The Future of the Mind (30 page)

Then Dr. Delgado pressed another button, and the alpha male instantly sprung back to normal, resuming his aggressive behavior and reestablishing his power as the king of the hill. The delta males scrambled in fear.

Dr. Delgado was the first person in history to show that it was possible to control the minds of animals in this way. The professor became the puppet master, pulling the strings of living puppets.

As expected, the scientific community looked at Dr. Delgado’s work with unease. To make matters worse, he wrote a book in 1969 with the provocative title
Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society
. It raised an unsettling question: If scientists like Dr. Delgado are pulling the strings, then who controls the puppet master?

Dr. Delgado’s work puts into sharp focus the enormous promise and perils of this technology. In the hands of an unscrupulous dictator, this technology might be used to deceive and control his unfortunate subjects. But it can also be used to free millions of people who are trapped in mental illness, hounded by their hallucinations, or crushed by their anxieties. (Years later, Dr. Delgado was asked by a journalist why he initiated these controversial experiments. He said that he wanted to correct the horrendous abuses being suffered by the mentally ill. They often underwent radical lobotomies, in which the prefrontal cortex was scrambled by a knife resembling an ice pick, which was hammered into the brain above the eye socket. The results were often tragic, and some of the horrors were exposed in Ken Kesey’s novel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, which was made into a movie with Jack Nicholson. Some patients became calm and relaxed, but many others became zombies: lethargic, indifferent to pain and feelings, and emotionally vacuous.
The practice was so widespread that in 1949, Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for perfecting the lobotomy. Ironically, in 1950, the Soviet Union banned this technology, stating that “it was contrary to the principles of humanity.” Lobotomies, the Soviet Union charged, turned “an insane person into an idiot.” In total, it is estimated that forty thousand lobotomies were performed in the United States alone over two decades.)

MIND CONTROL AND THE COLD WAR

Another reason for the chilly reception of Dr. Delgado’s work was the political climate of the time. It was the height of the Cold War, with painful memories of captured U.S. soldiers being paraded in front of cameras during the Korean War. With blank stares, they would admit they were on secret spy missions, confess to horrific war crimes, and denounce U.S. imperialism.

To make sense of this, the press used the term “brainwashing,” the idea that the communists had developed secret drugs and techniques to turn U.S. soldiers into pliable zombies. In this charged political climate, Frank Sinatra starred in the 1962 Cold War thriller
The Manchurian Candidate
, in which he tries to expose a secret communist “sleeper” agent whose mission is to assassinate the president of the United States. But there is a twist. The assassin is actually a trusted U.S. war hero, someone who was captured and then brainwashed by the communists. Coming from a well-connected family, the agent seems above suspicion and is almost impossible to stop.
The Manchurian Candidate
mirrored the anxieties of many Americans at that time.

Many of these fears were also stoked by Aldous Huxley’s prophetic 1931 novel
Brave New World
. In this dystopia, there are large test-tube-baby factories that produce clones. By selectively depriving oxygen from these fetuses, it is possible to produce children of different levels of brain damage. At the top are the alphas, who suffer no brain damage and are bred to rule society. At the bottom are the epsilons, who suffer significant brain damage and are used as disposable, obedient workers. In between are additional levels made up of other workers and the bureaucracy. The elite then control society by flooding it with mind-altering drugs, free love, and constant brainwashing. In this way, peace, tranquility, and harmony are maintained, but the novel asked a disturbing question that resonates even today: How much of our
freedom and basic humanity do we want to sacrifice in the name of peace and social order?

CIA MIND-CONTROL EXPERIMENTS

The Cold War hysteria eventually reached the highest levels of the CIA. Convinced that the Soviets were far ahead in the science of brainwashing and unorthodox scientific methods, the CIA embarked upon a variety of classified projects, such as MKULTRA, which began in 1953, to explore bizarre, fringe ideas. (In 1973, as the Watergate scandal spread panic throughout the government, CIA director Richard Helms canceled MKULTRA and hurriedly ordered all documents pertaining to the project destroyed. However, a cache of twenty thousand documents somehow survived the purge and were declassified in 1977 under the Freedom of Information Act, revealing the full scope of this massive effort.)

It is now known that, from 1953 to 1973, MULTRA funded 80 institutions, including 44 universities and colleges, and scores of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and prisons, often experimenting on unsuspecting people without their permission, in 150 secret operations. At one point, fully 6 percent of the entire CIA budget went into MKULTRA.

Some of these mind-control projects included:

•  developing a “truth serum” so prisoners would spill their secrets

•  erasing memories via a U.S. Navy project called “Subproject 54”

•  using hypnosis and a wide variety of drugs, especially LSD, to control behavior

•  investigating the use of mind-control drugs against foreign leaders, e.g., Fidel Castro

•  perfecting a variety of interrogation methods against prisoners

•  developing a knockout drug that was fast working and left no trace

•  altering people’s personality via drugs to make them more pliable

Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as
LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window.

Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “
great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said.

Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “
neuro-scientific impossibility.”

But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person.

Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.

Of course, the military was not the first to experiment with mind control.
In ancient times, sorcerers and seers would claim that giving magic potions to captured soldiers would make them talk or turn against their leaders. One of the earliest of these mind-control methods was hypnotism.

YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY
.…

As a child, I remember seeing TV specials devoted to hypnosis. In one show, a person was placed in a hypnotic trance and told that when he woke up, he would be a chicken. The audience gasped as he began to cluck and flap his arms around the stage. As dramatic as this demonstration was, it’s simply an example of “stage hypnosis.” Books written by professional magicians and showmen explain that they use shills planted in the audience, the power of suggestion, and even the willingness of the victim to play along with the ruse.

I once hosted a BBC/Discovery TV documentary called
Time
, and the subject of long-lost memories came up. Is it possible to evoke such distant memories through hypnosis? And if it is, can you then impose your will on another? To test some of these ideas, I had myself hypnotized for TV.

BBC hired a skilled professional hypnotist to begin the process. I was asked to lie down on a bed in a quiet, darkened room. The hypnotist spoke to me in slow, gentle tones, gradually making me relax. After a while, he asked me to think back into the past, to perhaps a certain place or incident that stood out even after all these years. And then he asked me to reenter that place, reexperiencing its sights, sounds, and smells. Remarkably, I did begin to see places and people’s faces that I had forgotten about decades ago. It was like watching a blurred movie that was slowly coming into focus. But then the recollections stopped. At a certain point, I could not recapture any more memories. There was clearly a limit to what hypnosis could do.

EEG and MRI scans show that during hypnosis the subject has minimal sensory stimulation in the sensory cortices from the outside. In this way, hypnosis can allow one to access some memories that are buried, but it certainly cannot change one’s personality, goals, or wishes. A secret 1966 Pentagon document corroborates this, explaining that hypnotism cannot be trusted as a military weapon. “
It is probably significant that in the long history of hypnosis, where the potential application to intelligence has always been known, there are no reliable accounts of its effective use by an intelligence service,” it read.

It should also be noted that brain scans show that hypnotism is not a new state of consciousness, like dreaming and REM sleep. If we define human consciousness as the process of continually building models of the outside world and then simulating how they evolve into the future to carry out a goal, we see that hypnosis cannot alter this basic process. Hypnosis can accentuate certain aspects of consciousness and help retrieve certain memories, but it cannot make you squawk like a chicken without your permission.

MIND-ALTERING DRUGS AND TRUTH SERUMS

One of the goals of MKULTRA was the creation of a truth serum so that spies and prisoners would reveal their secrets. Although MKULTRA was canceled in 1973, U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals declassified by the Pentagon in 1996 still recommended the use of truth serums (although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that confessions obtained in this way were “unconstitutionally coerced” and hence inadmissible in court).

Anyone who watches Hollywood movies knows that sodium pentathol is the truth serum of choice used by spies (as in the movies
True Lies
with Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Meet the Fockers
with Robert De Niro). Sodium pentathol is part of a larger class of barbiturates, sedatives, and hypnotics that can evade the blood-brain barrier, which prevents most harmful chemicals in the bloodstream from entering the brain.

Not surprisingly, most mind-altering drugs, such as alcohol, affect us powerfully because they can evade this barrier. Sodium pentathol depresses activity in the prefrontal cortex, so that a person becomes more relaxed, talkative, and uninhibited. However, this does not mean that they tell the truth. On the contrary, people under the influence of sodium pentathol, like those who have imbibed a few too many, are fully capable of lying. The “secrets” that come spilling out of the mouth of someone under this drug may be total fabrications, so even the CIA eventually gave up on drugs like this.

But this still leaves open the possibility that, one day, a wonder drug might be found that could alter our basic consciousness. This drug would work by changing the synapses between our nerve fibers by targeting neurotransmitters that operate in this area, such as dopamine, serotonin, or acetylcholine. If we think of the synapses as a series of tollbooths along a superhighway, then certain drugs (such as stimulants like cocaine) can open the tollbooth
and let messages pass by unimpeded. The sudden rush that drug addicts feel is caused when these tollbooths are opened all at once, causing an avalanche of signals to flood by. But when all the synapses have fired in unison, they cannot fire again until hours later. It’s as if the tolls have closed, and this causes the sudden depression one feels after the rush. The body’s desire to reexperience the sudden rush then causes addiction.

HOW DRUGS ALTER THE MIND

Although the biochemical basis for mind-altering drugs was not known when the CIA first conducted its experiments on unsuspecting subjects, since then the molecular basis of drug addiction has been studied in detail. Studies in animals demonstrate how powerful drug addiction is: rats, mice, and primates will, given the chance, take drugs like cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines until they drop from exhaustion or die from it.