involved with Cameron. Details of the funding arrangement leaked out in the late 1970s, leading to a lawsuit filed against the agency by a group of Cameron’s former patients. The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

Cameron spent the remainder of his career working on a project that was, in many ways, the polar opposite of his brainwashing experiments. Instead of destroying memory, he attempted to restore it. He had read about James McConnell’s memory-transfer experiments, and with his keen talent for attaching himself to questionable research, he eagerly jumped
²⁵
on this bandwagon. Once again, visions of a Nobel Prize danced before his eyes.

McConnell had theorized that RNA played a key role in the process of memory formation, so Cameron gave elderly patients RNA pills, hopeful this would improve their recall. He periodically administered a memory test to check their progress. Soon he was reporting positive results. The only problem was that he was giving the patients the exact same test, again and again, which made their improvement predictable and rather meaningless. Somehow he had overlooked this obvious flaw in his experiment’s design.

In September 1967 Cameron climbed to the summit of a mountain near Lake Placid and dropped dead of a heart attack. The manner of his death seemed somehow appropriate: In death, as in life, it was his own driving ambition to get to the top that ultimately brought him down.

It begins with a simple request. Sit in a room and say whatever comes into your mind. Do this for five minutes. You happily begin talking, and before you know it the time is up. But then the experiment takes an unexpected turn. The researcher says: “Please verbalize your thoughts as you did before, with one exception. This time, try not to think of a white bear. Every time you say ‘white bear’ or have ‘white bear’ come to mind, though, please ring the bell on the table before you.”

Huh? A white bear? This shouldn’t be too difficult. How often do you think about white bears anyway? But complying with the request proves tougher than anticipated. You start talking, and suddenly a white bear lumbers into your thoughts. Try as you might, you can’t suppress the image. You try to distract yourself. You think of other things—an upcoming dentist appointment or a pattern on the floor. But nothing works. The bear keeps pushing its way back into your head.

In 1987 psychology professor Daniel Wegner devised the white-bear experiment and tested it on ten Trinity University undergraduates. He found that not one of them could stop thinking about white bears. Consider the frustration of one of his subjects (note: asterisks indicate bell rings signifying thoughts of a white bear):

Of course now the only thing I’m going to think about is a white bear . . . Ummm, what was I thinking of before? See, if I think about flowers a lot * . . . I’ll think about a white bear, it’s impossible. * I could ring this bell over and over * and over * and over * and . . . a white bear * . . . and okay . . . And I’m trying to think of a million things to make me think about everything * but a white bear and I keep thinking of it over * and over * and over * and over. So . . . umm, hey, look at this brown wall. It’s like every time I try and not think about a white bear, I’m still thinking about one, and I’m tired of ringing the bell.

But the experiment wasn’t over. Wegner next asked the undergraduates again to say whatever came to mind, but now he gave them permission to think about white bears. Surprisingly, they didn’t just think about the bears; they obsessed over them. They rang the bell like Quasimodo on steroids. By contrast, a control group of ten undergraduates who had received instructions to contemplate white bears from the outset rang the bell far less often. Wegner realized he had discovered a rebound effect—initial suppression of white bears leads to subsequent obsession about them.

So did all this have a point, or was Wegner just peculiarly interested in white bears? Yes, it did have a point. And no, Wegner was not a white-bear fanatic. The white-bear image was arbitrary. He borrowed it from an anecdote told by Dostoyevsky (an anecdote that, he sheepishly admitted, he read in
Playboy
magazine while a college student).

The point was that white bears represent unwanted thoughts. If you’ve ever found yourself unable to stop thinking about something—such as food, cigarettes, alcohol, or an ex—you’re familiar with unwanted thoughts. Wegner’s experiment revealed that the more we try to control what we think, the more control slips out of our grasp.

The real killer, of course, is the rebound effect. Perhaps your diet has been working. You’ve successfully fought off your cravings for weeks. You’re not thinking about food. Then someone hands you a cupcake at an office party, and it’s like a dam bursting. The next thing you know, you’ve downed the entire tray and are halfway through the bowl of nachos. Your suppression has turned into obsession.

And it gets worse, because the rebound effect can lead to an escalating cycle of suppression and obsession. Wegner writes, “The person becomes alarmed, noticing that an unusual degree of preoccupation is underway. This might produce a newly energized attempt at suppression, only to restart the cycle . . . Eventually, pathological levels of obsessive concern could result.”

At which point you find yourself sitting in a corner, foaming at the mouth, madly screaming, “White bear! White bear! White bear!”

²⁶
Wegner’s experiment, as quirky as it is, is today considered a classic of modern psychology. One of the fun things about it is that you can try it yourself. Just put down this book and don’t think about a white bear for a while. But don’t say you haven’t been warned. White bears, once not invited in, can be devilishly hard to get rid of.

Fourteen-year-old Chris sits at a table. A redheaded researcher in her late forties sits opposite him. She leans forward and looks him in the eye. “Chris, tell me what you remember about being lost in the mall when you were five.”