BRAINWASHING OR MIND CONTROL

The control of the thoughts and actions of another without his or her consent. Generally, the term implies that the victim has given up some basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes, and has been made to accept contrasting ideas. “Brainwashing” is often used loosely to refer to being persuaded by propaganda.

There are many misconceptions about mind control. Some people consider mind control to include the efforts of parents to raise their children according to social, cultural, moral, and personal standards. Some think it is mind control to use behavior modification techniques to change one’s own behavior, whether by self-discipline and autosuggestion, or through workshops and clinics. Others think that advertising and sexual seduction are examples of mind control.  Still others consider it mind control to give debilitating drugs to a woman in order to take advantage of her. Some of the tactics of recruiters for religious, spiritual, or New Age human potential groups are called mind control tactics. Many believe that terrorist kidnap victims who become sympathetic with their kidnapper’s ideology are victims of mind control (the so-called Stockholm syndrome).
Similarly, women who stay with abusive men are often seen as victims of mind control. Many consider subliminal messaging in Muzak, in advertising, or on self-help tapes to be a form of mind control. Many believe that it is mind control to use laser weapons, isotropic radiators, infrasound, nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse generators, or high-power microwave emitters to confuse or debilitate people. Many consider the alleged creating of zombies in voodoo as mind control. The “brainwashing” tactics  (torture, sensory deprivation, etc.) of the Chinese during the Korean War are often cited as the paradigm of mind control.
Finally, no one would doubt that it would be a clear case of mind control to be able to hypnotize or electronically program a person so that he or she would carry out one’s commands without being aware that he or she is being controlled. A term with such slack in its denotation is nearly useless. The denotation of “mind control” should not include activities where a person freely chooses to engage in the behavior. Nor should it include cases where fear or force is used to manipulate or coerce people into doing some action.
Inquisitions do not succeed in capturing the minds of their victims. As soon as the threat of punishment is lifted, the extorted beliefs vanish. You do not control the mind of someone who will escape from you the moment you turn your back. Also, it should be obvious that to render a woman helpless by drugs so you can rape her is not mind control. Using a frequency generator to give people headaches or to disorient them is not the same as controlling them. An essential component of mind control is that it involves controlling another person, not just putting them out of control or doing things to them over which they have no control.
Some of the more popular misconceptions of mind control originated in fiction, such as the film 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1962). In that film, an assassin is programmed so that he will respond to a posthypnotic trigger, commit a murder, and not remember it later. Other books and films portray hypnosis as a powerful tool, allowing the hypnotist to have his sexual way with beautiful women or to program her to become a robotic courier, assassin, and so on. One such book even claims to be based on a true story: The Control of Candy Jones (Playboy Press, 1976) by Donald Bain. To be able to use hypnosis in this powerful way is little more than wishful thinking.
Other fictional fantasies have been created that show that drugs or electronic devices, including brain implants, can be used to control the behavior of people. It has, of course, been established that brain damage, hypnosis, drugs, or electric stimulation to the brain or neural network can have a causal effect on thought, bodily movement, and behavior. However, the state of human knowledge on the effects of various chemical or electrical stimulation to the brain is so impoverished that it would be impossible using today’s knowledge and technology to do anything approaching the kind of mind control accomplished in fantasy.
It is certainly conceivable that some day we may be able to build a device that, if implanted in the brain, would allow us to control thoughts and actions by controlling specific chemical or electrical stimuli. Such a device does not now exist nor could it exist given today’s state of knowledge in the neurosciences. (However, two Emory University neuroscientists, Dr. Roy Bakay and Dr. Philip Kennedy, have developed an electronic brain implant that can be activated by thoughts and in turn can move a computer cursor.
Their goal is to help paralyzed patients move limbs or prosthetic devices, but military minds are probably drooling at the thought of other uses for this technology.) There also seems to be a growing belief that the U.S. government, through its military branches or agencies such as the CIA, is using a number of horrible devices aimed at disrupting the brain. It is known that government agencies have experimented on humans in mind control studies with and without the knowledge of their subjects (Scheflin and Opton 1978).
The claims of those who believe they have been unwilling victims of mind control experiments should not be dismissed as impossible or even as improbable. Given past practice and the amoral nature of our military and intelligence agencies, such experiments are not implausible. Nevertheless, it is a near certainty that our government is not capable of controlling anyone’s mind—except through the usual methods of propaganda and censorship—though it is clear that many people in many governments lust after such power.
Some of the claims made by those who believe they are being controlled by electronic weapons do not seem plausible. For example, the belief that radio waves or microwaves can be used to cause a person to hear voices transmitted to him seems unlikely. We know that waves of all kinds of frequencies are constantly going through our bodies. The reason we have to turn on the radio or television to hear the sounds or see the pictures being transmitted through the air is because those devices have receivers that “translate” the waves into forms we can hear and see.
What we know about hearing and vision makes it very unlikely that simply sending a signal to the brain that can be “translated” into sounds or pictures would cause a person to hear or see anything. Someday it may be possible to stimulate electronically or chemically a specific network of neurons to cause specific sounds or sights of the experimenter’s choosing to emerge in a person’s consciousness. But this is not possible today. Even if it were possible, it would not necessarily follow that a person would obey a command, say, to assassinate the president just because he heard a voice telling him to do so. Hearing voices is one thing. Feeling compelled to obey them is quite another.
The above considerations should make it clear that what many people consider mind control would best be described by some other term, such as “behavior modification,” “thought disruption,” “brain disabling,” “behavior manipulation,” “mind-coercion,” or “electronic harassment.” People are not now being turned into robots by hypnosis or brain implants. Furthermore, given the state of knowledge in the neurosciences, the techniques for effective mind control are likely to be crude, and their mechanisms imperfectly understood.
We can also dismiss subliminal advertising as mind control. Despite widespread belief in the power of subliminal advertising and messaging, the evidence of its effectiveness is anecdotal and comes from interested parties. You will search in vain for the scientific studies that demonstrate that playing inaudible messages such as “do not steal” or “put that back” in Muzak significantly reduces employee or customer theft, or that subliminal messages increase sales of snacks at movie theaters. We can also dismiss the tactics of husbands who control their wives and the alleged creation of zombies in voodoo.
Wives who are terrorized by their husbands or boyfriends are victims not of mind control but of fear and violence. Zombies can be dismissed as cases of drugs being used to render people helpless or of passing on fraudulent stories. Thus, if we restrict the term “mind control” to those cases where a person successfully controls another person’s thoughts or actions without their consent, our initial list of examples of what people consider to be mind control will be pared down to just three items: the Stockholm syndrome and kidnap victims; the tactics of religious, spiritual, and other New Age recruiters; and the so-called brainwashing tactics of the Chinese inquisitors of American prisoners during the Korean War.
The tactics of cult recruiters differ substantially from those of kidnappers or inquisitors. Recruiters generally do not kidnap or capture their recruits, and they are not known to use torture as a typical conversion method. This raises the question of whether their victims are controlled without their consent. Many recruits are not truly victims of mind control and are willing members of their communities. Similarly, many recruits into mainstream religions should not be considered victims of mind control. To change a person’s basic personality and character, to get them to behave in contradictory ways to lifelong patterns of behavior, to get them to alter their basic beliefs and values, would not necessarily count as mind control.
It depends on how actively a person participates in their own transformation. Many may think that a person is out of his mind for joining Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Jim Roberts’s The Brethren, but their crazy beliefs and behaviors are no  wilder than the ones that millions of mainstream religious believers have chosen to accept and engage in. Some recruits into non-mainstream religions seem to be brainwashed and controlled to the point that they will do great evil to themselves or others at the behest of their leader, including murder and suicide.

This device is an “apparatus for and method of sensing brain waves at a position remote from a subject (… which) also can be used to produce a compensating signal which is transmitted back to the brain to effect a desired change in electrical activity therein.” This 1976 patent apparently never made it to mass production (or if it did, all memory of such a device has been eradicated from our brains using the device itself).

These recruits are often in a state of extreme vulnerability when they are recruited, and their recruiter takes advantage of that vulnerability. Such recruits may be confused or rootless due to tragic life circumstances. Some may be people who are mentally ill or brain damaged, emotionally disturbed, greatly depressed, traumatized by self-abuse with drugs or abuse at the hands of others, and so on. But it would not be wise to actively recruit the emotionally disturbed. Such people are difficult to control.
Recruiters are likely to look for people they can make vulnerable. One former cult recruiter told me: “Cults seek out strong, intelligent, idealistic people. They also seek out the rich, no matter what their mental status is.” Recruiters and other manipulators are not using mind control unless they are depriving their victims of their free will. A person can be said to be deprived of his free will by another only if that other has introduced a causal agent that is irresistible. How could we ever demonstrate that a person’s behavior is the result of irresistible commands given by a religious, spiritual, or personal growth leader?
It is not enough to say that irrational behavior proves a person’s free will has been taken from them. It may be irrational to give away all one’s property, to devote all one’s time and powers to satisfying the desires of one’s divine leader, or to commit suicide or plant poison bombs in subways because ordered to do so, but how can we justify claiming such irrational acts are the acts of mindless robots? For all we know, the most bizarre, inhumane, and irrational acts done by the recruits are done freely, knowingly, and joyfully. Perhaps they are done by brain-damaged or insane people. In either case, such people would not be victims of mind control.
That leaves for consideration the acts of kidnappers and inquisitors, the acts of systematic isolation, control of sensory input, and torture. Do these methods allow us to wipe the cortical slate clean and write our own messages to it? That is, can we delete the old and implant new patterns of thought and behavior in our victims? First, it should be noted that not everybody who has been kidnapped comes to feel love or affection for his or her kidnappers. It may be that their tormentors reduce some kidnapped or captured people to a state of total dependency. They are put in a position similar to that of infancy and begin to bond with their tormentors much as an infant does with the one who feeds and comforts it. There is also the strange fascination some of us have with bullies. We fear them, even hate them, but often want to join their gang and be protected by them. It does not seem likely that people who fall in love with their kidnappers are victims of mind control.
There is certainly some explanation why some people act as Patricia Hearst did and why others under similar circumstances would not have become Tanya had they been kidnapped by a rag-tag band of rebels calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. It is doubtful that mind control should play much of a role in the explanation. Some women are attracted to gangsters, but have few opportunities to interact with them. We do not need to revert to mind control to explain why Hearst became intimate with one of her terrorist captors. She may have thought she had to in order to survive. She may have been genuinely attracted to him. Who knows? Mind control is a better defense than “changed my mind about a life of crime” when facing bank robbery and murder charges. Finally, it is widely believed that the Chinese were successful in brainwashing American prisoners of war during the Korean War. The evidence that their tactics were successfully used to control the minds of their captives is slim.

Very few (22 of 4,500, or 0.5%) of those captured by the Chinese went over to the other side (Sutherland 1979: 114). The myth of success by the Chinese is primarily due to the work of Edward Hunter, whose 'Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds' (1951) is still referred to by those who see mind control tactics as a major menace today. The CIA promoted the myth in 1950, however, to inspire hatred of the North Koreans and communism, to explain why some American soldiers said good things about their captors, and “to aggrandize their own role by arguing that they themselves must investigate brainwashing techniques in order to keep up with the enemy” (Sutherland 1979: 114).
If we define mind control as the successful control of the thoughts and actions of another without his or her consent, mind control exists only in fantasy. Unfortunately, that does not mean that it will always be thus.

By Robert Todd Carroll in the book "The Skeptic’s Dictionary - A Collection of Strange Beliefs,Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions", Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2003, excerpts from pages 223-227. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.