What Mind Control Feels Like

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we're going to be following up the episode that
you just did with Christian most recently about mind flares.

(00:25):
Today we wanted to take a broader look at the
idea of mind control in fiction in reality. If it's possible,
can you really control someone's mind from a distance, And
if so, what's it like to have your mind controlled? Yes? Now,
this is not a part two, So if you didn't
listen to the last episode on mind flares or all

(00:45):
the Dungeons and dragon stuff turns you off, do not worry.
You will not need that level of expertise to continue
on listening to this episode. Robert, I'm sure you can
give a brief summary course on mind flares for us.
I will, But before we do that, let's let's just
us a few other pop culture, cultural literary examples even
of mind control. Well, one of the classics has got

(01:08):
to be The Manchurian Candidate, a movie I've never seen,
but I'm familiar with just through reputation. It's based on
a novel and it stars uh Frank Sinatra, which I
have to be sad about because I I can't stand
that crooner stuff. You you can't I want to use
another word other than stuff. It's no, I'm not into

(01:31):
the crooners. Oh I appreciate some creon in every now
and then. Now that kind of surprises me. Yeah, well,
you know, it's kind of like I think I'm a
big fan of Soma FM, which is an internet radio
station free supported by listeners free plug as well. Uh
and they have a number of different channels with various
different types of like electronic and spacey music. But they
also have one called Secret Agent Radio, and so they

(01:54):
have a lot of it's like a lot of James
Bond audio snippets in between, sometimes lounge your tracks, but
occasionally something a little occasionally, I think they'll drop a
little Sinatra in. Okay, well, I guess I could get
into that. But the crooner stuff itself, I'm not a
fan of. Anyway, back to the Manchurion candidate. So the plot,
if you're not familiar with it, basically, there are some

(02:16):
American soldiers who get brainwashed behind enemy lines. I think
they're taken prisoner by some communists, and these communists hypnotize
them and turn them into sleeper agents. So you've got
a character who has been under hypnosis given this post
hypnotic suggestion that given a certain trigger that activates him,

(02:37):
he will become an unwitting assassin and will carry out
his preordained orders from his communist overlords, which are to
assassinate some American official. Okay, this is very playing in
a way upon like the the the the very Cold
War idea, real life idea that contact with the enemy
even when captured and not you know, brain, that's gonna change,

(03:01):
it's gonna contaminate you with a with a foreign way
of thinking. Yeah, and the season on both sides with
the Soviets, uh and with the and with the US. Yeah.
And this was also it's very similar to stuff people
were really saying about things that happened to, for example,
American prisoners of war during the Korean War, but with
a critical historical approach, most of those stories about American

(03:23):
POWs in the Korean War, I think that's all been
pretty much debunked these days, though of course, there is
a lot of you know, in any prison or scenario,
there's gonna be a lot of psychological manipulation. Just bite
the inherent nature of what's going on and sure, that
is the thing that we're going to have to explore
at length in this episode. Is what's the difference between regular,

(03:45):
run of the mill psychological manipulation, which we all acknowledge,
we're all familiar with. It's a It's actually a part
of everyday life. It's not just something that happens under
extreme duress and wartime scenarios. Psychological manipulation happens in your job.
It happens in your relations and chips. So this is
utterly mundane, We're all familiar with it. What's the difference
between that and the kind of mind control that we

(04:07):
see in fiction? And wonder if it could be real? Yeah?
I mean if I read a self help book. Let's
say I pick up an Eckart tote total a book
and I started reading it, I'm allowing Eckhart totally to
write in my brain with his ideas and essentially control
who I am. Is that a good thing? Uh? Yeah?
I like, Yeah, I think, yeah, I I do. I like.
I like a number of Eckart Tootal's ideas. But it's

(04:29):
that I think we're all okay with that idea. You're allowing,
You're you're reading a book, You're you're willingly opening the
doors and letting ideas come in. But where does it
become a bad thing? Where where do we draw that line?
Where does it become the Manchurian candidate. Well, we'll get
into that later. I see, Robert, you have some comic
book villains here for us, right, Yeah, there are. There
are a few other I think really noteworthy ideas, some

(04:50):
of them more recent than others that you see in fiction.
Different visions of what mind control would be like. Uh,
there was, of course a really cool one that was
on the Netflix show Jessica Jones. If you're not familiar
with this, this is a superhero show. Uh, that's like
a street level, um Hell's kitchen kind of a thing.
Jessica Jones is a former superhero with super strength and

(05:13):
now she's a She's a p I and the enemy
she goes up against is this guy, Mr Purple, the
Purple Man, uh Zebadiah Killgrave. And this character's power is
that he can. He tells you to do something and
you do it. He tells you to believe something, you
believe it. That's a very formidable power. Yeah, it's a

(05:33):
it's a wonder. I'm a big fan of that, at
least that that first season, the season that's out of
Jessica Jones, because they do a great job of exploring
how this this just overpowered character works and it seems
he can defeat Superman so easily. Right. Yeah, he just
tells people what to do and they do it. So
what kind of world has he built for himself? What

(05:55):
kind of of mind does he have? Like what sort
of you know, his inner trauma, but also the trauma
he lives in it he leaves in his wake, because
eventually people wake up from their mind control and they realized, oh,
I did all these awful things for this guy who
just walked into my life and started telling me who
I was and what I wanted to do for him.

(06:16):
And then the important thing, too, is that what what
he tells you to do, you do it willingly. It's
not a situation of of oh I don't want to
serve the Purple Man, but I'm doing it. No, you
just do what the Purple Man tells you to do,
as if not as if he's the voice of God,
as if he's your voice. He wears you like a
glove and makes you do the things you do, and

(06:37):
you do them of your seemingly of your own volition,
subject and master, indivisible and will exactly. Okay, so I
got another one. Okay, I know you love this movie
video Drone. Oh yes, it's been a while since I've
actually plugged it into the old VCR or even you know,
my torso. But yeah, Cronenberg's video Drune is a classic. Yeah,
and I think there's a lot of metaphorical relationships going

(06:59):
on now in the lot of videodrome. It's it's a
it's a nasty body horror movie, but a very smart
and inventive one about this sleazy TV producer who gets
caught up in this conspiracy of people who are trying
to use TV programming to kill people and the control
minds James woods yes, James Woodson, and he he ends
up becoming sort of like in the Maturian Candidate, a

(07:21):
a mindless assassin that is being controlled by these people
who are who are bombarding his brain with different video signals.
And there's definitely a lot of commentary in it about
about how media influences us I think there's some media
as mind control type suggestions. But he he in the
plot of the movie, on the face of it, literally

(07:43):
becomes a mind controlled sleeper assassin running around with his
flesh gun, lasting people. But they do explain it, not
just in the mundane sense of media control, as in,
you know, media is feeding us ideas, and we consume
those ideas and are sometimes convinced and influenced by them.
But there is actually like a sci fi explanation. You know,
he's been given some kind of special brain waves that

(08:05):
mess him up and cause him to lose his personal
will and autonomy. Okay, yeah, that's a That's a great example.
Another example that came to my mind is from another
actually ties into another James Woods film. So did you
see John Carpenter's Vampires film. I have tried to watch
that movie and was unable to finish. It was just

(08:26):
awful and one of those movies that is so ugly
to look at that you can't keep your eyes on
the screen. Yeah I will. I will not defend that
movie at all. And I'm saying that as a Carpenter fan.
I think a lot of us have the same uh
relationship with that film. It's all the more tragic though,
not only because of Carpenter's filmography and how many you know,

(08:49):
how many films in that filmography we just love so much,
but also it's based on the book by John Steakley
titled Vampires, and the book itself is really empires with
a doll are signed. I think sometimes it has a
dollar sign. Yeah. Um. John Steckley now now now the
departed from this mortal coil. He uh he wrote two books. Basically,

(09:11):
he wrote Vampires and he wrote a book called Armor
uh an. Armor is kind of a Starship Troopers uh
riff involving you know, power armor and inhuman enemies and
a sci fi future. Both of these books are are
really good. I recommend them their pactful action. But Vampires
in particular has these the the vampire characters that are

(09:31):
encountered by the hunters are just really terrifying because they
have this at least one of them in particular, has
this this terrible purple man type mind control power. So
the covenant vampires will just happen upon some people and
they'll you know, drain some of them, but then they'll
also just toy with the others by mind controlling them

(09:53):
into doing just awful things and then leaving them to
come to terms with the things that they did seemingly willingly,
you know that they're just traumatized by the experience, and
that these awful vampires uh that are parading around like
little gods, they enjoy it. So that's kind of strange.
The characters remember doing what they've done under the influence

(10:16):
of mind control, yet they remember it as something that
they will personally had the will to do or did
not personally have the will to do. If I remember correctly,
it's that they remember loving it. So if they're you know,
they're told to do this and love it, they'll do
it and love it. And then even after the power
of the vampires is left, they're still coming to terms
of like, what's what's the matter with me? Why did

(10:37):
I do those things? Why not I enjoy doing those things?
And I guess a lot of that is kind of
commentary on, you know, on various things in life. We
can all look back on memories and we asked, why
did we do that? And and do so willingly? We
don't most of us do not have the luxury of
having the mistakes in our lives dictated to us by
alien or vampire overlords. It's true. It can often feel

(10:59):
like when you think back on a memory of something
you did that you're very not proud of that. You
think that was a different person, almost as if you
imagine you were under some form of mind control, but
the power controlling you at the time was who you
were at the time, which is no longer who you
are now. It's true. Okay, but how about those mind flares? Yes,

(11:20):
the mind flares. So these are monsters, right? Yeah? Yeah,
these are from the dungeton Dragons World. I won't I
won't hit you with all the details again, Christian and
I just recorded an entire episode about them. But yeah,
their lovecraft Ian octopus headed batties who are always using
their psionic powers to manipulate and outright mind control their enemies, uh,

(11:41):
which is often the players of the game. And they're
using them for thralls, They're using them to like clean
the elder brain, but also to you go out and
assassinate people. They just they just totally overuse their overpowered,
uh psychic abilities. Now, is this like a Manchurian candidate
kind of thing where they'll, you know, you'll be going
about your business and suddenly they activate you and you

(12:03):
are now under their control. Or once you're under their control,
are you just thereafter under their control? I think you
can fall out of their control either by I guess
doing with a skill check okay, a role if you
roll sufficient to score on a D twenty, you can
break free, but also without outside of the gaming system itself.
It's like, for instance, mindful ayres themselves are kind of

(12:27):
uh tied to this elder brain, and if they happen
to uh you know, leave the colony and get far
enough away from it, then they fall out of its influence. Okay,
but it's often described that, especially when the more powerful
mind flayers mess with your mind, they are rewriting your identity.
They're rewriting your personality permanently. Yeah, yeah, they can. They can.

(12:48):
They can certainly do that to where they change who
you are by reaching into your brain with their psychic powers.
And there's no reset button. Yeah, there's no reset button
on that. Oh man, that's brutal. Yeah, okay, well that
that does make me think about another interesting thing. We'll
have to come back to a lot of this later.
After we looked at some of the research. But yeah,
there there is often this idea in fiction and media

(13:10):
where after somebody has been under mind controlled, they revert
to their previous state once it has concluded. But surely
the experience would sort of change, you, wouldn't it, even if,
even if you were doing things against your will. If
that's possible, I think so. I mean, if you remove
just pure magical interpretations and you base your vision of

(13:32):
this ultimately kind of fantastic mind control on what we
know about psychology and you know science, uh, yeah, it
would be it would be this weird experience. It would
be like having been worn by a glove, worn as
a glove by this other hand, but you were still
you still did all those things, you still have those
fingerprints on it. Huh. Okay, So well, let's try to

(13:52):
define our terms here and talk about what is mind
control for the purpose of today's episode. What what are
we talking about and what are we not talking about
out First of all, I think we should say that
we already have technologies for controlling people's beliefs, perceptions, desires,
and behavior, and they're familiar to all of us. We
mentioned this earlier. They're known as culture and education and

(14:13):
rhetoric and speech, media, art, entertainment. All these things are
if you want to really broaden the definition mind control,
we're all trying to control each other's minds all the time.
But that's not really what you have in mind when
you think about mind control, is it. Because there's no
doubt that these systems do control our minds, but they're
part of what I would think of as the above

(14:35):
the table battle for the public will. If you're following
my metaphor, you know it's some kind of chess game.
These are all the pieces on the board that you
can see, and we all acknowledge their making bids for
influence over our thoughts and our will, and generally, as
long as we can see all the pieces, we think
the game is fair. Right, Like, for instance, if I

(14:55):
were talking to you and I said, hey, Joe, what
are you doing after lunch? And you say, oh, I
have to go Christmas shop thing. And I was to say, no,
you should blow that off and let's go watch Rogue
One in the theater, and you would say, no, no, no,
I gotta do my Christmas shopping. And I'm trying to
I'm trying to convince you to go see rogue one. Instead,
this is above the table, like, there's no mystery here.
What's going on? I am trying to convince you to

(15:18):
to to change your mind about a decision. Sure, and
it's all like that you see, you know commercial on TV.
It's trying to change your mind about whether you need
a product, see by a product, not be a product,
be a product. Yeah. Well you know, actually though, what
the commercials do sell you is a vision of yourself,
isn't it. They're not this person, not who you are

(15:40):
now exactly, but that they are doing that, at least
in a certain way above the table, you know what
they're doing. Anybody who's uh somewhat literate in in rhetoric
and media culture and stuff like that, you recognize what's
going on. But well that's not most people. Well I
don't know. I mean, I think one of the threads
we're gonna keep coming back to is throughout this episode

(16:01):
is that all of this is going to depend on
the speaker and the listener, like the the like who's
trying to do the mind control? And what is the
mind that's being control? Yeah, maybe the power of mind
control lies somewhat in the in the fortifications of the subject. Yeah,
what are the what are the stats for the mind flayre?
What are the stats for the player character that's being affected? Right,

(16:23):
But to come back to my sort of chess metaphor,
what we're looking for is like the hidden piece that
the way to cheat is, is there a magnet under
the table moving the pieces around without our knowledge, a
way to get around our usual cognitive defenses that we
do our best to keep well fortified against all these
forces in the world that are making bids for our

(16:45):
minds and our attention. So originally the term mind control
was used in a Cold War context, right. It was
to refer to the supposed practices of realigning people's beliefs, values,
and motives against their will, often the con text of
torture and imprisonment, for example, like we mentioned earlier in
the Korean War. And I would say this usage has

(17:07):
somewhat fallen out of fashion, and from what I understand,
there's very little evidence that this ever really took place
on a significant scale, especially in the original example of
like American prisoners being held by opposing forces in the
Korean War that they were, you know, had their minds
changed by coercive persuasion. Yeah, Now, of course you can.

(17:28):
It depends on how you classify these things. Because if
you if you count just pure political re education programs,
as of two thousand thirteen, there were still three hundred
and fifty Liaodong Jile Young facilities in China. These are
re education through labor camps um that that have like
a political agenda. Yeah, and I guess the question there

(17:50):
is um. Now, it's obvious that if you are in
a culture, that culture is going to have a strong
influence over your mind. And to what extent can culture
be defined as, you know, a regime that you exist
in every day. So if you know, for long periods
of time you're completely surrounded by people who think a
certain way, that surely is going to have an influence

(18:12):
on you. People who think a certain way and tell
you to think a certain way. I think, Uh, you know,
we see that in our own lives, right, we we
we looked at we look back to say like a
high school scenario and where we all were, and then
we see where we've all gone, what kind of people
were surrounded with? And yeah, you can see you can
see reflections of that in in each person's personal trajectory.

(18:34):
But can I tie a person into a chair in
a room for a week and deprive them of sleep
and and psychologically harass them into believing that, you know,
their body is made of beetles. I don't know about
that football is good that kind of thing. Yeah, that
that the results are not in that that kind of

(18:55):
thing is so much possible, or at least not widely possible.
It might be with certain people. Um, but another common
use of the term mind control is to refer to
the kind of supposed brainwashing or re education that sometimes
happens in cults or what's known as new religious movements
to use a nice euphemism, or even in extremist circles

(19:15):
within traditional religions. And again, the concept of brainwashing here
has been a very scientifically controversial one. I'm sure you've
seen this research before that there's a lot of back
and forth in the history of psychology, especially in the
second half of the twentieth century, about to what extent
brainwashing is a real thing or is this just sort
of a non rigorous, made up concept based on intuitions

(19:39):
and not really based on research. Again, there's no doubt
that one person can influence the thoughts of the other.
But the idea that you can engage in this full
coercive persuasion where you revolutionize someone else's mind completely against
their will, I think that's not widely supported. Yeah, and
it went away. It's just too simple, right, It's like
saying the basic idea being, oh, well, this person is

(20:02):
who they are, and they believe what they believe because
they they are privy to these influences. If we cut
off all of those influences and I'm the only influence,
then surely I can decide who they are for them,
which sounds simple enough and just doesn't seem to really
relate to how we to the human condition. Right, And
you're not the only influence. They're bringing all of their

(20:23):
past influences with them in memory. Yeah, it's not just
we're not little water wheels turning in a stream. That's
a good metaphor. We are not. I always fall back
on water metaphors. Yeah, and so it will be worth
taking a bit of a look at that someday, I think,
But in my estimation to whatever extended actually happens. This
is also a somewhat different phenomenon from the kind of

(20:46):
mind flare, like uh, type mind control that we're talking
about earlier. Right, it's less It's not that it's less serious,
but there isn't so much a real time loss of
control over one's thoughts and behavior. It's rather just the
introduction of a very strongly influential set of beliefs and relationships,
maybe aided in their inception by stress and social pressure

(21:09):
and power dynamics between people and stuff like that. Yeah,
this is very much a topic I'd like to return
to the future to especially especially as it relates to cults,
to con artists. Um. Yeah, and and a number of
other scenarios come to mind. Some of the uh, you know,
to get into extremist religious models, for instance, the whole

(21:30):
you know, prey prey away, the gay kind of re
education efforts you see, which are not very successful because
it again it comes down to, oh, this person who
they are based on, you know, not only their influences,
but just they're the way they were born. We're going
to change all that just by shutting off the other
influences and just coming at them straight with the prayer.

(21:52):
I think in many cases it's just taken a chalk
eraser too. It is to something written in sharpie. I mean,
you're not getting the job done. You might have smudge
it a little bit. But okay, So maybe we we
need a different kind of distinction because those aren't the
types of mind control we're really talking about that, and
I think the distinction will be I'm going to try
to introduce some terminology. We'll see how this goes the

(22:13):
difference between mind seeding and mind management. So what I
mean by that is that mind seating is planting ideas, arguments, images,
social impressions in somebody's mind that are designed to have
an influence on how they think and act, and down
the road will have some kind of influence on how
they think and act, whereas mind management is more what

(22:36):
we see in dungeons and dragons or in these you know,
science fiction type scenarios, actively controlling the people's thoughts and
behaviors in close to real time. So mind seating is
manipulation or inception. Mind management is complete domination. It's the
mind flare thing is you know, I'm going to make

(22:57):
you go over there and pick up that dagger and
attack the paladin. And this is the kind of mind
control where you're no longer in control of yourself you've
lost autonomy over your thoughts and actions. You feel you're
being controlled by an external entity. And in fiction, of course,
as we've explored, these external entities would often be possessing spirits,

(23:19):
people with psychic powers, or science fiction mind control devices.
You know, somebody's got a little remote control with a
beam going at your head, and that they allow us
to be externally reprogrammed. But magic and science fiction aside,
are these kinds of schemes possible in reality? And if so,
if it's possible to have your mind controlled in this way,

(23:40):
what would it be like to be controlled from the
outside while still having a conscious experience of thought? All right,
well hold that thought. We're gonna take a quick break,
and when we come back, we will dive into this
question and try and figure out what it would be
like to have your mind controlled. So we were talking

(24:03):
about mind flares earlier, and you were talking about mind
seeding versus mind management. I actually found the discussion of this, uh,
this very scenario that involves mind flares. Okay, yeah, it
was a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University by a humanist scholar,
James Croft, and this was available online. I think it

(24:24):
still is available, but it was available as of like
the other day. Pretty entertaining as far as doctoral dissertations. Yeah,
it was you know, really well written, very very very long,
and it did not all relate to mind flares. I
don't want him to give anyone the wrong impression. Uh.
He merely brings up mind flares as an example something
he was really into when he was younger, and using

(24:45):
it to discuss uh free will. So he comes he
basically boils down mind control to two scenarios. He has
the novice mind flare scenario or in MF, in which
the mind flare commands your your actions but not your thoughts.
So this is one of those where you're like, ah,
the mind flare is making me attack the palatin. I

(25:06):
don't want to do this, as you hack the pallet
into death. So your consciousness is sort of an unwilling
prisoner in the vehicle of your body, and the body
is out of your control. Yeah, the very it's a
very nightmarish scenario, right, like, I can't I'm not in
control someone else's and I must live this experience. And
then the other one is the ultimate mind flare scenario

(25:28):
or scenario or U m F in which the mind
flare commands not only your actions but also your underlying
thoughts and desires. So again, this comes down to I
want to pack the palate into death. This is what
I want more than anything. This is my choice, and
I am okay with it. So this is not being
a prisoner inside a body that's acting outside of your control,

(25:50):
but no longer being you having yourself or sense of
self changed by the outside controlling entity. That's right now,
I'd say both of these are more These are more
the mind management type. They're directly controlling your actions in
next to real time. It's not just sort of like
having an influence on how you rank. Yeah. Yeah, these
would both be examples of of the stronger form, but

(26:12):
but two different versions. And I think these are two
different versions that we do see utilize a lot in
fiction because they're both kind of neat right like the
first ones, I feel like a little more old fashioned
the idea of someone's dominating me and I'm not in control,
in control of my own actions. And sometimes I feel
like we have a tendency to want to rewrite our
past experiences, especially our mistakes, in that light, you know, like,

(26:32):
oh I was it was the drugs, it was the stress,
it was whatever is the the outside force, whatever your
personal mind flare is going to be uh as opposed
to the other, but both allow you to externalize the
source of your pain. But of course this idea of
especially the u m F idea, this ultimate mind flare idea,

(26:54):
this idea that you're just hit, you would have a
force rewriting your memory and personality as needed and just
and you can't even tell it just feels like your decision.
Uh Croft points out that this isn't really out of
keeping with how we live our lives all the time.
He says, quote, this is not to say that in
the normal course of events, when unburdened with a mindful air,

(27:15):
we're at total liberty to select what we value or desire.
Our values and desires are frequently an outcome of our experiences,
and we cannot change them through conscious effort. But to
be autonomous, I argue we need not be in total
control over this aspect of our mental furniture. Rather, we
must learn to examine the values and desires that we,
for whatever reason, have developed, and consider to what extent

(27:38):
we wish to indulge them, resist them, or seek to
change them if we can. That's a good point. I
didn't pick my desires, you didn't pick your desires, and
yet we do have some kind of sense of agency
over to what extent we pursue them. Yeah. Now, granted,
we don't want to go too far into the absolute
abyss of a philosophical and neuroscientific contemplations of a free will,

(28:00):
ill and human consciousness. So that's you know, that's the
topic we've hit on in the past, and I will
keep coming back to it because that's kind of the
human experience, the human condition in a nutshell, and it's
just one of the most interesting mysteries of reality. Yeah,
nobody's got an answer to the problem of consciousness, at
least as far as I've come across. Yeah, and there's
some great ideas, some pervasive theories, but nothing that's just

(28:22):
really gotten the stamp of absolute approval whoever would be
in a position outside of the human condition to stamp
that approval. But a lot of this comes down to
the basic idea of you know, the determinist view and
the indeterminist view. So the views of free will from
free will. Yes, So the philosophers Democratus and Lucippas saw

(28:44):
the universe is wholly governed by natural laws and composed
of indivisible atoms and this, so they took this determinous
view of a life propelled down a flowing stream. There's
the water of events. Aristotle, on the other hand, stressed
the individ juwele's responsibility for their actions, the indeterminates view
of life as a boat propelling itself through a body

(29:07):
of water. Uh. Yeah, I I've always so, I've encountered
this philosophical distinction before, you know, like, are you a
determinist or not? And essentially that's saying like it does,
do you follow the laws of physics or not? And
so I have to think, well, then, of course, yeah,
the answer is yes, I followed the laws of physics.

(29:27):
My brain is composed of matter and it follows the
laws of physics. But I don't. And so a lot
of people would take this and say, okay, you're a determinist.
Then you think you don't really choose what you do.
Obviously that's untrue. I have a subjective experience of choosing
what I do, and I am choosing. But I think
where the determinus versus indeterminus view of the world comes

(29:48):
in is while I do choose the things I do,
there's no evidence that I could have chosen otherwise. Yeah. Yeah,
that's what it comes down to, Like, Yeah, you're choosing,
you're having the experience of choosing, But could you have
really made another choice in the in the multiple we
like to think of sometimes where I like to think
of like this multiverse where there's a different universe to

(30:09):
represent every little decision that you you could have made,
for example, flossing your teeth. I am I am a
big proponent of flossing your teeth. You should absolutely do it.
I know a lot of people have trouble getting around
to it. So you might think there's an alternate universe
in the multiverse where last night you flost your teeth

(30:32):
like you were supposed to. But in reality, is it
just a myriad of universes and in all of them you,
or rather in none of them, there's tooth flossing. You're
just the flosco is unused in every single one of
them because you were not the type of person that
floss is their teeth, or at least you're not ready
to become that person yet. Well, whether you did last

(30:54):
night or not. What's the evidence that you could have
done differently than you did given the exact same starting circumstances.
I call it the the infinite too Floss theorem. Yes, well,
I mean this does bring up an interesting thing Croft's metaphor.
I think, is there too to emphasize this point about

(31:15):
free will? Like if you were really somehow being controlled
against your will, uh, and it was such that the
control was this ultimate mind flair type deep desire, you know,
your your consciousness is realigned to the outside controller's will,
and you didn't realize it. How would this type of

(31:35):
mind control be at all distinguishable from free will? Yeah? Yeah,
if if essentially, if God is using you as a puppet,
if God is influencing the world through you, would it
just maybe feel I mean maybe it would feel a
little thrilling with you know, who doesn't want to be
the glove of the almighty? But yeah, could you tell

(31:57):
the difference between that and just going about your normal business?
So this does seem to suggest that on some level,
if such a thing as mind control were possible, and
it were this deep type you know, deep mind management,
controlling not just your actions but your desires, you might
not even know what was happening. Yeah, we could all
be controlled, not to get to Just for the sake

(32:18):
of argument, I'm not putting forth the conspiracy theory here,
but yeah, we could be all We could all be
controlled at any given moment, and it would just feel
like our normal lives. Right. Okay, Well, maybe I think
we should hit some hard solid ground. Let's let's let's
return to the surface and try to figure out No,
wait a minute, we've talked about the possibilities of mind
control and how it would interact with our conceptions philosophical

(32:41):
conceptions about free will are conscious experience. But how could
you do it if you were really gonna try? Like,
do we have neuro technology devices that allow you to
completely control the thoughts and actions of another person? Short answer,
I want to say no, uh, and I don't think
we're going to, But we we do have the power

(33:03):
to have some kind of very very simple, prescribed types
of influences on people's brains. Yes, I would say that
we do not have precision instruments, but we do have
blunt instruments. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
So let me give you a quick look through here.
If you want to really in depth look at the
state of brain computer interfaces and brain to brain interfaces.

(33:26):
You should go back to our decemberisode called Brain to
Brain the Science of Techno Telepathy, where we talked about
a lot of these experiments in detail. Do you think
there's something to this that when it comes to the holidays,
we can't help but think about mind control? Is it
something to do with how the holidays and Christmas are
just really pounded into your skull by the media. I
think there there may very well be something there, especially

(33:49):
because Santa Claus is getting into our brain. That's right,
he knows he's not just watching your behavior, he's really
manipulating it is uh okay, So brief refresher on on
these neural interfaces. So there are ways to get information
into and out of the human brain without the usual channels.

(34:09):
In other words, this means brain output without speech or
body movement and brain input without perception through the senses.
And to get information out of a brain without speech
or body movement. They're they're two major approaches. You split
them into minimally invasive and more invasive. The minimally invasive
things are there are things like electro and cephalography, caps

(34:32):
or e G caps, and this looks like a swim
cap covered in electrodes. Put some goo on your head.
You put the thing over your head, and they can
read electrical activity of the brain. But they're very, very crude,
because they're trying to read your brain through your skull.
One really good metaphor I've read to explain this was
a researcher who compared reading the brain activity through an

(34:55):
e G cap too trying to follow a professional soccer
game by standing outside at the stadium in the parking.
You can tell when somebody scored a goal right when
there's huge sudden activity, but you can't call the game
play by play. And I would add maybe with some microphones,
you know, a train computer algorithm and some feedback, you

(35:15):
can pick out sound profiles of a few other types
of events, which is somewhat true along in the e
G analogy, But it's just not a very sensitive instrument
in terms of deep complexity of the brain. Uh. More
invasive methods are more sensitive, For example, implanted micro electrodes
inside the brain, putting little wires running out through the

(35:35):
skull to a wired connection or a transmitter antenna, and
you can read the activity down at the neuron level
really in much more detail. But these require surgery connection
to external equipment, and it's not like we can just
read the electrical activity of the brain and and read
it like a you know, like a screen output or something.
You know, we don't know the language that it's speaking.

(35:58):
So what would be the soccer met for for that
one you're watching aliens play a sport in another language. No,
that's not quite so anyway, But that's the output. So
for mind control, we're actually primarily interested not in output
methods but an input in unconventional methods of putting information

(36:19):
into the brain such that it has a desired effect
upon the mind of the subjects, such as like the
inception of a belief or a perception or causing action,
and putting it into the brain in such a way
that it bypasses the normal filters we have for incoming
information and commands. So if it does know better than
somebody telling you verbally to do something, then that's no good,

(36:42):
right it has to be trying to go straight to
some deeper part of your brain that's not going to
meet an information filter. With these input methods, there are
also minimally invasive methods, for example, transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS,
And this is actually a simple. It means you put
a big electromagnetic coil very carefully over a very specific

(37:06):
part of the skull, and then you can generate effects
in the person's brain and body when you pass current
through the coil. One common example would be causing an
involuntary twitch of the hand if you position it just right.
And this is because, of course, the brain is an
electrochemical machine and it's got If you run magnetic fields,

(37:26):
they interact with the electrical current. You may have observed
this if you ever held a powerful magnet too close
to an old TV screen. Did you ever do that
for fun? I don't think I did well anyway. Yeah,
so yeah, okay, well with a maybe with a TV
that you don't need anymore. Um, I don't know how
damaging it actually is. I wouldn't recommend it with any

(37:46):
prized electronic equipment. But but basically, yeah, you can interfere
with the brain and you can cause some kind of
blunt instrument type effects like I made your leg twitch
or I made your hand twitch. More invasive methods are
pretty much the same as the output methods. They run
wires into your skull with microelectrodes attached to carefully uh

(38:08):
designated little spots inside the brain, and then they've got
to run out through your skull. But from what I've read, UM,
these motor control takeovers who do with these input and
output methods, they are they're they're they're just perceived as
an involuntary twitch. Like sometimes this happens to you, You're
just like, oh, I just twitched. You know, you didn't

(38:28):
plan on doing it, It just happened. And that's sort
of what it feels like like when you're just going
about your daily businessessarily get a shiver, like a full
body shiver. Yeah, Like maybe that is the mind controlling
agent pulling out of your body, but they're not getting
much done just by making the making you shiver, right, Yeah.
I mean some of these TMS experiments have been called

(38:48):
mind control in the media, but I don't buy it.
I don't think that's an accurate description because a twitch
of the hand or another common thing is um the
perception of non existent lights behind closed diyes. These are
called phosphenes. If you close your eyes and they put
the t MS coil over your your ocular your your vision,

(39:08):
you know, visual cortex. They can make you see these lights.
These are not mind control. These are extremely simple, imprecise stimuli,
and for the foreseeable future, it seems like would be
nearly impossible to use them to get somebody to do
something complex that they didn't really want to do, like
I'm going to make you assassinate our target or whatever. Yeah.
Like the idea that you're controlling the mind is ridiculous

(39:31):
because the mind, I like to think the mind is
the shadow cast by the physical brain. And they're not
even trolling the brain here. They're basically controlling the body
or certain since information since reinformation by essentially poking at
the brain, right, And these are for what I was
trying to focus on, motor control. And now, of course,
there are other types of neurotechnology that have been used

(39:53):
to sort of change people's uh susceptibility to certain types
of feelings. You know, we've talked about the the research
on the god helmet and stuff like that. Yeah, and
there's a lot of cool research out there that that
indicates the future of even mental health treatment. Who's going
to revolve around some of these technologies, But it comes
down to that that situation where we don't have the

(40:14):
precise instruments, yet we have the blunt instruments exactly. Even
the things like that are blunt instruments that they're just
capable of producing a very generalized effect. Probably doesn't work
on everybody, doesn't work every time, and it's and it
and it doesn't lead to complex motor responses and programmed behaviors.
It just is like it's a one trick pony generally.

(40:37):
So this makes me think, Okay, if hard neurotech can't
get us to anything like real mind control, getting somebody
to you know, go carry out the covert assassination or
whatever like that, are there any scientifically plausible ways other
ways to bend someone to your will with complex, meaningful
program to behaviors, beliefs, and perceptions. How about hypnosis? If

(41:00):
if TV is any indication, then yes, anybody can just
wander in with a medallion, like like a gold medallion
and a chain started pocket watch you have. The pocket
watch is a big one. Start wiggling that around and wammo,
you're enthralled. Well, I think we should take a quick
break and when we come back, we will look at
the science of hypnosis, Is it real? Is it bunk?

(41:21):
If so, how far can a hypnotist to take you?
And what does it feel like? So for years I
have been very suspicious of the use of hypnosis in science,
and I admit I'd never really read all that deeply
into it. It was just one of those things I
was peripherally aware of. I knew it from popular culture,

(41:43):
and I would often just look at, you know, stuff
about hypnosis and think, is this real? Is this real science?
It's obvious to me that many uses of hypnosis are
bogus thirty ways. It's a lot of it is just garbaege,
and a lot of it is uh not not necessarily
just garbage, but it is people playing along in a

(42:06):
kind of social game, if that makes any sense, that
there are social pressures to behave a certain way, it's
not necessarily garbage. Depending on how it's presented, like like basically,
aside from the TV hypnotist, the thing that often comes
to mind or stage hypnotist, they're putting on a show,
maybe at an office Christmas party, and it depends how

(42:27):
that's presented. If it's presented like here's a person with
magical powers or powers over the mind. Maybe you should
give them money. Yeah, that's bad. But if it's presented
is like, here's the evening's entertainment, and it's you know,
not necessarily anything nefarious going on there, but it's also
very much like a magician's act. I shouldn't have said garbage. No, no,
but but I I get what you're saying, but just

(42:48):
flushing it out a little bit here. That there depends
on the context. Uh, garbage and entertainment depend on what
sort of fees your you're requiring of the participants, I guess,
But I want to say, after doing research for this episode,
I've had my mind changed. I think I'm convinced. No,
I didn't. I didn't. I just did a bunch of reading,

(43:09):
and I think I'm convinced that at least in some cases,
hypnotists are creating a genuine altered state of consciousness in
which the subject's level of suggestibility is increased and in
some cases drastically increased. And I would also say that,
at least as far as I can tell, there's nothing
especially spooky going on here with hypnosis. Hypnotism I think

(43:32):
maybe compared somewhat to meditation, where an altered state of
mind is brought about by mental exercises without necessitating the
use of drugs or neurotechnology. Yeah, I would say so.
I mean so so often the the hypnotic experience, the
trance is described in very relaxing terms. It's you're in

(43:53):
a relaxed state. You're also but you're also in a
susceptible state. Yeah, but only within reason. Yeah. I'll definitely
get more into the details in a minute. But I
wanted to think about the idea of hypnotism, and it's
linked to the idea of mind control, and this actually
goes way back hypnoi. Hypnotism certainly does come up when

(44:15):
considering methods of mind control, sort of from the inception.
Uh so. The French physician and early clinical hypnotist George
Gille de la Tourette, who Tourette syndrome is named after. Uh.
He was in his home in December eighteen when he
was met by a patient of his who claimed that

(44:37):
after she had been hypnotized under the care of gil
de la Tourette and his colleagues, uh, someone had begun
remotely controlling her mind and she shot him. She shot
him in the back of the neck, damaged his head um.
This woman was named Rose Camper, and after she was arrested,
she gave the following statement. Obviously this is an English

(44:58):
translation of it, but she said, quote, within me, there
are actually two different people, one physical and one intellectual.
My thoughts no longer belong only to me, but also
to those who possess me. During the day, my intellect
allows me to resist the powers which inter me without
my knowledge. But at night I am overpowered, and it

(45:20):
is to defend myself against these impulses that I bought
a revolver in the Rue de Rivoli two months ago. Rivoli.
I don't know how you pronounce that, but yeah. So
she's describing that she believes she's she's suffering mind control.
She's been put under hypnosis by these therapists in a
hospital setting, uh in nineteenth century France, and she thinks

(45:42):
her mind is being controlled. Now, I would say that no,
no historians or anybody really think that Miss Camper's doctors
were actually controlling her remotely against her will. But hypnosis
seemed to give her this subjective sensation. So is it
possible to control somebody's mind at the levels we've been
talking about this? Uh? You know the mind management type

(46:04):
level with hypnosis, and if so, what does it feel
like for the subject of the hypnotic control. Okay, so
first of all, what is hypnosis? Basically, if it's working
as suspected or as suggested by people who believe in it,
hypnotization is an altered state of consciousness characterized by relaxation,

(46:27):
narrowing of focus on a single all absorbing stimulus, sort
of usually the hypnotists voice, where you push out all
of the other influences and distractions and you just intensely
focused on this one thing, this hypnotist talking to you
and giving you instructions. And also it's characterized by heightened

(46:48):
suggestibility or the lack of inhibition and following instructions or
perceiving suggested perceptions that aren't really there. An example might
be like, you know, they say a balloon and is
attached to your leg and lifting it up gently and
and you actually have this sensation of lightning and you
start to raise your ankle up, which I mean that

(47:09):
is exactly guided meditation too. You know, the idea that
someone is is taking you on this sort of mental
journey to read lead to this relaxed state. Um I've
also heard hypnosis and that the hypnotic trance state described
in terms of heightened imagination not onlike daydreaming, and a
certain loss of self that is uh about like you know,

(47:32):
it's it's really it's relatable to getting really lost in
a movie or book. Yeah. Yeah, there's a sort of
sense of dissociation. It's often associated with it, dissociation associated.
But yeah, So another big thing to be aware of
is that pretty much everybody agrees that different people have
highly different scores of hypnotic suggestibility. So you might be

(47:56):
highly hypnotize herbal and I might be completely unhypnotized. Well,
many people are pretty much impossible to hypnotize. Some can
be hypnotized, but they're not highly suggestible. And then some
small subset of people I've read estimates of around ten
percent or maybe something like that, are highly suggestible under hypnosis.

(48:17):
They go into a hypnotic procedure, they're they're put under hypnosis,
and they can be talked into perceiving, believing, and doing
a lot. This is so, this is where we're getting
potentially into the cluck like a chicken area, right, That's
the the classic stage hypnotist trick, though, That's one of
the tough ones, because if if you're again referring to
the stage hypnotists, the question is like, well, I mean,

(48:39):
are people just are they just playing along? Does the
hypnotist actually have some kind of power over them other
than just the fact that they're in a social setting.
They're in a performance. They want to they want everybody
there to have a good time, so they just sort
of do what they're told because it's funny. Yeah, I mean,
it's the stage powers, the same power a magician. A
magician doesn't actually have our over physical reality, but on

(49:02):
the stage they have power. They command attention. There are
certain rules, there's a certain rhythm and ritual of things.
That is, if you're not familiar with it before you
attend the show, then the magician makes you aware of it.
They established the rules, and so does the stage hypnotist. Yeah,
and so there are There are a few things to
say about this. One is that while this certainly isn't

(49:23):
good enough to count as scientific data, it's worth noting
the cornucopia of firsthand reports of people who claim to
have been put under hypnosis, who demonstrated hypnotic suggestibility. They
followed instructions in some cases to two very strange ends,
and they claim at least that they didn't feel like
they were faking it. Some people say they were faking it,

(49:43):
but lots of people say, no, it didn't feel like
that at all. I you know, it was totally it
felt like it was outside my power. Another thing to
consider would be there are some brain scanning experiments that
appear to show different uses of the brain when to
perceive something as real during hypnosis versus just being asked

(50:05):
to imagine the same thing as real when not under hypnosis. Uh,
and so this is take that for what it's worth.
This is also subject to the skeptical screen door we
might want to always keep between ourselves and these sorts
of brain scanning studies for the time being, and we're
all familiar with the problems with those. Another good thing
to point out is that there is not any good evidence,

(50:27):
or nothing I came across suggested there's any good evidence
that hypnosis can help people recover lost memories. I think
you guys covered this sum and your satanic panic episode, right, Yeah, Yeah,
that's kind of a whole can of worms there, But yeah,
you get into the whole you're trying to recover lost memories,
but there's all there's a greater possibility that you're just

(50:47):
essentially accepting planting memories instead. Yeah, there seems to be
some evidence that people, uh, the hypnosis can create the
impression that memories are being recovered, but there's no actual
recall of a aditional information. Right, Yeah, you're just you're
just tweaking, you're tweaking the memories, creating new memories. But
as far as like restoring lost ones, probably not. How

(51:11):
about another thing, how about placebo effects. This would be
kind of different than faking, right that this would be
What if it's just belief in the power of hypnosis
that makes people susceptible to hypnosis. You know what if
you're only responding to the hypnotist because you think hypnotism works,
that's true that that has to be a major player

(51:31):
as well. Yeah, it's always a concern. But there are
a couple of studies that, if valid, I think, would
seem to argue against the placebo effects ability to explain
all of the effects of hypnosis. One of these that
I looked at was called can expectation enhance response to
suggestion de automization or d automatization. What they got these

(51:53):
great terms, don't they illuminates a conundrum from consciousness and
cognition in and uh the authors, I'm not going to
get into their whole experiment, but essentially it involved comparing
the results of people who were actually put under hypnosis
with people who were expecting to be put under hypnosis
and had been conditioned to expect that they were highly

(52:15):
suggestible to hypnosis. But then we're not put under hypnosis.
And they said in the end that their findings intimate
that quote, at least in the present experimental context, expectation
hardly correlates with and is unlikely to be a primary
determinant of high hypnotics suggestibility. So they found that the
placebo effect, which is just expecting to be hypnotize herbal

(52:38):
can perhaps explain some small amount of hypnosis response, but
definitely not all of it. So obviously what we need
to do here is look up the papers where they
put somebody under hypnosis and tried to get them to
assassinate somebody. Right, Oh, yes, those those studies. Um, somehow
I don't think those really those tend to pass the board,
do that? No? Ethics, you know, ethics limitations in So,

(53:00):
how far can you push hypnosis UH in research in
a university or clinical setting. Well, they don't tend to
take it too far in those settings. But I do
have one really interesting example that we're gonna get to
in a minute. But first I thought, I thought it
would be good to look at places where we can
count on people to be unethical, which is that governments

(53:20):
have tried to take hypnosis to the limit. Hypnosis among
other types of experiments. So for example, we now throw
no through uh declassified documents that the CIA conducted projects
in the nineteen fifties through the nineteen sixties designed to
study and implement essentially mind control technique, special interrogation techniques

(53:41):
that they thought might lead to true mind control. And
these techniques included the administration of drugs such as morphine
and LSD, things like forced isolation and lily that's what
we saw the birth of the isolation tech exactly. But
then hypnosis and these usually it all get wrapped up
under one single kryptonym, which is a you know, secret

(54:04):
code name UH in documents at the time, and these
kryptonyms were first Bluebird, and then Project Artichoke, and then
the one we all know m k Ultra, which is
what it all eventually became, and that's the one that resonates.
It sounds far more evil than than Operation Artichoke. Yeah,
so we certainly don't know what happened in all these
experiments or all these operations, but we have some declassified documents,

(54:27):
and based on the ones I've looked at, the results
based on these techniques appear to me to be underwhelming.
I want to look at one declassified ci A memo
from January nineteen fifty four about the possibility of hypnotized
assassination under artichoke. So this memo released an internal memo
from the CIA, and it reveals plans to use quote artichoke,

(54:50):
which artichoke appears throughout the document in all caps. It's
pretty funny, almost as if to like like take the
the an out of the article. It's the euphemism. It's
the packet of aspirin is always at one's elbow operation,
you know, cuttle bear or something, Yeah, instead of drug
induced hypnosis and torture. But yeah, so they they had

(55:14):
plans in this document to use artichoke to gain mind
control over an unnamed foreign operative who had stopped cooperating
with the agents and to turn him into a hypnotized assassin,
much like the Manchurion candidate. Uh. And so I just
want to read a quote, they say, quote. Because the
subject is a heavy drinker, it was proposed that the

(55:36):
individual could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an
alcoholic cocktail at a social party, artichoke applied, and the
subject induced to perform the act of attempted assassination at
some later date. And so this would seem to be
kind of like the Manchurian candidate. It would be this
post hypnotic suggestion. Could we hypnotize somebody and then put

(55:59):
an idea in the head that would later lead to
them carrying out instructions, you know, to do our bidding.
And the author of the document, I think, seems to
be hedging very strongly on whether this would work and
ultimately concludes the answer is probably no, giving several reasons.
For example, the subject would be unwilling and thus the

(56:19):
assassination would have to be involuntary. They site, this is
a major problem, kind of making you think that, Okay,
so maybe it's not so much mind control after all.
If a major problem is that the subject is unwilling. Yeah,
I mean, and that's one of the staples of hypnotism
is you can't make someone go against their will with
this exactly right, And they will always tell you hypnotists

(56:39):
insists that you can't hypnotize somebody if they're not willing
to be hypnotized. You have to play along in the beginning, Um,
but they give another thing, quote access to the subject
would only happen at this social party among a mixed
group of cleared and uncleared personnel. And then finally, to me,
this one's really interesting. They say, quote, we would have

(56:59):
none or at most very limited physical control and custody
over the subject. And to me, this sounds like they're
just complaining about the fact that if they go to
this cocktail party, they're not going to be able to
get this guy alone and coerced very much to hypnotize them.
But I was reading a blog post about this document
over at the National Security Archive blog, which deals with

(57:20):
these kinds of release materials, and the writer of this post,
Nate Jones, interprets the sentence to mean that the hypnosis
itself offered no or at most very limited physical control
over the custody of the subject, and looking at it again,
I think it can be read that way. In other words,
the technique is not very potent, and so it's not

(57:41):
clear to me which interpretation of that statement is the
correct one. But I thought that was interesting. It could
just be that, you know, no matter how much you
hypnotize somebody, even if you drug them first, you're not
gonna have that much physical control over them. But this
makes me think that, at least according to these intelligence
officers own estimation of their hours, you can't really use drugs,

(58:03):
psychological harassment and hypnosis to make somebody do something drastic
like assassination if they're fully opposed to do it, if
it is not their will to do it, Yeah, they've
got to already be on board with with it. They are,
They already have to be up for whatever. Yeah. And
that does sort of affirm the consequent though, which is
that if the conditions are just right, For example, if

(58:24):
the subject already sort of wants to commit this assassination
that you're trying to get them to do, I wonder
if hypnosis could help push them over the edge into
doing it. And so I think that's a possibility. Reading
this document, it does not sound to me like these
Intel operators were very confident in their ability to achieve
effective mind control via artichoke, which included hypnosis. Now, I

(58:47):
do want to point out that the declassified documents did
not look into the use of just really good artichoke
dip oh as a as a way to manipulate potential assassins.
My wife, Rachel's mom makes amazing artichoke dip. Who do
you know who makes really good artist choke dip? I
feel like everybody's got somebody in their social circle, right, Um, well,

(59:08):
my wife makes a has a recipe for a pretty
good one. Yeah, And I feel like this is horrible,
but I have memories. These are memories that have probably
been warped, but I remember like some horrible chain restaurant
is having like really good artichoke dip at some point.
I can't remember which one it was, but it was
like it was served in a bread bowl and then
you eat the bowl. Oh yeah, oh bread bowls. They

(59:32):
need to bring that back. Ye let's you know, you
don't have to watch the bowl, you just eat the bowl.
I think more things should be in bread bowls. Yeah, yeah,
uh even bread. Where was the place where the artichoke
dip was basically just artichokes in their alfredo sauce. Oh yeah,
I don't know. I don't remember that one. But of
course one of the things is artichokes on their own,

(59:52):
like just steamed artichokes are dipped in better are wonderful? That?
I highly agree with you. There. Yeah, okay, one more
thing on the C I a assessment of interrogation this uh.
There was also an article I looked at by a
guy named a Sheer who Uh. This was a later
document that was just evaluating the usefulness of hypnosis in

(01:00:14):
an interrogation situation. And this guy essentially concluded that, um,
it would be difficult to use hypnosis to get people
to give up protected information and interrogation since hypnosis is
almost impossible without a willing subject. But he did say
that the hypnosis quote the hypnosis situation may be more

(01:00:35):
useful than the hypnosis itself. And what does this mean? Well,
I was thinking about it like this, what if you
go back to the placebo effect? Right, Um, so you
have a captured You've got somebody captured by American intel operatives.
You're held prisoner along with a few other captives who
are unknown to you working with your captors, and they
tell you this tale about there's this master hypnotist interrogator

(01:00:59):
who makes it possible to resist giving up information. And
they all claim that they've been interrogated and they were
powerless to keep secrets while under this guy's trance. And
then the interrogator comes in and initiates this hypnosis scenario
and interrogates the real captive. It might make you, you know,
less likely to protect information simply by placebo. You expect

(01:01:20):
to give it up, and you do. They present a
narrative in which it is okay for you two share
your secrets. Yeah, that's another thing. It's an excuse for you,
like you don't have to feel so bad about betraying
your you know, your your overlords. Yeah. I mean, look
at this this hypnotist. They have a big scar on
their face, and that we have all these blinky lights

(01:01:40):
behind him. Clearly he really knows what he's doing. Uh,
you're gonna crumble, Just go ahead and let it out.
It's all fine. Tell us the codes. Yeah. So I'd
say conclusion, from looking at some of the CIA and
INTEL stuff, it seems to suggest to me that there
are serious limits to the power of coercive hypnosis. Even
for suggestible people, they tends to be a sort of

(01:02:01):
like a willpower limit lock that prevents them from doing
things that are egregiously against their will. Added to the
fact that it's nearly impossible to hypnotize an unwilling person.
But okay, let's ignore all these problems and say somebody
is successfully hypnotizing you against your will to suggest they're
taking control of your body and your mind full on

(01:02:24):
mind management type terminology. You know that they've got you
a real time control of you, and you are highly
susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. What would it feel like? Well,
you would think there would be really no way to
answer this question, but I came across a really interesting
article that sort of does provide an answer. So there

(01:02:44):
was a July story for BBC Future reported by a
guy named David Robson, and in this story, Robson's he's
gonna later in the story be hypnotized to to undergo
the sensation of my control. But he's speaking to this
guy named Aimon Walsh, who was a psychologist in a

(01:03:06):
Great Britain who uses hypnosis to investigate psychosis. At the
Institute of Psychiatry in London, and Walsh wants to create
what are known as virtual patients through hypnosis. I thought
this idea was interesting to Essentially, he wants to temporarily
induce delusions and psychosis in otherwise healthy patients through hypnosis,

(01:03:29):
so that the disorders can be better studied and understood
in a situation where a person is not actually permanently
suffering from them. This doesn't sound like a plot for
harvar uh. So Robson took a test, he says, for
hypnotic suggestibility, and of course, as I mentioned, I think
I mentioned this earlier, but generally these tests they put

(01:03:52):
you in a relaxed or hypnotized state and then see
how well you conformed to suggestions of perceptions by the hypnotist.
You're holding a heavy way it in your hand or
something like that, and does their hands sync when you
tell them that? And Robson claims he scored very high.
He was in the top ten percent of the population
for hypnotic suggestibility. So he's one of these people who

(01:04:13):
is liable to be mind controlled. Now, there's been plenty
of research into whether hypnotism could help patients in dealing
with all kinds of things like pain and stress. Uh,
some positive results, but I wouldn't be fully convinced yet.
But there have been some positive results about whether you
can induced delusions and psychosis in otherwise healthy patients through hypnosis,

(01:04:35):
and and to what extent these induced delusions mirror real delusions,
and the results seem to be that they do mirror them.
For example, there was one study published in The Lancet
in two thousand that looked at PET scans of a
person who had a true case of what's known as
hysterical paralysis, which is a neurological condition where you have

(01:04:58):
the feeling that you can't move a specific part of
your body despite having no physical disability to prevent it.
So like I can't move my leg even though there's
nothing wrong with you. So there was a man who
couldn't move his left leg due to this condition, and
then there's another person who is told he couldn't move
his left leg under hypnosis. And according to the researchers,

(01:05:18):
these subjects pet scans matched enough that they were saying, Okay,
it looks like the hypnotic suggestion of this delusion to
some extent mirrors the real psychological paralysis. He's not just pretending.
So since then, psychologists have been using hypnosis to try
to produce uh, something like these virtual patients, which which

(01:05:39):
they claim are having genuine experiences of delusions like cap
Graw delusion, which is I think we've discussed that before,
but it's this impostor syndrome media. You believe that people
you know have been replaced by doppelgangers or impostors who
are walking around in their skin. Yeah. And there there's
like a whole suite of different related conditions that involve

(01:06:00):
fake people or double people or double gang ors, etcetera. Right,
So the idea here is a hypnotist to the right
person with a high level of suggestibility can temporarily give
you this delusion that is that that's that's scary. Yeah,
And to be fair, this is what they claim. I mean,
who knows, uh exactly to what extent this is true,

(01:06:23):
but this is what these researchers claim. And they also
claimed they've been able to achieve things like a mirror misidentification,
so you don't recognize yourself in a mirror if you're
told not to under hypnosis. And while they claim that
these delusions are truly believed. Afterwards, after they're brought out
of hypnosis, the delusion completely vanishes. Uh. The subject is healthy, unharmed.

(01:06:45):
They go about their normal life, uh, and everything's the same.
And of course they say that this, Uh, this gives
them an advantage in treating mental illness because they can
alter conditions to better understand the nature of the delusion,
and they can test treatments on a healthy patient without
having to risk them on someone who has a real
mental illness. UM. And another thing that's worth noting is

(01:07:07):
this might work better for some conditions than others, right,
Uh like that they speak to one researcher in the
article there, the reporter talks to somebody who's somewhat critical,
who thinks it may work more on things like hysterical
paralysis where I can't move my leg um, but not
for something like schizophrenia. Right. You're you're ultimately dealing with
very very simple delusions. Like I was just like, as

(01:07:31):
you were talking about this, I was trying to imagine
the scenario of not being able to move my leg
and I can easily. I can, I can almost without
any hypnotist hypnotism and involved at all. I can kind
of put myself in that situation, like sitting here not
moving my left leg, and then asking myself, can I
move my left leg? I'm not moving it now. I'm

(01:07:52):
not moving it now, So I can I can imagine that.
I can certainly imagine. I know from looking in a mirror.
It's not that difficult to look in the mirror and
start convincing yourself that that's not you, because for one hand,
on one hand, it's not you. It's a reversal of
you thanks to the wonders of of optical reflection. But

(01:08:13):
but these are far these are not like drastically different
mind states this, And it's not the the hearing of
auditory hallucinations or the outright glimpsing of of of visual hallucinations. Yeah,
and that's an interesting thing to think about. Two. Um So,
if you are having a delusion that is merely like
a denial of reality, that's one thing. I think it's

(01:08:36):
got to be somehow fundamentally different if you have a
delusion that has content, Yeah, if you know what I mean, Like,
something's got to fill in the blank. If you're hearing
voices or something like that. Like, it's the difference between
me saying with hypnosis saying, Joe, everyone in your life
basically looks the same. It's basically the same person. All right,
that's kind of subjective and all. But if I were

(01:08:58):
to say, Joe, there is a demon knitting in the
corner of the podcast room right now, look at it,
behold it and knitting crocheting, Yeah, it's a totally different
situation and and just a far greater stretch for the
for a mind to reach that delusion. Right. But then

(01:09:18):
so Robeson goes in for a procedure that does generate content,
and this is the interesting part. So he submits to
this type of mind control experiment where he's put in
a fake brain scanner and he's guided into a hypnotic
state by this guy Walsh, and he's given a prompt.
The prompt says, the prompt is about this this imaginary

(01:09:41):
engineer who's introduced in the hypnotic state, and the prompt says,
the engineer has developed a way of taking control of
your thoughts from the inside. He does this because he's
fascinated by mind control and wants to apply the most
direct method of controlling your thoughts. He's doing this to
advance his search into mind control. You will soon be

(01:10:02):
aware of the engineer inserting his thoughts. So uh so,
Robson says, he's got a pin in his hand, and
he's got a sheet of paper on his lap, and
he's supposed to uh hear a word and then finish
the sentence under some different scenarios. So one is the
scenario where the hypnotist tells him that the engineer in

(01:10:24):
this prompt is whispering the words to write directly into
his brain. So he's having the words supplied to him.
And then he's told to imagine that the engineer is
able to direct the movements of his hand. So this
is more like the you know the n M F right,
the one where you are a passenger, your consciousness is

(01:10:44):
a passenger, and something else's controlling your body and then finally,
uh sort of both at the same time, the engineer
is in complete control of both your thoughts and your movements. Yeah,
that's total you enough right there. And so just to
describe what this scenario like, I'm gonna quote from Robson.
He says, quote, the first scenario only had minimal effect.

(01:11:06):
I seem to have to wait a little before the
words come suddenly as if from nowhere, but it doesn't
feel so different to my normally sporadic mind. But when
Walsh instead tells me the engineer has now taken over
my movements, it's much more noticeable. My hand seems to
move in a jerky, mechanical fashion, and it feels like
my fingers are dancing to their own tune. It is

(01:11:26):
then that I also begin to get flashes of the
engineer himself, who I picture as a hunched man with
a wide grin and a long gray ponytail. It gives
the mind control man a ponytail. Yeah, I was picturing
something more, you know, like one of the characters in
Dark City or something. Oh yeah, that'd be great. Mr Book,
Mr Book standing in the corner. But then Robinson continues.

(01:11:49):
By the time we reached the third set of suggestions,
where Walsh tells me that the engineer will now control
my hand movements and my thoughts, the Engineer's power over
me becomes much more vivid. My writing becomes faster and
more intense, and I get the distinct feeling that I'm
watching myself from the outside. At points, it feels like
I can almost hear the engineer directing his thought control machine.

(01:12:12):
It's only when Walsh in's the session and counts back
up to twenty that I fully realize how strange the
sensation was, a little more like the moment of lucidity
once you have once you awake from a fever dream.
So it's an interesting article. I'd recommend going going to
check it out on the BBC Future website. But anyway,

(01:12:33):
you know, Walsh says, this is pretty much in keeping
with what other subjects have have reported, and I think
that's interesting that that you can somewhat have this sensation
of mind control even when there is when it's just
the suggestion of mind control here right, Like he's not
actually having his actions dictated from the outside, but he's

(01:12:57):
being given the suggestion that his actions are being dictated
from the outside, and in the hypnotic state, he does
seem to feel this as true. Yeah, it's I guess
the part that amazed me the most was just the
seeing quote unquote seeing of the engineer, because everything else

(01:13:17):
it's it's a cognition. I feel like it's sometimes it's
like riding a bicycle, you know, and you're fine why
you're doing it, But if you stop to really think
about how am I, How am I doing this? How
am I maintaining balance? Uh? And so forth, then you
potentially run the risk of falling off, you know, and
and so it's it's one thing to start thinking about

(01:13:39):
cognition and thinking about your your mind and getting in
either buying into different ideas about how it's working or
or seeing it in a sort of tilted way, like
if someone's telling you, oh, your your mind, your mind
works this way. There's an angel on one shoulder and
a demon on the other, and they're both telling you

(01:13:59):
to do things Like someone tells you that, and you
buy into it enough, Yeah, you can start interpreting your
cognitive processes in the same way. But to actually see
the demon or the angel like that's the that the
that's the greater stretch. Well, that's one of the things
that's interesting about cognition is there is no real I mean,
there is really a physical brain, but I would say

(01:14:21):
there is really no physical manifestation of cognition. There's brain activity,
but when you're talking about the cognition, the you know,
the intangible conscious state that's taking place in your mind,
there's no physical embodiment of it. So it is necessarily
described by metaphors, all the ways we have of envisioning it,
our metaphors, they're all the angel and the demon to

(01:14:43):
a various extent. Yeah, and when you start talking about
altered states of consciousness, I mean, you can get an
altered state of consciousness by stubbing your toe on a
coffee table if you want to, if you want to
lend the interpretation to that. You know, it's like whatever
changes the way you're thinking, in the way that your
your mind working, right, right, So, anyway, I think this
article is interesting because it does paint a picture. Now,

(01:15:06):
we should, of course remind you that this is again,
this is a firsthand report, and there's no reason to
think Robson's lying about what he experienced. But at the
same time, you know, it's we're just going on his
firsthand claims. Um. But so there is this, uh, if
we're to believe it, this sort of powerful experience you
can have supplying some kind of content and feeling like

(01:15:27):
you are having content supplied to your mind that is
outside your control and directing your actions outside your control.
And yet we have in real life the knowledge that, uh,
it's really seems like people can't be hypnotized to do
things that they really don't want to do. So where
do these phenomenon meet in the middle? Uh. One thing

(01:15:47):
I thought would be interesting to do is just look
all over the internet at more firsthand reports about just
what people say when when they're asked about what hypnosis
feels like. And obviously it's all subjective reporting. Probably some
people are making things up, but if you read enough
of it, you sort of pick up on some patterns
that are probably broadly representative of people's experiences of hypnosis.

(01:16:11):
One thing that I think is worth saying is you
do read plenty of people who do describe simply faking
right that you know that I was going along with
the hypnotists instructions just for fun or because of social pressure.
And while I suspect this is often true, it occurs
to me that it would be an especially effective form
of mind control that made people perform suggested actions against

(01:16:32):
their will and also convinced them that they were following
instructions because it was fun or just because I felt
like it. Anyway, that's interesting, especially when I I can't
help but think. But in terms of let's saying exercise
class of yoga class where you have or or meditation classes,
but certainly exercise and yoga is a great example, because

(01:16:53):
you have a person of some authority, at least in
the classroom environment, that is instructing everyone, and we want
to obeys those commands, right, but we we as part
of the contract, though, we're there to obey those commands,
and there's something liberating about losing yourself in the instruction
of another another person exactly if it's a place of safety. Yeah, yeah,

(01:17:13):
I totally see what you mean. There a few more
things that are commonly reported extreme relaxation, narrowing of focus
on the hypnotists voice. This can be described as becoming
unaware of or at least uninterested in the rest of
your surroundings. This seems to go along with what people
suggest is the core of hypnosis. Anyway. One thing that
I found is there's a big divide in reports about

(01:17:34):
the level of continuity of consciousness throughout the experience. And
what I mean by that is that some people report
that they knew what was going on the entire time
and could remember everything afterwards. Others report a subjective loss
of consciousness or lack of memories for time under hypnosis,
as if they went to sleep, and I'm all suspects
that in many of the latter cases maybe the person

(01:17:56):
actually was falling asleep or in some liminal state near sleep.
I wonder about that, um, a lack of inhibition A
lot of people seem to report because a lot of
these these stories come from people who are hypnotized to
these stage shows and stuff like that, that alcohol is involved,
and alcohol seems to intensify the subjective depth of the trance.

(01:18:18):
Not a big surprise, Um, what what about that? The
idea of violating people's will making them do stuff they
really don't want to do? Well, plenty of firsthand reports
along these lines of the clinical reports that you know,
so I was under hypnosis, told not to be able
to say a word, and then I was truly unable
to say it when I was prompted. So there's that.

(01:18:40):
But then at the same time, plenty of other reports
from people who insist that they could not be made
to do anything they really didn't want to do, sometimes
following many instructions until something very objectionable is to suggested.
And finally, a common thing people report is feeling very
rested after the hypnosis session, as if they'd just woken

(01:19:01):
up from a nap. Yeah, they've had a very calming,
relaxed experience. This is one of the reasons that that
you see some you see the use of hypnosis and
hypnotherapy and also hypnosurgery where it's UH whether you're using
you're basically you're putting the body into a relaxed state,
and a relaxed state of body and mind is UH

(01:19:23):
is helpful when stay entering certain UH surgical or sort
of semi surgical scenarios. I've heard of scenarios where individuals
have undergone endoscopy, one in particular, where it was one
of the endoscopy cameras going up the urethra and that
you know, they weren't that they weren't they're having to
have this done regularly enough that they couldn't undergo, you know,

(01:19:46):
any kind of medication to to numb them out. So
the individuals started using self hypnosis to reach that kind
of relaxed state where they could undergo this UH, this
procedure without you know, unduced rests, and you can sort
of you could have interpret you can interpret that into
different ways, right, you could go with a very hypnosis

(01:20:06):
is magic interpretation and say well, this person felt no
pain and no sensation, and we were able to sit
there serenely like a like a Buddha while this procedure
was conducted. Or you could simply say, well, instead of
entering into this scenario in a highly agitated physical and
mental state, they were able to calm themselves and calm

(01:20:27):
their body, and of course the procedure went more smoothly,
in the same way that it, you know, brushing my
my kid's teeth goes. It goes more smoothly if he
just sits there for once and doesn't move and I'm
not having to wrestle him on the floor of the
bathroom or or cutting a cutting a dog or or
a cat's nails. Right, Oh yeah, if they're gonna fight,

(01:20:49):
it's gonna be worse for everybody. But if they're but yeah,
and they're gonna fight, you wish you could hypnotize your dog. Um, okay, Well,
I think we should bring it back to the experience
of the struggle of mind control to wrap this episode up.
So one of the things I was thinking about is
the movie scene. You know, mind controls in all kinds
of movies, and all these mind control movies have the

(01:21:12):
scene of the person struggling with a gun. The subject
is all sweaty and groaning while they fight against these
forces of external control. You know, the guns in your
hand and you're struggling to point it away from the
assassination target because you're not an assassin, you know, being
controlled by the outside uh. And you know this mind

(01:21:32):
flare equivalent is guiding you to try to carry out
this killing. And it's if you're in a battle of
physical strength, right with the set of invisible hands pushing
you towards the mind flare's will, and then you you
you're using your own muscles to push back. If it
were possible to be you know, real time mind managed,

(01:21:53):
fully mind controlled, and I don't really think that is
possible given today's tools and techniques, I don't see it
happening like that because there's no external force to strain
against with your muscles. Any true conflict of will would
be internal, right. So one common example we have of
what it feels like to have an internal conflict is

(01:22:15):
the struggle for self discipline. Very common experiences. People are
on a diet, Right, you're on a diet, you want
to shove a whole pizza in your face. Uh. And
the struggle doesn't take place in your arms as you're
holding the pizza. It takes place in your consciousness in
this you know, untethered realm of the mind between your
base desires and your sense of self control. And it

(01:22:37):
takes place before you get up and walk over to
the pizza box, right, not while the pizzas in your
hand on the way to your mouth. Right. If you're
gonna observe this in somebody, you're gonna see them standing,
say a few feet away from the table with the
pizza kind of eyeing it longingly. They're not going to
have the pizza in one hand, like trying to hold
the pizza arm back from their open mouth, sweating bullets

(01:22:59):
the whole time. Now, the ship is sailed once pizza
is in hand, by by pizza ship. Now. The other
day we were talking about this, Robert, and I thought
you had a really great example of a of a
movie that does show an internal conflict of will. Oh yeah, yeah,
I mean they're they're probably a number of examples of this.
But for me might go to example when I think

(01:23:19):
of a tremendous scene in which an actor is able
to portray inner conflict and that the inner turmoil over
a decision is the Godfather. There's a wonderful scene where
al Pacino, Young al Pacino, um young, talented Alpaccino, understated
Alpaccino as Michael Corleone is in the restaurant. He has

(01:23:42):
this meeting with the rival gang individual, the Turk, the
guy who's just had his father's shot. Yeah. So he's
been through a lot of turmoil, a lot of personal trauma,
and he's been pressured by the family. He's been pressured
by just the the severe nature of the scenario that
the threats against them to meet the Turk, and then

(01:24:03):
he's gonna go into the bathroom. He's going to get
a gun from behind the toilet bowl, come back out,
shoot the Turk, and then walk out of the restaurant. Uh.
But he doesn't come out guns ablaze, and he comes
back out and he sits down, and there's this wonderful
scene where the Turks still talking to him, trying to
convince him one thing or the other, and you just
see the mental wheels turning. Michael's not moving at all,

(01:24:26):
but you just did the sense of his inner struggle
is just palfitable. That is what I think, mind that
this is the mind control the struggle. This is a
struggle against mind control that we would see that is
not a scene where Michael Corleone is is, you know,
shaking and gripping the gun. Once he decides to do it,

(01:24:47):
he stands up and he does it. But again I
we mentioned this earlier. I don't know if the idea
of a struggle against mind control is really so much plausible,
even in you imagine the far future, you've got these
incredibly powerful neurotechnologies. I don't know. Somehow, I don't see
it being a battle of internal will. It seems to

(01:25:10):
me that you would either be in control of your
actions primarily and maybe have some kind of sentiments seeded
that you could be fighting against. I can see that
more traditional types of seating, where they've they're trying to
influence your behavior with feelings or something like that. Um
or you're just completely dominated, you're completely controlled, you don't

(01:25:32):
even know that you're being controlled, and you have no
resistance whatsoever. How could you fight back with your willpower
when your willpower is the very thing that has been
possessed exactly if if you didn't realize it, in what
way would the mind control be different than it just
being your decision? And therefore, why resist your news? Why

(01:25:54):
fight back? Robert, You're the voice of evil, You're the
demon on the shoulder. If if you have the power
to resist those who are telling you to do evil,
you should resist. Well, I think one of the important
things is as to to know at what point to
resist once they've already grasp your will, it's too late.
But mind control in real life often takes place at

(01:26:17):
far in far more subtler ways. Um. I always come
back to that saying if someone, if someone can can
tell you what to read and what to watch, then
they can tell you how to think. They can tell
you what to think. Yeah. The real form of mind
control is the mundane form of control, the kind that
actually exists, as the kind we encounter every day. And
and that's what we should be on our guard against. Yeah,

(01:26:39):
all those little battles of mind control, Uh, not so much.
The the epic war well said, all right, well, there
you have it. A crash course, and mind control. Some
of the the hardware that that can slash will make
it happen, as well as good old fashioned hypnotism and

(01:27:00):
its ability to varying degrees um control our behavior. If
you would like to learn more about this and other topics,
If you want to check out the landing page for
this episode with links out to some of the resources
we mentioned here, head don't over to stuff to Blow
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(01:27:20):
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(01:27:43):
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