The Making of a Mind-Controlled Killer

[justdrew]

[Stephen Morgan]

I like that film, Cypher, one of my favourites.

Also, Collin Wilson's Big Book of the Supernatural has a hypno-chapter. Covers some nineteenth century cases, a French girl made a sex slave through hypnosis, and an Austrian woman hypnotised into attempted murder.

And there's Linda Lovelace, of course.

[professorpan]

I am sorry to use Rense as a link, but it's where I remember reading it. It is from The Guardian.

Any chance you could just copy and paste from Rense so I don't have to break my self-imposed rule about visiting that cesspool? Thanks

[Elvis]

Any chance you could just copy and paste from Rense so I don't have to break my self-imposed rule about visiting that cesspool?

Got it here:

'We Can Implant Entirely False Memories'

The Guardian - UK
12-7-3

Laura Spinney on our remembrance of things past...
You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland,
and then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you?

Alan Alda had nothing against hard-boiled eggs until last spring. Then the actor, better known as Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine. In his new guise as host of a science series on American TV, he was exploring the subject of memory. The researchers showed him round, and afterwards took him for a picnic in the park. By the time he came to leave, he had developed a dislike of hard-boiled eggs based on a memory of having made himself sick on them as a child - something that never happened.

Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has been obsessed with the subject of memory and its unreliability since Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Early on in her research, she would invite people into her lab, show them simulated traffic accidents, feed them false information and leading questions, and find that they subsequently recalled details of the scene differently - a finding that has since been replicated hundreds of times.

More recently, she has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people's suggestibility because, among other things, real life tends to be more emotionally arousing than simulations of it. So these days she takes her investigations outside the lab. In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust.

"We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."

She has persuaded people to adopt false but plausible memories - for instance, that at the age of five or six they had the distressing experience of being lost in a shopping mall - as well as implausible ones: memories of witnessing demonic possession, or an encounter with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character, and as the Los Angeles Times put it earlier this year, "The wascally Warner Bros. Wabbit would be awwested on sight", at Disney.

Elizabeth Loftus' research has obvious implications for the reliability of eyewitness testimony. And it was as a result of her findings that in 1994 she co-wrote her book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, and took a strong stand in the recovered memory debate of the 90s, for which she was reviled by those who claimed to have uncovered repressed memories of abuse - alien, sexual or otherwise.

The American Psychological Association (APA) now takes the line that most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them, and that it is rare (though not unheard of) that people forget such emotionally charged events and later recover them. But it states that, "Concerning the issue of a recovered versus a pseudomemory, like many questions in science, the final answer is yet to be known." And the debate simmers on. Several new lines of evidence suggest that the interaction between memory and emotion is more complex than was thought. Powerful emotions, it seems, can both reinforce and weaken real memories. We may be able to actively degrade painful memories. And false memories, once accepted, can themselves elicit strong emotions and thereby mimic real ones.

To try to tease apart these complex relationships, the psychologist Daniel Wright and his colleagues at the University of Sussex have been looking into what it is that makes some people more susceptible to false memories than others. On average, studies show that around a third of those subjected to the "misinformation effect" wholly or partially adopt a false memory, but it seems to depend on both the person and the memory. Alan Alda swallowed the hard-boiled egg story, to the extent that he declined to eat one at the UCI picnic, but he wasn't taken in by Bugs Bunny in Disneyland. In one study published last year, 50% of volunteers were persuaded they had taken a ride in a hot-air balloon when they had not. But when Kathy Pezdek of the Claremont Graduate University, California, tried to make people believe they had received a rectal enema, she met with almost universal resistance.

Amid all this variability, Wright's group did find one significant correla tion - though it was not dramatic: those who were more vulnerable to false memories also tended to suffer more frequent lapses in attention and memory. The trouble is, he says, "People who have been traumatised also tend to score higher on tests of lapses in memory." Their traumatic experiences may contribute to their forgetfulness, but their forgetfulness may lay them open to memory distortion - so true and false become harder to disentangle.

Among the symptoms suffered by victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are chilling flashbacks. But, says Michael Anderson of the University of Oregon, "People who suffer PTSD represent a very small fraction of the people who experience trauma. The great majority of people who experience trauma never develop PTSD and eventually are able to adapt in the face of these events." He argues that they do so by suppressing the memory, and that this suppression gradually erases it.

Two years ago, Anderson's group showed that people who deliberately try to keep a word out of their mind find it harder to recall later than if they had not suppressed it. Counter- intuitively, this form of forgetting seems more likely to occur when people are confronted by reminders of the very memory they want to avoid. Anderson says an extreme example of this might be a child who is forced to live with an abusing care-giver, and must put the memory of abuse to one side in order to interact with that care-giver. "If people continue to work at it, the amount of forgetting grows with repetition and time," he says.

At the annual meeting of the US Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans last month, Anderson's group presented new data on how this "motivated forgetting" might arise in the brain. When people tried to suppress memories for certain words while having their brains scanned in a magnetic resonance imaging machine, not only did the researchers see a dampening of activity in the hippocampus, a structure known to be critical for memory formation, but the frontal cortex was highly active. Since the frontal cortex is important for conscious control, they believe that neurons here may be suppressing the representation of the unwanted word in the hippocampus, and in the process impairing its memory.

However, Anderson admits that his experiments ignore the effect of a memory's emotional intensity on a person's ability to suppress it. And there is plenty of evidence that memory for emotionally charged events can be enhanced - albeit at a cost. Also last month, Bryan Strange of the Wellcome department of imaging neuroscience at University College London and colleagues showed that people were more likely to remember a word if it was emotionally arousing - "murder" or "scream", say - than if it was neutral. And the words most likely to be forgotten were neutral ones presented just before emotionally arousing ones. The effect was more pronounced in women than in men, and both the enhanced memory for the emotional word and the forgettability of the preceding neutral one could be reversed by dosing the volunteers in advance with the drug propranolol.

Propranolol, a commonly prescribed beta-blocker, interferes with the neurochemical pathway thought to be responsible for making emotionally arousing events more memorable - the beta-adrenergic system - and it has already been used experimentally in the treatment of patients with PTSD. In one study, published in October, Guillaume Vaiva of the University of Lille and colleagues offered prop- ranolol to victims of assault or motor accidents shortly after their traumatic experience, and then invited them back for psychological testing two months later. On their return, almost all the patients exhibited some symptoms associated with PTSD, but they were twice as severe among those who had not taken the drug.

The finding that propranolol can be effective at blocking memory when given after an event as well as before is important because, as Loftus explains, "In the real world you can't be there to exert your manipulations right at the time an event is happening, but you can get on the scene later." It has been proposed that propranolol should be offered to victims of rape as a standard measure to prevent them developing PTSD. But could it also be used to erase false memories - for instance, "recovered" memories of alien abduction - that nevertheless elicit all the physiological responses associated with harrowing, real memories?

"If the formation of false memories depends on beta-adrenergic activation, then it would seem very possible that propranolol administration could affect them," says the UCI neuro- biologist Larry Cahill, who has also investigated the effects of the drug in PTSD patients. But Ray Dolan of UCL, a co-author with Bryan Strange of the study on memory for emotional words, points out that not all false memories have a common basis. If they are interpolations into gaps in memory, such as the gap that opened up before the presentation of an emotionally arousing word, or possibly the gap into which Alan Alda inserted a memory of having over-indulged in eggs, then it is conceivable the drug would work. But, says Dolan, "Other classes of false memory, for example, where the memories are fantasies or out-and-out fabrications, would be immune to propranolol."

The idea of doctors having the power to wipe the memory clean sends shivers down many people's spines. False memories could safely be erased, perhaps, assuming there was a reliable way of differentiating them from true ones. Although brain-imaging techniques highlight some differences in patterns of brain activation when a person recalls a true as opposed to a false memory, these are statistical differences only. "We are so far away from being able to use these techniques to reliably classify a single memory as being real or not real," says Loftus, "Yet that is what the courts have to do."

True memories, too, can get out of control and become destructive, leading to PTSD and other anxiety disorders. But they start out as an important self-defence mechanism - teaching you, for instance, that too many hard-boiled eggs are bad for you. Erasing them completely could be dangerous.

In the end, says Loftus, it will come down to personal choice. "What would you rather be in the world, sadder but wiser, all too well remembering the horrors of your past and feeling depressed, or perhaps not remembering them very much and being a little happier?"

Further reading

The Myth of Repressed Memory by Dr Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, 1996 paperback (St Martin's Press, New York). ISBN 0312141238

American Psychological Association website with links to questions and answers about memories of childhood abuse: http://www.apa.org/pubinfo/

Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control by Michael C Anderson and Collinn Green, Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, 2001 (Nature, 410 [6826], 366-9)

Guardian link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/dec/04/science.research1

[Simulist]

I remember in the '60s as a little kid being taught---in school---that "hypnosis can't make you do anything bad that you wouldn't do while awake." Later on I started to wonder if that "fact" was pushed on us to keep the truth a secret---to reserve the nefarious uses of hypnosis for official use only.

Then a few years ago I opened a 1908 book I had lying around called "On the Witness Stand," by Hugo Münsterberg, then professor of psychology at Harvard and a leader in experimental psychology, which was a pretty new thing at the time.

The title threw me off, and I'd let the book sit on a shelf for a long time before finally cracking it. It contains some surprises---which maybe shouldn't have been surprises, considering it was published in 1908. Münsterberg's Wikipedia entry makes no mention of hypnosis, but he talks about it throughout "On the Witness Stand."

This passage grabbed me:

IT was in a large city which I was visiting for the first time. I went to see the hypnotic experiments of a friend, a physician for nervous diseases. He invited me to witness the treatment of a lady who had been deeply hypnotised by him for a local nervous disturbance. Her mind seemed normal in every respect. She was a woman of wealth and social position. When she was in hypnotic sleep, he suggested to her to return in the afternoon when she would find us both, and, as soon as he took out his watch, to declare her willingness to make a last will in which I should become the only heir to all her property. She had never seen me before and I was introduced to her under a fictitious, indifferent name. When she left the office after awakening from her hypnotic sleep, she did not take any notice of me at all. At the appointed hour she returned, apparently not knowing herself why she came. She found in the parlour, besides her physician and me, three or four others who wanted to watch the development of the experiment. She was not embarrassed. She said that she had passed the house by chance and that she thought it would be nice to show her doctor how much better she felt and to ask whether there was any objection to her going to the theatre. I then began a conversation with her about the opera. We talked for perhaps ten minutes on music and the drama, exactly as if we had met at any dinner party, and there was nothing in the least strange in her ideas or in her expression of them.

Suddenly my friend asked how late it was and, as arranged, took his watch out of his pocket. There was a moment of hesitation. The lady spoke the next few words in a stammering way; but then she rushed on and told us that she had not expected to find such a company, but that her real purpose in coming was to report to me that she had selected me as her heir and that now she wanted accordingly to make her last will. Up to this moment her action has been a mechanical carrying out of the post-hypnotic suggestion, but the really interesting part was now to begin. I told her that there must be a mistake, as she could not have seen me before, and I mentioned a fictitious city in which I claimed to live. At once she replied that she had just spent the last winter in that city, and that she had met me there daily on the street, and that from the first she had planned to leave me all that she owned. I insisted that at least she had never spoken to me. Yes, in that same city she had met me repeatedly in society. I represented to her the unnaturalness of leaving her wealth to a stranger instead of to her children. At once she replied that she had thought it out for years, that it would be a blessing for the children not to be burdened with riches, while she knew that I would use them in a philanthropic way. The others took part in the conversation, scores of arguments were brought up to discourage her from this fantastic plan. For each one she had a long-considered excellent rejoinder.

Finally, I told her directly that, as she knew, she had been hypnotised that morning and that this whole idea of the last will had been planted in her head by the witnessed suggestion of her physician. With a charming smile she replied that she knew all that perfectly well, but that she did not contradict and resist this proposition of the doctor simply because it by chance coincided entirely with her own cherished plans, which had been perfectly firm in her mind for a year. She would have written to me some day soon if I had not come to town. She went on that she was unwilling to hear any further doubts of her sincerity and that she was ready to take an oath that she had made up her mind in favour of such a testament long before she was hypnotised. To put an end to all this, she insisted that paper be brought to her, and then she wrote a codicil which left all her property to the fictitious man from the fictitious town. The doctors present had to sign as witnesses. I put the paper into my pocket, switched the conversation over to the theatre again, and, after a few minutes, she had evidently forgotten the whole episode. She treated me again as a complete stranger; and when I asked whether she happened to know the city before mentioned, I was told that she had once passed through it on the train. When she left the house, she had clearly not the slightest remembrance of that document in my pocket, which we others then burned together.

If I had been present as an uninformed stranger during that afternoon visit, I should have been so completely misled that I could not have thought of any additional inquiry or any further argument to test the validity of the testimony. Everything seemed to harmonise with the one plan which had been put into her mind. All her memories became falsified, all her tastes and emotions were turned upside down, all her life experiences were mingled with and supplemented by untrammelled imagination, coupled with the strongest feeling of certainty and sincerity, and yet everything was moulded by her own mind, with the exception of that one decision which had been urged upon her from the outside.

And this:

One aspect offers itself at once: the hypnotised person may become the powerless instrument of the criminal will of the hypnotiser. He may press the trigger of the gun, may mix the poison into the food, may steal and forge, and yet the real responsible actor is not the one who commits the crime but the other one who is protected and who directed the deed by hypnotic suggestion. All that has been demonstrated by experiments a hundred times. I perhaps tell the hypnotised man that he is to give poison to the visitor whom I shall call from the next room. I have a sugar powder prepared and assure my man that the powder is arsenic. I throw it into a glass of water before his eyes and then I call the friend from the next room. The hypnotised subject takes the glass and offers it to the newcomer; you see how he hesitates and perhaps trembles, but finally he overcomes his resistance and offers the sugar water which he must take for poison. The possibilities of such secret crimes seem to grow, moreover, in an almost unlimited way through the so-called posthypnotic suggestions. The opportunity to perform unwillingly a crime in the hypnotic sleep itself is in practical life, of course, small and exceptional. But the hypnotiser can give the order to carry out the act at a later time, a few hours or a few days after awaking.

Every experimenter knows that he can make the subject go through a foolish performance long after the hypnosis ended. Go this afternoon at four to your friend, stand before him on one leg and repeat the alphabet. Such a silly order will be carried out to the letter, and only the theoretical question is open, whether the act is done in spite of full consciousness, or whether the subject falls again under the influence of his own imagination at the suggested time into a half hypnotic state. Certainly he does not know before four o'clock that he is expected to do the act, and when the clock strikes four he feels an instinctive desire to run to the house of his friend and to behave as demanded. He will even do it with the feeling of freedom and will associate in his own mind illogical motives to explain to his own satisfaction his perverse desires. He wants to recite the alphabet to his friend because his friend once made a mistake in spelling, Might he not just as well run to his friend's house and shoot him down if a criminal hypnotiser afflicted him with such a murderous suggestion? He would again believe himself to act in freedom and would invent a motive. The situation becomes the more gruesome, as the criminal would have only half done his work in omitting to add the further suggestion that no one else would ever be able to hypnotise him again and that he would entirely forget that he was ever hypnotised. Experiment proves that all this is entirely possible, and that posthypnotic suggestion thus plays in literature a convenient rôle of secret agency for atrocious murder as well as for Trilby's wonderful singing.

Münsterberg tries to give human nature the benefit of the doubt with this reasoning:

It is true, I have seen men killing with paper daggers and poisoning with white flour and shooting with empty revolvers in the libraries of nerve specialists or in laboratory rooms with doctors sitting by and watching the performance. But I have never become convinced that there did not remain a background idea of artificiality in the mind of the hypnotised, and that this idea overcame the resistance which would be prohibitive in actual life. To bring an absolute proof of this conviction is hardly possible, as we cannot really kill for experiment's sake.

Ah, the good old days. Well, I'm sure that by now those experiments have been carried out...and replicated.

Indeed they have.

I have a declassified MKULTRA-era document I've posted on this board a couple of times now already, showing that an office secretary was hypnotized into pointing a gun at another woman, and pulling the trigger. Normally the gun-woman was quite frightened of guns, and would never have done such a thing without the "benefit" of hypnosis.

We can add one more step which is entirely possible: the hypnotiser may see a further opportunity to give the posthypnotic suggestion of suicide. The next day the victim is found dead in his room; everything indicates that he took his own life; there is not the least suspicion: and the hypnotiser is his heir in consequence of the spurious last will. Similar cases are reported, and they are not improbable. The easiness with which any hypnotiser can cover the traces of his crime by special suggestions makes the situation the more dangerous.

The point is, they've known this stuff for 100 years.

And the conventional wisdom is still that "hypnosis can't make you do anything bad that you wouldn't do while awake." Is that what psychologists are still taught to believe?

Probably. PhDs (and lots of other people too) often have the common sense "educated" right out of them — otherwise, given the rest of the stuff they do know, they'd easily be threats to their employers.

Here's the declassified document I was talking about. It's quite interesting. And here is a verbatim transcription of it:

A/B, 3, 2/18


To: File

Subject: Hypnotic Experimentation and Research, 10 February 1954


On Wednesday, 10 February 1954, hypnotic experimentation and research work was continued in Building 13 by Mr. [blacked out] using the following subjects: Misses [blacked out] and [blacked out].

The group of five subjects appeared on schedule. The operator expecting only three subjects, namely Misses [blacked out] and [blacked out] was forced to alter his plans somewhat due to the unexpected arrival of two more subjects.

Plans were originally made to conduct experiments in color blindness, blindness and intoxication. These plans were altered to permit first, the subjects to present questions and discussions. (This was to permit the operator to spot any subjects who were critically analyzing their progress.) Several questions were presented and promptly clarified to the satisfaction of the subjects. In this discussion it was obvious that Misses [blacked out] and [blacked out] were beginning to lose confidence in themselves. From this point on the work proceeded as follows:

1. A posthypnotic of the night before (pointed finger, you will sleep) was enacted. Misses [blacked out] and [blacked out] immediately progressed to a deep hypnotic state with no further suggestion. This was to test whether the mere carrying out of the posthypnotic would produce the state of hypnosis desired. Needless to say, it did.

2. Miss [blacked out] was then instructed (having previously expressed a fear of firearms in any fashion) that she would use every method at her disposal to awaken Miss [blacked out] (now in a deep hypnotic sleep) and failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss [blacked out]. She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to “kill” [blacked out] for failing to awaken. Miss [blacked out] carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded pneumatic pistol) gun at [blacked out] and then proceeding to fall into a deep sleep. After proper suggestions were made, both were awakened and expressed complete amnesia for the entire sequence. Miss [blacked out] was again handed the gun, which she refused (in an awakened state) to pick up or accept from the operator. She expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.

[Marie Laveau]

This whole discussion reminds me of why I started questioning absolutely everything I think I "believe" many years ago. Even stuff that seems as if it should be okay.

It also reminds me that I have a long, long way to go. Thanks for the reminder.

Also, just as an aside, if it is so easy to DO, wouldn't it be just as easy to UN-DO? I mean the example of Alan Alda; perhaps not so much the trauma-based stuff, though I even have to wonder about that, just for the sake of wondering.

[82_28]

Hmmm. All of this very interesting.

I allowed a therapist to hypnotize me a couple of years ago. First time having it done. I can say this: I felt off for a few days afterwards. Like my own obsessive "time keeping" and mental note taking had had an artificial gap "recorded" into it. It was disorienting and until I put two and two together I just thought I felt off because of the anxiety and depression I was enduring at the time. Yet, it was a different feeling. A feeling of a lack of cohesiveness of reality -- which of course was the reason I was seeing the therapist -- infernal OCD. In some ways because of this experience it makes me glad I do have OCD as it is easy to perpetually analyze everything and repeat the likely scenarios which led to the memory loss. (OCD sucks though because you are always imputing errors on everything where they need not be applied -- that's the debilitating part!)

I've come to realize that relief of symptoms are in self-hypnosis or in a better term, distraction by doing enjoyable or engaging things and if you're not getting emotional support that means it is time to support someone or something else. Every time now that I feel a worry coming on I say "shit, here come the stupid unrealistic worries again" and I know I am going to have to endure the span of time it takes for it to cycle out of my brain. Reality or what I idealize my reality as comes from compassion and empathy as this is exactly the bane of my particular brand of OCD, a terrible, all consuming fear that I am going to do something to hurt someone and I must account for everything I have ever done on every given day.

To sum up, my feelings on the matter are are don't let someone else ever hypnotize you -- hypnotize yourself rather, with what you want to do and strive to be the best person you can. It's never going to be perfect other than the perfection of your state at the moment. Thinking like that will never make what hurts go away, but possibly more bearable and educational as to what this fucked up existence is all about. . .

[BrandonD]

I see no evidence of that, nor do I think it is likely to be true. And the angle of mind control and the like is just a new varnish on an old school of mental magic, and something Derren has built upon to separate himself from the pack. But I'm skeptical of that kind of involvement of CIA and other alphabet agencies in the entertainment industry, except the obvious cases when they are "working" with studios to make sure the military gets portrayed sympathetically (via handy quid pro quo loans of military hardware).

Note my previous phrase >"play with"<. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it.

But since you've gone down that road, consider: If, as you yourself acknowledge, the CIA is in a position to work with studios in order to ensure that the military gets portrayed sympathetically - and if this effort is to some degree successful and worthwhile from the agency's point of view - then WHY exactly would they be uninterested (or unsuccessful) in using this position to influence the social climate in other ways that serve their interests?

Anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of the CIA knows it has fingers in more cookie jars than just the military.

I think it's obvious that an agency in the above postion of influence would exploit that position in every possible manner. Which is why the idea of powerful agencies using media outlets to influence public opinion is something that is completely within the realm of possibility.

With regards to your other comments, how does anything I'm saying relate to "globe-spanning conspiracies"? That smells suspiciously like a debate tactic. If one agency can influence the media in one particular manner (as you mentioned), then surely one other agency can influence the media in one other particular manner. This doesn't even remotely require a globe-spanning conspiracy, it just requires *one guy's* integrity to be compromised.

But in the end even if it is possible I have no reason to think it is definitely true, which is why I said it is just an idea to play with.

[Nordic]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derren_Brown

Derren Victor Brown (born 27 February 1971)[1] is an English illusionist, mentalist, hypnotist, painter, writer and sceptic. He is known for his appearances in television specials, stage productions, and British television series such as Trick of the Mind and Trick or Treat. Since the first broadcast of his show Derren Brown: Mind Control in 2000, Brown has become increasingly well known for his "mind-reading" act. He has written books for magicians as well as the general public. His caricature artwork has received gallery exhibition and is available in a single volume documenting his portrait collection.[2]

Though his performances of mind-reading and other feats of mentalism may appear to be the result of psychic or paranormal practices, he claims no such abilities and frequently denounces those who do. Brown states at the beginning of his Trick of the Mind programmes that he achieves his results using a combination of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship". Using his knowledge and skill, he appears to be able to predict and influence people's thoughts with subtle suggestion, manipulate the decision-making process and read the subtle physical and psychological signs or body language that indicate what a person is thinking.

.. . . . .

Derren Brown: The Experiments (2011)

Derren Brown: The Experiments was announced on 4 October 2011 on his official blog. Described by Brown as a series of "ambitious sociological experiment, in which the unwitting subject is a single person, a crowd, or even an entire town". Brown stated that 'Three of [the episodes] are relatively dark, looking into the darker side of human behaviour, and one of them is rather positive and jolly' on his blog.

The first episode, entitled "The Assassin", aired on 21 October at 9pm and consisted of Brown successfully hypnotising an unwitting member of the public to 'assassinate' a celebrity revealed to be Stephen Fry. This technique was used as a comparison to theories regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, who claims to have no memory of the event.

The Making of a Mind-Controlled Killer



Just watched this. It's pretty convincing.

[Nordic]

Nothing yet?

Okay, I'll go first, since I posted it. I find it astounding, the differences between even the U.S. and the UK's media, considering how lockstep the two countries are politically, in that a mainstream show would actually show something like this. It would be unthinkable here in the States. They even put in clips from "RFK Must Die!" which would also be unthinkable here. Then they even go so far as to have a woman in a polka dot dress trigger the shooter.

These kinds of guys, this "mentalist" or whatever you want to call him, have always fascinated me. Their confidence level is off the charts. Maybe I just envy that, or else it seems so strange to me that someone with that level of confidence could also be so sensitive and clued in to what others are thinking and feeling. The potential for pure evil with someone this personally powerful is so extreme.

It's quite easy to imagine someone with these kinds of personal powers working at the level of the black-ops CIA MK-ULTRA type stuff. Frightening, really.

[Hammer of Los]

...

I'm really short on time man.

Derren Brown is indeed a fascinating fellow.

I wonder how much he truly knows about the secret of the Pure Effect.

...

[semper occultus]

...prev thread...

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33381

[Bruce Dazzling]

As semper pointed out, there was already a thread on Derren Brown and mind control, so I merged Nordic's thread with Morgan's.

Carry on.

[Nordic]

Hey, thanks for combining the threads. It just never occurred to me that there might already be a thread on this. Surprised I missed it the first time!

Glad to see others saw this and responded. It felt kind of strange there for a while .....

[Nordic]

I remember in the '60s as a little kid being taught---in school---that "hypnosis can't make you do anything bad that you wouldn't do while awake." Later on I started to wonder if that "fact" was pushed on us to keep the truth a secret---to reserve the nefarious uses of hypnosis for official use only.

Then a few years ago I opened a 1908 book I had lying around called "On the Witness Stand," by Hugo Münsterberg, then professor of psychology at Harvard and a leader in experimental psychology, which was a pretty new thing at the time.

The title threw me off, and I'd let the book sit on a shelf for a long time before finally cracking it. It contains some surprises---which maybe shouldn't have been surprises, considering it was published in 1908. Münsterberg's Wikipedia entry makes no mention of hypnosis, but he talks about it throughout "On the Witness Stand."

This passage grabbed me:

IT was in a large city which I was visiting for the first time. I went to see the hypnotic experiments of a friend, a physician for nervous diseases. He invited me to witness the treatment of a lady who had been deeply hypnotised by him for a local nervous disturbance. Her mind seemed normal in every respect. She was a woman of wealth and social position. When she was in hypnotic sleep, he suggested to her to return in the afternoon when she would find us both, and, as soon as he took out his watch, to declare her willingness to make a last will in which I should become the only heir to all her property. She had never seen me before and I was introduced to her under a fictitious, indifferent name. When she left the office after awakening from her hypnotic sleep, she did not take any notice of me at all. At the appointed hour she returned, apparently not knowing herself why she came. She found in the parlour, besides her physician and me, three or four others who wanted to watch the development of the experiment. She was not embarrassed. She said that she had passed the house by chance and that she thought it would be nice to show her doctor how much better she felt and to ask whether there was any objection to her going to the theatre. I then began a conversation with her about the opera. We talked for perhaps ten minutes on music and the drama, exactly as if we had met at any dinner party, and there was nothing in the least strange in her ideas or in her expression of them.

Suddenly my friend asked how late it was and, as arranged, took his watch out of his pocket. There was a moment of hesitation. The lady spoke the next few words in a stammering way; but then she rushed on and told us that she had not expected to find such a company, but that her real purpose in coming was to report to me that she had selected me as her heir and that now she wanted accordingly to make her last will. Up to this moment her action has been a mechanical carrying out of the post-hypnotic suggestion, but the really interesting part was now to begin. I told her that there must be a mistake, as she could not have seen me before, and I mentioned a fictitious city in which I claimed to live. At once she replied that she had just spent the last winter in that city, and that she had met me there daily on the street, and that from the first she had planned to leave me all that she owned. I insisted that at least she had never spoken to me. Yes, in that same city she had met me repeatedly in society. I represented to her the unnaturalness of leaving her wealth to a stranger instead of to her children. At once she replied that she had thought it out for years, that it would be a blessing for the children not to be burdened with riches, while she knew that I would use them in a philanthropic way. The others took part in the conversation, scores of arguments were brought up to discourage her from this fantastic plan. For each one she had a long-considered excellent rejoinder.

Finally, I told her directly that, as she knew, she had been hypnotised that morning and that this whole idea of the last will had been planted in her head by the witnessed suggestion of her physician. With a charming smile she replied that she knew all that perfectly well, but that she did not contradict and resist this proposition of the doctor simply because it by chance coincided entirely with her own cherished plans, which had been perfectly firm in her mind for a year. She would have written to me some day soon if I had not come to town. She went on that she was unwilling to hear any further doubts of her sincerity and that she was ready to take an oath that she had made up her mind in favour of such a testament long before she was hypnotised. To put an end to all this, she insisted that paper be brought to her, and then she wrote a codicil which left all her property to the fictitious man from the fictitious town. The doctors present had to sign as witnesses. I put the paper into my pocket, switched the conversation over to the theatre again, and, after a few minutes, she had evidently forgotten the whole episode. She treated me again as a complete stranger; and when I asked whether she happened to know the city before mentioned, I was told that she had once passed through it on the train. When she left the house, she had clearly not the slightest remembrance of that document in my pocket, which we others then burned together.

If I had been present as an uninformed stranger during that afternoon visit, I should have been so completely misled that I could not have thought of any additional inquiry or any further argument to test the validity of the testimony. Everything seemed to harmonise with the one plan which had been put into her mind. All her memories became falsified, all her tastes and emotions were turned upside down, all her life experiences were mingled with and supplemented by untrammelled imagination, coupled with the strongest feeling of certainty and sincerity, and yet everything was moulded by her own mind, with the exception of that one decision which had been urged upon her from the outside.

And this:

One aspect offers itself at once: the hypnotised person may become the powerless instrument of the criminal will of the hypnotiser. He may press the trigger of the gun, may mix the poison into the food, may steal and forge, and yet the real responsible actor is not the one who commits the crime but the other one who is protected and who directed the deed by hypnotic suggestion. All that has been demonstrated by experiments a hundred times. I perhaps tell the hypnotised man that he is to give poison to the visitor whom I shall call from the next room. I have a sugar powder prepared and assure my man that the powder is arsenic. I throw it into a glass of water before his eyes and then I call the friend from the next room. The hypnotised subject takes the glass and offers it to the newcomer; you see how he hesitates and perhaps trembles, but finally he overcomes his resistance and offers the sugar water which he must take for poison. The possibilities of such secret crimes seem to grow, moreover, in an almost unlimited way through the so-called posthypnotic suggestions. The opportunity to perform unwillingly a crime in the hypnotic sleep itself is in practical life, of course, small and exceptional. But the hypnotiser can give the order to carry out the act at a later time, a few hours or a few days after awaking.

Every experimenter knows that he can make the subject go through a foolish performance long after the hypnosis ended. Go this afternoon at four to your friend, stand before him on one leg and repeat the alphabet. Such a silly order will be carried out to the letter, and only the theoretical question is open, whether the act is done in spite of full consciousness, or whether the subject falls again under the influence of his own imagination at the suggested time into a half hypnotic state. Certainly he does not know before four o'clock that he is expected to do the act, and when the clock strikes four he feels an instinctive desire to run to the house of his friend and to behave as demanded. He will even do it with the feeling of freedom and will associate in his own mind illogical motives to explain to his own satisfaction his perverse desires. He wants to recite the alphabet to his friend because his friend once made a mistake in spelling, Might he not just as well run to his friend's house and shoot him down if a criminal hypnotiser afflicted him with such a murderous suggestion? He would again believe himself to act in freedom and would invent a motive. The situation becomes the more gruesome, as the criminal would have only half done his work in omitting to add the further suggestion that no one else would ever be able to hypnotise him again and that he would entirely forget that he was ever hypnotised. Experiment proves that all this is entirely possible, and that posthypnotic suggestion thus plays in literature a convenient rôle of secret agency for atrocious murder as well as for Trilby's wonderful singing.

Münsterberg tries to give human nature the benefit of the doubt with this reasoning:

It is true, I have seen men killing with paper daggers and poisoning with white flour and shooting with empty revolvers in the libraries of nerve specialists or in laboratory rooms with doctors sitting by and watching the performance. But I have never become convinced that there did not remain a background idea of artificiality in the mind of the hypnotised, and that this idea overcame the resistance which would be prohibitive in actual life. To bring an absolute proof of this conviction is hardly possible, as we cannot really kill for experiment's sake.

Ah, the good old days. Well, I'm sure that by now those experiments have been carried out...and replicated.

We can add one more step which is entirely possible: the hypnotiser may see a further opportunity to give the posthypnotic suggestion of suicide. The next day the victim is found dead in his room; everything indicates that he took his own life; there is not the least suspicion: and the hypnotiser is his heir in consequence of the spurious last will. Similar cases are reported, and they are not improbable. The easiness with which any hypnotiser can cover the traces of his crime by special suggestions makes the situation the more dangerous.

The point is, they've known this stuff for 100 years.

And the conventional wisdom is still that "hypnosis can't make you do anything bad that you wouldn't do while awake." Is that what psychologists are still taught to believe?

The whole book is pretty interesting, and it's online:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Witness/

Damn, Elvis. Thanks for this. Just extremely fascinating.

How did I miss this thread before. Hm, maybe I didn't. Maybe I .... just ... can't ... remember ....