MK ULTRA PROJECT : FROM NEW YORK TIMES ABOUT MIND CONTROL

PUSH-BUTTON PEOPLE? – 10 april 1967:

There are disquieting implications in the experiments on control of human beings and animals that Professor José M.R. Delgado of YaleMedicalSchoolhas successfully conducted. His latest feat has been to demonstrate that by implanting electrodes in a female monkey’s brain he can make it reject its own child on radio command. Two years, ago he revealed that he had been able to stop a charging bull in mid-course and make it amble obediently away in response to the same type of electronic stimulation.

It is the possibility of similar control over human beings that causes concern. Several years ago Dr. Delgado told a scientific meeting thatexperiments with patients suffering from epilepsy or emotional illness seems to support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion, and behavior can be directed by electrical forces and that humanscan be controlled like robots by push buttons. It is indeed a “distasteful conclusion” despite Dr. Delgado’s assurance that electrical stimulation cannot change the basic characteristics of the experimental subject…Dr. Delgado and his colleagues are pursuing these researches to learn more about the brain, how it functions, and how its disorders can be alleviated or cured. But it is quite conceivable that in some countriesinvestigations may be under way into the possibility of using these techniques to control human beings. Presumably there is still a long way to go before Dr. Delgado’s accomplishments with monkeys canbe successfully transferred to humans. But the mere existence of such a possibility is disturbing, and certainly merits wider public discussion and greater attention than it has received up to now.

SCIENTIST SAYS CONTROL OF INTELLIGENCE IS POSSIBLE

– Psychologist Says Level of the Brain Can Be Raised By HAROLD M. SCHMECK Jr., April 3, 1968

Within 5 to 10 years, science will be able to exercise a “significant degree of control” over human intellectual capacity, a psychologist predicted today…He said society should start thinking about this possibility before it is too late. I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and the intellectual functioning of all people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain, said Dr. David Krech, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley…Testifying at a Senate sub-committee hearing, the scientist said this kind of control had already been demonstrated in animal experiments…He said a class of chemicals had been identified that can improve the memory and the problem-solving ability of laboratory animals. Some of these drugs, he said, can raise a hereditarily stupid animal up to the performance level of brighter animals ofthe same species…Another class of drugs can prevent the permanent storing of memories. The best known of these is puronycin, an anti-biotic that is not used medically. In other words, these drugs, when injected in the animal permit it to put in an efficent day’s work, although the animal is prevented from building up a permanent body of experiences, memories, expectations and abilities, Dr. Krech said…For if laterresearch should show that our animal data were applicable to man, and if in the meantime we had failed to prepare ourselves for that eventuality, then we might find it too late to institute effective, carefully thought through and humane controls. He testified before the Government Research Subcommitee of the Senate Government Operations Committee. The subcommittee, under the chairmanship of Senator Fred R. Harris, Democrat of Oklahoma, is considering legislation to set up national commission on health science and society…To me, in any event, it is clear that some of the possible outcomes of our present brain research can raise problems surpassingly strange in their novelty, bafflingly complex and of serious social importance, Dr. Krech said.

BRAIN WAVE – 19.9. 1970

If the late George Orwell were writing a sequel to “1984″ today, he would probably reject as archaic the propaganda techniques for controlling people’s minds described in his famous anti-utopian classic. Today, for example, he might envisage a society in which a newborn baby’s first experience would be neurosurgery, an operation in which the child’s brain was fitted with miniaturized radio devices connected to every majör center controlling reason and emotion.

Children in such a society might be raised as flesh and blood electrical toys, whose ideas and behavior were directed by computer signals. An aberrant or heretical ideas would be transmitted to the computer, which would be programed to take appropriate action to restore control…If this is still fantasy, it is not so fantastic as it was before Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado of Yale reported his latest work. By fitting radio requirement into a chimpanzee’s brain, he has developed a technique which permits a computer to make a specific change in the test animal’s brain waves…That represents at least a first step down the road toward the nightmare vision of a brain-controlled population. Over the past decade Dr. Delgado has reported using electrical stimulation to stop a charging bull, to make a female monkey reject her children and to perform other similar feats. Dr. Delgado himself some years ago said that experimental evidence seems to support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion and behavior can be directed by electrical forces and that humans can be controlled like robots by push-buttons. Dr. Delgado’s work is aimed at finding new techniques to help those stricken with mental illness, epilepsy and such afflictions, not to create some future super-totalitarian state. Fortunately, human ignorance about the brain remains so vast that there is no imminent prospect that the techniques being worked on at Yale could have Orwellian significance.

Nevertheless, the horrifying prospect rises that in the 21st century the lexicographers may have to drop the verb “to brainwash” and replace it with “to brainwave”.

Man’s Brain Child, April 18, 1965.

Among the famous secret documents of World War-II was a technical report known as the “Yellow Peril,” because it came in a bright yellow cover — and included equations so abstruse only professional mathematicians, and not all of them, could understand them. The author of the report was the late Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who received his doctor’s degree from Harvard at the age of 18 and went on to become one of the most creative and widely read scientists of our times. Wiener regarded his report with mixed emotions. As a leading mathematician, he was proud of the fact that he had contributed to the design of computers. As a man with a conscience, he voiced a deep concern about the social implications of what he and his associates were doing. This double role accounts largely for the impact of his first and in many ways most influential book, Cybernetics, which was originally published in 1948 and has just been issued in a revised paperback editions. Cybernetics is, among other things, an introduction to new scientific development. The title comes from the Greek for “helmsman” (rorgängare, styrman) and refers not only to ship-steering devices and other automatic machines, but also to living control devices built into the human brain(kontrollkomponenter inbyggda i hjärnan). In introducing this field he served as unofficial spokesman for a highly original group of thinkers whose leaders included fellow mathematicians John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Claude Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories; Johan Bigelow, an engineer associated with von Neumann at the Institute; and WarrenMcCulloch, a leading brain investigator at the University of Illinois Medical School.

Wiener coined the word nearly a generation ago to identify a new field that was just beginning to take shape, the broad study of all control systems, artificial and natural, manmade and begotten.

Revival of R. U. R., May 7, 1950.

Last Friday and yesterday the Dramashop of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revived Karel Capek’s famous play R.U.R., which stands for Rossums’ Universal Robots and which enriched every language with the word “robot.” There would be no reason for mentioning the revival here were it not for a prologue written and spoken by Professor Norbert Wiener,the mathematician who coined the word “cybernetics.”… This is in essence exactly what Plato said, for it means that humanity as a whole can be ruled by nothing less than men who span the whole of humanity…If cybernetics is to be used for vain ostentation or to satisfy the lust of power, it can lead only to damnation. It must be redound to some purpose which we recognize as righteous and which transcends all petty private ambitions.

Mayo Scientists Use Electrodes on Brain, April 3, 1953

Patients’ brains are “wired for sound” with hairlike electrodes sometimes left in place for several weeks in a new technique reported at the Mayo Clinic today…The scientists said that through the depth recording and electrical stimulation methods, new fields of investigation had been opened into: basic function of the human brain, like memory thought, action, sight and smell.

At last week’s meeting of the American Physiological Society in Chicago, Dr. José M.R. Delgado, a Yale neurologist, rose to tell about his way of treating mental afflictions by implanting electrodes in the brain and then turning on a feeble current. He has been developing this technique for the past five years. Dr. Delgado implants from seven to forty electrodes in various sections of a monkey’s brain. After recovery the monkey’s brain is stimulated through one electrode or a combination of electrodes. The effects are dramatic. A ferocious monkey ofthe macacus rhesus species become so tame that his face could be stroked. As soon as the current was turned off he wanted to bite anyone near him.

Electric Technique for Mental Cases, April 11, 1953

At last week’s meeting of the American Physiological Society in Chicago, Dr. José M.R. Delgado, aYale neurologist, rose to tell about his way of treating mental afflictions by implanting electrodes in the brain and then turning on a feeble current. He has been developing this technique for the past five years.

Dr. Delgado implants from seven to forty electrodes in various sections of a monkey’s brain. After recovery the monkey’s brain is stimulated through one electrode or a combination of electrodes. The effects are dramatic. A ferocious monkey of the macacus rhesus species become so tame that his face could be stroked. As soon as the current was turned off he wanted to bite anyone near him. This electrode technique has been tried in a small way on human patients with encouraging results, but many more months of clinical work must be done before neurologists will adopt it. One reason is that the complete after-effects of the treatment are unknown.One patient treated in a hospital had suffered for years fromsevere pains that could be relieved only through drugs, and then only temporalay. An electrical current passed through implanted electrodes destroyed a small area of the frontal lobes of his brain. Immediaterelief followed. After his discharge from the hospital the man went back to work.The ideas of implanting electrodes in the brain was first introduced successfully inSwitzerland, more than twenty-five years ago. Other medical scientists have used variations of the method ever since. In Dr. Delgado’s development of the technique, the electrodes remain in the skull for long periods, even permanently

Pavlov’s Dogs and Communist Brainwashers, May 9, 1954.

Through a monstrous misuse of famous psychological techniques the totalitarians seek to enslave the human mind… The world became more conscious of the danger of systematized mental coercion when the trials against the subversive old Bolsheviks took place in Moscow in 1936 and 1937. It seemed nearly impossible to believe that these oldguard Communists had suddenly changed into traitors. When one after another, every one of the accused confessed and beat his breast, we at first thought that it was a great show of deception, intended for the international stage, until gradually it dawned upon us that a much worse tragedy was being enacted. Human beings were being systematically changed into puppets…It was this method that Moscow’s Chinese Communist allies used in the Korean war to “brainwash” Col. Frank H. Schwable and other P.O.W.’s….

The fact that it is technically possible to bring the human mind into a condition of enslavement and submission has tremendous political implications in what is going on at this moment in the world of the totalitarians, their propaganda, and the “cold war.” We should also recognize, of course, that intervention into free thinking and free mental development does not occur only on the other side of the Iron Curtain…If man is unaware of new mental pressures threatening him in this aftermath of war, he will become an easy and willing victim, howling with the wolves in the woods.

Surgeons to Work via ‘Push Button’, FEBRUARY 14, 1954

A procedure developed largely by Swedish investigators — the “stereotaxic technique” — for, exploring and treating the deep recesses of the brain — will be the basis of the Mount Zion method…A mathematical device, into which are fed the proper measurements, enables a surgeon to insert instrument with great precision. The procedure was so painless that it generally was used under only a local anesthetic… The new “aiming” technique, called stereotaxis, was perfected so that a surgeon might hit a “target area” in the brain without making a large incision and needlessly involving healthy tissue…Dr. Feinstein returned late last year from the University of Lund, Sweden, where he spent almost two years with Dr. Lars Leksell, famous neurosurgeon to whom is credited the development of the new form of “mathematical surgery.”… In all these procedures, the physicians said, It is important to emphasize that the patient remains conscious and yet free from pain.

Device Suggested To Err Like Brain, March 24, 1955

Dr. McColloch is studying at M.I.T. the possibilities of direct electronic communication with the human brain… The suggestion was made here yesterday afternoon at a symposium of Design of Machines to Simulate the Behavior ofthe Human Brain. The symposium, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, was apart of the annual conference of the Institute of Radio Engineers.The essential limitation of modern brain-simulating mechanisms is that they can give only correct answers, Dr. Schmitt said.Observing that the human brain had no such limitation, Dr. Schmittsaid it was necessary for a person to make “forced decisions” to havean answer always and to be able to act quickly and certainly just as ifthe answer were always correct…

Electrical Brain, April 7, 1955

“Push-button” living rats that run and stop under the control of an electric current are being used in brain research at the University of Washington. A weak electric current, passed through an electrode imbedded in a specific area of the brain causes a rat to start running in a methodical fashion. As soon as the current is shut off, the animal stops automatically.

Device Appears to have Memory; Conditioned Like Pavlov’s Dogs, September 5, 1955

An electromechanical apparatus that apparently “learns” by experience and also forgets has been shown to visitors at this year’s meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science here. It is one of the many models of parts of the living brain built by Dr. W. Grey Walter, a British neurologist, who directs experimenentation at the Burden Institute near Bristol…The educable machine is called Cora, or Conditioned Reflex Analogue, because like the famous conditioned dogs of the Russian physiologist, Pavlov, it responds to an association of ideas or stimuli by a process of apparent anticipation…By other circuits, including feed-back or self-regulating control, the reflex model exhibits many individual characteristics usually considered to be confined to the process of thought.

Radio Waves’ Use In Surgery Noted, February 4, 1956

The use of radio waves to destroy selectively portions of the human brain in a manner that in some ways may be superior to the use of the surgeon’s knife was described here yesterday.

…This gently and selectively destroys brain tissue around the electrode while leaving surrounding tissues unchanged…Some types of brain tumours can best be removed by destroying them in place and then pumping them out. And recent surgical relief for a degenerative condition that causes profound muscle tremor in the aged (Parkinsonism) involves selective destruction of brain tissues.

Mr. Aronow said that the new radio frequency power technique was held by some surgeons to be advantageous because it might offer precise control of the volume of brain tissue to be destroyed, and precise control of the site in the brain where tissue was to be destroyed…And he emphasized that operations to destroy brain tissues, while often simple to

do, were very radical operations. The new radio frequency techniques is experimental, he said.

Brain Research by Soviet Cited, 13.4.1958

Soviet advances in brain research and the possible advent of pharmachological warfare were cited last night by an eminent psychologist in a plea for a greater American effort to penetrate the secrets of the mind. Dr. Leonard Carmichael, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said those who love freedom cannot view without concern the possibility that brain changes may be induced by new means….He took issue with those who asserted that Soviet Union lagged behind the West in the behavioral sciences…In many respects of brain research, the Soviet Union led the world. Dr. Carmichael anticipated the possibility of a “dramatic breakthrough in brain study” and the development of novel methods for altering human behavior. He expressed the fear that such techniques might be used to make people submit to authoriatarian control…He declared that the possibility of pharmachological warfare necessitating pharmachological counter-measures was to be taken seriously…Dr. Carmichael warned that the free world could not afford to disregard the long-range integrated program of brain research now being carried forward in the Soviet Union by a large, competent and hard-working staff…He emphasized the use of modern conditioned-reflex techniques, new electronic recording devices and the effect of pharmaceutical products on higher nervous activity.

Automatic Analysis of Brain’s Signals Aids Mental Study, 20.9.1958

The automatic analysis of the electrical signals produced by the human brain is enhancing medical understanding of psychiatric disorders, it was said here yesterday. And such analysis reportedly may aid aneasthesis for surgery…He explained. Physicians at Mayo Clinic originally made use of the relation between brain waves and depth of anesthesia to automatically regulate anesthesia, Mr. Slocombe said. He demonstrated a modified version of the Mayo machine in which the depth of anesthesia of the patient – as indicated by the brain waves – is continuously indicated. Mr. Slocombe expressed the view that a machine could be devised to keep a patient anesthetized to the level where the brain’s electrical signals were of the desired form.

Current’s to Brain Produce Changes in Social Behavior, Aug 12, 1959.

The social behavior of humans and animals can be drastically influenced by electrical stimulation of the brain a researcher said yesterday…He said his tests would, at first seem to support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion and behavior can be directed by electrical forces and that animals and humans can be controlled like robots. This assumption must be qualified, he said.

Talking Machine Won’t Be Tricked, December 29, 1959

Devices are also being developed that can teach themselves without human intervention. They will soon be making decision at speeds and through steps of reasoning beyond the reach of human minds. These developments, with their prospects for good and evil, were discussed at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science being heldhere. The situation was foreseen where the nation, under threat of war, could surrenderits destiny to a device whose decision would “win” the war but destory the country.

Current’s To Brain Produce Changes In Social Behavior, August 12, 1959

The social behavior of humans and animals can be drastically influenced by electrical stimulation of the brain a researcher said yesterday…Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado, Associate Professor of Physiology at the Yale University School of Medicine, said painless charges to the human brain had evoked such feelings as fear, friendliness and recall of long-forgottenevents. The patients were mentally ill or epileptic. In the tests on monkeys and cats, there were definite changes in eating and sleeping, fighting and playing and sexual responses, he said.Dr. Delgado spoke at a meeting of the International Congress of Physiological Sciences in Buenos Aires. He said his tests would, at first seem to support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion and behavior can be directed by electrical forces and that animals and humans can be controlled like robots. This assumption must be qualified, he said.

Proton New Tool in Brain Surgery, 17.10 1961

TUMOUR MADE TO SHRINK – Parkinson’s Disease Is Also Treated With a Beam of Nuclear Particles

An international gathering of neurosurgeons heard today how radiation was being used to perform bloodless operations on the brain and to map the functions of the human brain…Medical researchers from Cambridge, Mass., and Stockholm, Sweden, described the successful use of proton beams on brains to treat persons suffering with tumors, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Dr. Raymond Kjellberg a neurosurgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital reported today the first application of this proton-beam technique for treating a deep-seated brain tumour…Dr. Lars Leksell of Serafimerlasarettet, a hospital in Stockholm described how the proton-beam technique had been used for successful treatment of a small group of patients suffering with psychic disorders and Parkinson’s disease. As an example, he told of a 44 year old women who had been progressively incapacitated by a right-side tremor from Parkinson’s disease. The woman was subjected in the proton beam treatment, with the protons aimed at the thalamus, a deep-scated collection of nerve cells inside the brain, which controls body movements. After thirteen days, Dr. Leksell reported, the tremor disappeared with complete recovery of function and without side effects.

Technological Decisions Ignore Human Factors, Admiral Rickover Says, November 20, 1964 Vice Adm. Hyman G. Rickover said tonight that both governmental and private organizations were disregarding human considerations in making technological decisions.Too often, he declared, technological decisions are being made on the basis of shortrange, private interests with no regard for the interests of others or the possibilities of harmful, long-range side effects. The methods of science, he said, require the rigorous exclusion of the human factor. But technology cannot claim the authority of science,and what is done with technology must be subject in the traditional concepts of ethics and morals, he said.

Admiral Rickover spoke before a symposium on Cybernetics and Society being held in connection with the 175th anniversary celebration ofGeorgetownUniversity. The two-day symposium is considering the social and psychological implications of the new science of cybernetics, which deals with computer control of human or machine activities. He said there must be a recognition that technology is a product of human effort, a product serving no other purpose than to benefit man — man in general, not merely some man. Neither public opinion nor the low, he said, has caught up with the new destructive potential of technology which is why perpetrators of technological damage often as not escape with impunity. Technology, Admiral Rickover said, is not an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meckly submit. It is, he said, nothing but the artifacts fashioned by modern man to increase his powersof mind and body.…Marvelous as they are, we must not let ourselves be ever awed by these artifacts, he said, They certainly do not dictate how we should use them nor by their mere existence do they authorize actions that were not anteriorly lawful.

Sociologist Warns on’Big-Brotherism’, April 14, 1966

In a benevolent, scientific disguise, the age of big-brotherism is fast approaching with possibly disastrous consequences only dimly regcognized by researchers and the public, a mental health meeting here was told today. Apparently in the interests of social welfare and scientific knowledge, an ugly alliance may be developing between legal electronic surveillance, scientific research and Government dossiers, according to Dr. Orville G. Brim Jr., a prominent sociologist who is president of the Russell Sage Foundation of New York. Dr. Brim participated in one of several sessions on surveillance, testing and the right of privacy …At the various sessions, behavioral scientists from different fields agreed independently to the growth of psychological tests, electronic surveillance and social research presented dangers.

‘Matador’ With A Radio Stops Wired Bull, May 17, 1965 – Modified Behavior in Animals Subject of Brain Study – By John. A. Osmundsen

Afternoon sunlight poured over the high wooden barriers into the ring as the brave bull bore down on the unarmed “matador” – a scientist who had never faced a fighting bull…But the charging animal’s horns never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen, Dr. Jose M.R.Delgado the scientist, pressed a button on a small radio transmitter in his hand and the bull braked to a halt…The experiment conducted last year inCordova,Spain, by Dr. Delgado of Yale Universitys School of Medicine, was probably the most spectacular demonstration ever performed of the deliberate modification of animal behavior through external control of the brain. Dr. Delgado was trying to find out what makes brave bulls brave – just as other of his experiments have aimed at finding the biological basis for emotions, personality and behavior in man and other animals through electrical stimulation of their brains. He has been working in this field for more than 15 years…I do believe, he said in a recent lecture, that an understanding of the biological bases of social and antisocial behavior and of mental activities, which for the first time in history can now be explored in a conscious brain, may be of decisive importance in the search for intelligent solutions to some of our present anxieties, frustrations and conflicts. Dr. Delgado said in an interview recently that he was particularly concerned with what he called the gap between our understanding of the atom and our understanding of the mind. .. We are in a precarious race, he said, between the acquisition of many megatons of destructive power and the development of intelligent human beings who will make intelligent use of the formidable forces at our disposal…Dr. Delgado’s contention that brain research has reached a stage of refinement where it can contribute to the solution of some of these problems is basic he said, on many of his own experiments. These have shown, he explained, that functions traditionally related to the psyche, such as friendliness, pleasure or verbal expression, can be induced, modified and inhibited by direct electrical stimulation of the brain.

Monkeys Rejects Its Young On Radio’s Order Test Explores Ways to Aid Mentally Ill

By ROBERT REINHOLD – MARCH 22, 1967

Female monkeys, normally among the most protective of mothers, can be ordered by radio to reject their young. Dr. José M.R. Delgado of Yale’s School of Medicine told a convention of electronic engineers here yesterday. The Spanish-born neuro-physiologist said he had conducted experiments in which a rhesus monkey coddling her infant son had responded to a 10-second radio signal by thrusting off her son, adopting an offensive attitude and biting herself as she wheeled angrily around her cage…The mother lost all interest in the infant monkey for more than 15 minutes before the effect of the radiosignal wore off and she took the little monkey back in her arms…The scientist described how fine wires were implanted in the mother’s brain to carry the electrical signal…The wires were inserted in the mesencephalon of mid-brain, which controls the maternal instinct. Dr. Delgado’s objective is not to manipulate, but to explore the physical and chemical basis of emotion and thought and also to develop new ways to treat the mentally ill. Such techniques have already been applied to humans – in calming violent mental patients and in treating epilepties.

OBSERVER: PASS YOUR MIND,PLEASE

By RUSSELL BAKER – Sept. 2, 1967

Dr. David Krech, aUniversityofCaliforniapsychologist, suggests in possibility that knowledge and memory may some day be transferred from brain to brain by injection. The doctor is depressed by the prospect. He apparently forces it as the final insult to individual integrity. And yet, if applied sanely, with restraint, what a boon it could be. The same thing is said, of course, about nuclear fission, which may explain why the news of each scientific advance, including the possibility of memory transfer, terrifies us. Why has science become Dr. Frankenstein? Because application of its boons is rarely planned until possibility becomes actuality, and then it is too late to save it from commercial or military exploitation. If there is a possibility of memory-knowledge transfer, now is the time to set regulations specifying how it may and may not be used.

PUSH-BUTTON PEOPLE? – Politisk ledare den 10 april 1967:

There are disquieting implications in the experiments on control of human beings and animals that Professor José M.R. Delgado of YaleMedicalSchoolhas successfully conducted. His latest feat has been to demonstrate that by implanting electrodes in a female monkey’s brain he can make it reject its own child on radio command. Two years, ago he revealed that he had been able to stop a charging bull in mid-course and make it amble obediently away in response to the same type of electronic stimulation. It is the possibility of similar control over human beings that causes concern. Several years ago Dr. Delgado told a scientific meeting that experiments with patients suffering from epilepsy or emotional illness seems to support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion, and behavior can be directed by electrical forces and that humans can be controlled like robots by push buttons. It is indeed a “distasteful conclusion” despite Dr. Delgado’s assurance that electrical stimulation cannot change the basic characteristics of the experimental subject…Dr. Delgado and his colleagues are pursuing these researches to learn more about the brain, how it functions, and how its disorders can be alleviated or cured. But it is quite conceivable that in some countries investigations may be under way into the possibility of using these techniques to control human beings. Presumably there is still a long way to go before Dr. Delgado’s accomplishments with monkeys can be successfully transferred to humans. But the mere existence of such a possibility is disturbing, and certainly merits wider public discussion and greater attention than it has received up to now.

SCIENTIST SAYS CONTROL OF INTELLIGENCE IS POSSIBLE – Psychologist Says Level of the Brain Can Be Raised By HAROLD M. SCHMECK Jr., April 3, 1968

Within 5 to 10 years, science will be able to exercise a “significant degree of control” over human intellectual capacity, a psychologist predicted today…He said society should start thinking about this possibility before it is too late. I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and the intellectual functioning of all people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain, said Dr. David Krech, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley…Testifying at a Senate sub-committee hearing, the scientist said this kind of control had already been demonstrated in animal experiments…He said a class of chemicals had been identified that can improve the memory and the problem-solving ability of laboratory animals. Some of these drugs, he said, can raise a hereditarily stupid animal up to the performance level of brighter animals ofthe same species…Another class of drugs can prevent the permanent storing of memories. The best known of these is puronycin, an anti-biotic that is not used medically. In other words, these drugs, when injected in the animal permit it to put in an efficent day’s work, although the animal is prevented from building up a permanent body of experiences, memories, expectations and abilities, Dr. Krech said…For if laterresearch should show that our animal data were applicable to man, and if in the meantime we had failed to prepare ourselves for that eventuality, then we might find it too late to institute effective, carefully thought through and humane controls. He testified before the Government Research Subcommitee of the Senate Government Operations Committee. The subcommittee, under the chairmanship of Senator Fred R. Harris, Democrat of Oklahoma, is considering legislation to set up national commission on health science and society…To me, in any event, it is clear that some of the possible outcomes of our present brain research can raise problems surpassingly strange in their novelty, bafflingly complex and of serious social importance, Dr. Krech said.

BRAIN WAVE – Politisk ledare den 19.9. 1970

If the late George Orwell were writing a sequel to “1984″ today, he would probably reject as archaic the propaganda techniques for controlling people’s minds described in his famous anti-utopian classic. Today, for example, he might envisage a society in which a newborn baby’s first experience would be neurosurgery, an operation in which the child’s brain was fitted with miniaturized radio devices connected to every majör center controlling reason and emotion.

Children in such a society might be raised as flesh and blood electrical toys, whose ideas and behavior were directed by computer signals. An aberrant or heretical ideas would be transmitted to the computer, which would be programed to take appropriate action to restore control…If this is still fantasy, it is not so fantastic as it was before Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado of Yale reported his latest work. By fitting radio requirement into a chimpanzee’s brain, he has developed a technique which permits a computer to make a specific change in the test animal’s brain waves…That represents at least a first step down the road toward the nightmare vision of a brain-controlled population. Over the past decade Dr. Delgado has reported using electrical stimulation to stop a charging bull, to make a female monkey reject her children and to perform other similar feats. Dr. Delgado himself some years ago said that experimental evidence seems to support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion and behavior can be directed by electrical forces and that humans can be controlled like robots by push-buttons. Dr. Delgado’s work is aimed at finding new techniques to help those stricken with mental illness, epilepsy and such afflictions, not to create some future super-totalitarian state. Fortunately, human ignorance about the brain remains so vast that there is no imminent prospect that the techniques being worked on at Yale could have Orwellian significance.

Nevertheless, the horrifying prospect rises that in the 21st century the lexicographers may have to drop the verb “to brainwash” and replace it with “to brainwave”.

In Behaviorist’s Ideal State,Control Replaces Liberty – 3 September, 1971

Traditional concepts of individual freedom and dignity have made an immeasurable contribution, but they’ve served their purpose, the rangy, cheerful, 67-year-old Harvard University professor asserted during a conversation… Dr. Skinner argues that contrary to prevailing wisdom, individual men and women are incapable of controlling their own behavior through free will, that their behavior is an inevitable product of external influences. Having thereby disposed of “autonomous man,” Dr. Skinner goes on to say that the only way to control behavior is to manipulate the environmental influences that regulate it…So he proposes widespread application of a developing “technology of behavior,” in which the actions of individuals would be controlled… Dr. Skinner, on the other hand, believes it will be possible to engineer a behavioral control system in such a way that the leaders of society would be brought under the same controls as the people.

N EW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW –3.9.1971

“There is just no gainsaying the profoundimportance of B.F. SKINNER’S new book,

BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY.

If you plan to read only one book this year, this is probably the one you should choose.”

From the New York Times review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

The new book by the great behaviorist, author also of Walden Two, who is the most influential (and controversial) living psychologist, is just published. It has already, through the shock and force of its ideas, stirred nationwide debate.

Dr. Skinner questions the ideals western man holds most sacred. He proposes to substitute — as the only possible solution to the deepening crisis in our civilization — a “technology of behavior” making full use of scientific capabilitis to alter the environment and man himself.

The Time cover story (Skinner’s Utopia: Panacea or Path to Hell?) the extensive editorials and articles in the New York Times (Is Freedom Obsolete?), the Washington

Star (He calls for an end to autonomous man), the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, as well as the cover story and condensation in Psychology Today, all bear witness to an event of the first importance. His book is one of the most important happenings in 20th century psychology (Science News) as it challenges, equally, the liberal, conservative, and radical concepts of man’s nature and man’s future.

Already in its 4th printing $ 6.95

BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY, NYT Book Review, 24.10.1971

The Skinner who appears in this book is different from the evengetistic author of Walden Two. Where once he fantasized about a world controlled by social science, now he attacks the unscientific fantasies of others; the fantasy that people possess the right to freedom from society, or that mankind has an innate dignity which transcends the way society makes man behave… This dissonance in Skinner’s thinking becomes amplified when he tries to explain the ethical purpose of behavior conditioning. He tells us that the “technology of behavior” is of itself morally neutral; a saint or a devil could employ it equally well. Speaking, as it were, ex machina, he indicates a few purposes to which he personally would like to see the techniques put… Science — modern, up-to-date, hard science — stands ready to support him. In the process Skinner, who has some harsh words for “pre-scientific” writers, mis-represents the character of modern scientific work. The unforgivable failing of this book is that it is incurious about the nature of society and has little to say about social life, though it proclaims a world of entirely socializable human beings..Indeed a concepton of human dignity as simple-minded as Skinner’s will never provide the insights that might stimulate a society to encourage more dignified behavior in its citizens.

ARTIFICIAL BRAIN, 10.2.1972

Electrodes planted deep withing the brain stem area, where commands from the cortex are normally integrated, could evoke movements of the head, foreleg, hindquarters and muscles of the face…Higher levels of behavior, including attack, withdrawal, sitting, standing, preening and eating food, could also be elicited.

Curbs on Biomedical Tests on Humans Proposed by Panels at Minority Parley – 9 jan 1976

Draft recommendations including the barring of all biomedical research in prisons and on children and the mentally infirm, were made today by panels of the first National Minority Conference on Human Experimentation… Among these was a feeling of urgent need for safe guards of the rights and medical well-being of research subjects. Another theme was the view that minority groups were consistently exploited in research. The minority groups cited in this regard were not only ethnic but also such groups as the poor and the mentally infirm. A third theme was an expression the need for a permanent national body to see that justice is done to research subjects in all institutions were there is human experimentation…We don’t want to kill science, said M. Carl Holman, President of the National

Urban Coalition, but we don’t want science to kill, mangle and abuse us.

Behavior Tests for C.I.A. Disclosed by Denver University, Sept. 7, 1977

The chancellor of theUniversityofDenversaid today that the school participated in mind control experiments sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency 20 years ago… Maurice Mitchell said he received a letter from the agency on Aug. 12, informing him that from 1954 to 1957 Alden B. Sears,then a graduate student at the university, conducted the experiments under a grant from the Geschikter Foundation for Medical Research, a C.I.A. front… He said that under the grant’s provisions, Mr.Sears, who may not have known that the experiments were connected to the C.I.A., was to perform three types of hypnosis and mind control studies. One experiment, involved testing whether a person could be brainwashed and “programmed” to do something at a later date.

The New York Times, August 20, 1998.

A terrorist whispering into his phone doesn’t realize that his words get transmitted to a ground station, becomeamplified and disappear into space where they are captured by the antennas on N.S.A. satellites…

Etiketlendi:MIND CONTROL, mk ultra, zihin kontrolü