"What Monster Could Have Done This?": Horror Films For Left-Wingers / Horror Films For Right-Wingers

Maybe it isn't an accident that Halloween and national U.S.
elections fall in such close proximity. Fear is a powerful driving
force for both. It certainly isn't an accident that politics
tend to leak into horror films, which often mine the political
zeitgeist to learn what kind of scares are selling at any given moment.
In fact, horror films are usually a better gauge of what's making the
country anxious than opinion polls are. As with politicians, there are
horror films for virtually every political stripe, as we explore in
this guide to how to combine two types of fear this Electioneen (or is
that Hallowelection?) season.

Horror Films For Left-Wingers:

Deathdream (1974)

The situation: An older married couple hears that their son
has been killed in Vietnam, but when they pray hard for the news to be
false, the boy returns. With a thirst for human blood.

The politics: Rather than being the elephant in the room, the
Vietnam War becomes the rampaging zombie who terrorizes Middle America.
Yes, that's right: In 1974, director Bob Clark made a movie that took
the bold stance of being against the war.

Key moment: Tired of being an inconvenient truth, the undead
soldier digs his own grave and buries himself. Talk about
passive-aggressive! That setup is echoed in…

Masters Of Horror: Homecoming (2005)

The situation: The scores of American soldiers killed in the
current war return from the dead to vote out the liars who put them in
harm's way.

The politics: Since George Romero pioneered the genre, zombie
movies have repeatedly been used for left-wing allegory, but Joe
Dante's political sentiments are so blunt that the film barely counts
as allegory (or horror) at all. The zombies here aren't hungry for
brains, they're conscientious, docile lobbyists for change; if
anything, the shotgun-wielding Ann Coulter-type played by Thea Gill
represents the real threat to humanity.

Key moment: There's no more sobering image than the mounted
coffins of dead soldiers, lined up in neat rows with the American flag
draped over them. Dante recreates this image in an airplane hangar,
only to have the soldiers angrily smash through their coffins, not
quite ready to rest in peace.

Land Of The Dead (2005)

The situation: And speaking of Romero's zombies, in the
dystopian future of his fourth zombie film, the rich get richer while
the poor get poorer. And also attacked by zombies. Evil businessman
Dennis Hopper tries to keep his city's zombie problems at bay by
secluding himself in a high-tech, expensively fortified skyscraper, but
when betrayed working-class mercenary John Leguizamo goes bucking for
revenge, Hopper has to deal with an angry, oppressed underclass and
a rapidly evolving zombie population.

The politics: Even if Hopper didn't make for such a direct

Bush/Cheney stand-in, Land Of The Dead's depiction of a grim
world where the gulf between the super-rich and the super-poor makes
class warfare inevitable would make this one of the most overtly
political horror films of the past decade.

Key moment: In 2005, the Bush administration's tough-talking words popped up in the mouths of all manner of cinematic evildoers (see also Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith), including self-professed real-life Republican Hopper, who channels Dubya (or at least squirmy mouthpiece Scott McClellan) when he insists that he doesn't negotiate with terrorists.

Eyes Without A Face (1960)

The situation: Of course, the gap between rich and poor is
nothing new for horror films. In this French classic, an experimental
plastic surgeon seeks out beautiful women to kill and skin so he can
stitch their faces onto his disfigured daughter. Hey, the rich are
different from you and me.

The politics: Pick your cause, lefties! While class warriors can nod ruefully at the movie's depiction of aristocratic arrogance, feminists can rally around its critique of the beauty myth, and even egetarians can find parallels between the grotesque scenes of human butchery and the daily business of any slaughterhouse. (Though it'llhelp if they watch Georges Franju's slaughterhouse documentary Blood Of The Beasts, handily included on the DVD.)

Key moment: A rich dude gets gobbled up by his own pack of trained dogs. Which raises a question: Do the rich taste different from you and me? If anyone has the answer, it's the protagonist of…

American Psycho (1999)

The situation: In the height of the '80s, an evil
über-yuppie (Christian Bale) amuses himself with hookers, a rigorous
exercise routine, incisive analyses of Huey Lewis and Genesis albums,
and mass murder. But is it all just in his warped mind?

The politics: Like Vampire's Kiss, American Psycho suggests that the poisonous self-absorption and blithe indifference to the suffering of others that characterizes young Republicans, conservative

yuppies, and the Reagan right could easily lead to blood-soaked killing
sprees.

Key moment: Bale experiences a moment of stark professional
and personal panic when he worries that his business card (and sleek
business-card holder) doesn't measure up to those of his peers.

They Live (1988)

The situation: In another film set during the tail-end of
the Reagan era, unemployed tough guy "Rowdy" Roddy Piper acquires a pair of fantastical sunglasses which reveal that the yuppie ruling
class are actually sinister aliens controlling the world through
subliminal messages.

The politics: John Carpenter's sly horror-thriller takes
welcome shots at yuppies, Reagan-era conformity, and product placement,
subliminal advertising's creepy conjoined twin. Who knew a movie
starring "Rowdy" Roddy Piper could be so deliciously subversive?

Key moment: Piper's class-consciousness gets an instant
upgrade when he puts on the sunglasses and notices that instead of the
usual dead presidents, his money reads "This Is Your God." Subtle!

The People Under The Stairs (1991)

The situation: In a ghoulish former funeral home, a wealthy,
evil, incestuous brother-and-sister landlord team (Twin Peaks'
Everett McGill and Wendy Robie) who bear an unmistakable resemblance to
Nancy and Ronald Reagan keep a freakish gaggle of abused, kidnapped
boys (and one very unlucky girl) hostage while hoarding the money
they've made as slumlords.

The politics: In addition to standing in for a president that demonized "welfare queens" and did his best to remove the socialsafety net, McGill represents every callous, parasitic businessman whoever exploited African-Americans for profit without giving anything back to the community.

Key moment: The first time McGill calls sister/lover Robie
"mommy" (Ronald Reagan's creepy pet name for Nancy), the film's
unsubtle allegorical aspects are made even more overt.

Body Snatchers (1993)

The situation: Aliens are rapidly replicating the bodies ofan army base's residents, then killing off the originals, leavinganyone not yet "converted" running scared.

The politics: Abel Ferrara's take on the Invasion Of The
Body Snatchers scenario is in many ways the leanest and meanest
version—it ties the insidious evil of conformity to the concept of
military hierarchy. Because who can really tell the difference between
a pod person and an officer?

Key moment: The new kids in town face down their alien
stepmother Meg Tilly, who tells them that escape is pointless, because
"there's no one like you left." This is more or less how every Democrat
has felt on the last several election days.

Horror Films For Right-Wingers:

Invasion
Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

The situation: Same story, different decade. And this
time, it's the conservatives feeling the squeeze. Aliens are rapidly
replicating the bodies of San Franciscans, then killing off the
originals, leaving anyone not yet "converted" running scared.

The politics: Don Siegel's 1956 version has been read as both
anti-communist and anti-anti-communist, but Philip Kaufman's 1978 film
has a clearer satirical take, slyly skewering the passivity of West
Coast New-Agers. An I'm Okay, You're Okay culture only allows
the pod people to propagate quicker.

Key moment: Self-help guru—and ruthless alien—Leonard Nimoy
informs wise-to-the-conspiracy Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland that
they're "trapped by old concepts" and need to wake up to a world where
there's "no need for hate… or love." But there was plenty of love, or
at least scary, dangerous sex, in the decade to come.

The slasher film (1980-present)

The situation: A group of horny teenagers head into the
woods for a weekend of drinking and debauchery, but they're killed off
one at a time by a superhuman psycho-killer, often wearing a mask
and/or a dark trench coat

The politics: Reacting against the progressive sexual
politics of the '60s and '70s, Reagan-era slasher films like Friday
The 13th and their ilk were notable for their puritanical attitudes
about teenage sexuality, and were particularly vicious toward
promiscuous females. The only characters that survive these movies tend
to be the ones who keep their clothes on.

Key moment: A couple goes skinny-dipping or starts in on some
heavy petting, leaving themselves vulnerable to a bloody hacking.
Repeat for 10 years.

The Last House On The Left (1972)

The situation: In a modern-day updating of Ingmar Bergman's The
Virgin Spring, the parents of a murdered girl get the opportunity
to torture members of the cult that raped and killed her.

The politics: The dead girl brought some of anguish on
herself by going into the city to see a demonic rock 'n' roll band,
then trying to score marijuana from a dirty hippie cult. Honey, don't
trust anyone under 30.

Key moment: The parents realize who their houseguests are
when they see their daughter's peace-symbol necklace hanging around the
neck of one of the longhairs. Not groovy.

The Exorcist (1973)

The situation: Other films found the devil within. Preteen
sweetie Linda Blair gets possessed by The Devil—capital "T," capital
"D"—and after mom Ellen Burstyn exhausts the learned opinions of
egghead scientists and touchy-feely psychiatrists, she calls in a
couple of God's Catholic soldiers to clean house.

The politics: In the immortal words of The Louvin Brothers,
"Satan is real," which is good news for Christian fundamentalists eager
to see the clash of good and evil in non-metaphorical terms. And don't
think it's an accident that the movie is about an ineffectual single
mother, or that the story is set in Georgetown, a liberal elitist
enclave in that den of sin, Washington D.C.

Key moment: The priests literally go medieval on Blair's
ass, scarring her skin with splashes of holy water. Their God is an
awesome God. And one not to be doubted, as proved by a later exercise
in exorcism.

The Exorcism Of Emily Rose (2005)

The situation: Loosely inspired by the most notorious
demon-possession case on record, the film mixes horror with courtroom
drama as it looks into the case of a priest charged with negligent
homicide for allowing a "possessed" young woman to die under his care.

The politics: At a time when "intelligent design" is making
headway against the teaching of evolution in public schools, Emily
Rose sets up a rigged Scopes Monkey Trial-like scenario in which
science fails to account for what the defendants argue is a religious
phenomenon. Once again, Clarence Darrow takes the loss.

Key moment: Initially skeptical of her client's claims—that
is, until demons start to pay her nightly visits—defense attorney Laura
Linney argues that the facts shouldn't determine the outcome of the
case, because they eliminate other possibilities. The motions of
prosecutor Campbell Scott ("Objection! Silliness!") are overruled.

Speaker warns about manipulation

Speaker warns about manipulation
By C. JEROME CROW
http://www.redbluffdailynews.com/news/ci_4547235


Even very smart people can be fooled, this was the message given to students, parents and teachers at Monday's Red Ribbon Week Kick-off held at the State Theatre.

Robert Fellows, motivational speaker and professional illusionist was the keynote speaker. Fellows is a Harvard graduate with a master's degree in theology and is well known for his message which promotes self-responsibility.

"No one wants to be trapped in jail," said Fellows. "But what is much more dangerous is being trapped in our minds."

He punctuated his remarks with illusions which kept the audience laughing and scratching their heads. He did tricks with rings and even escaped from a straitjacket. Fellows broke the number one magician rule by explaining how some of it was done. However, he did this with a purpose, to show just how manipulation can be used as mind control to get people to do harmful things.

"A lot of good people who have been taught all the right things make really bad decisions," said Fellows. "It's a natural human trait to want someone to lift the burden of making decisions for them."

This is why peer pressure is so powerful.

"Some very smart people can be manipulated," said Fellows. "We need to take responsibility for our own actions."

Fellows used the example of a sign that read "Keep off the the grass." He noted that most people when they read it, are used to the message, these are bright people who don't spend time studying the sign because they understand the meaning of it, they neglect to read the second "the" and read the message as they think it should be.

In another example, he asked a volunteer to pick one of three cards. When she picked a card, he turned it over to show printed on the back, "I knew you would pick this card."

As the audience watched in amazement, he asked the volunteer what would happen if she picked another card and he then asked her to do so. After selecting another card, he had her look on the back of the envelope the cards came from exposing a similar message. When she picked the third card, he asked her to open the envelope where she found a third message saying, that he knew she would pick the card.

"The audience member really does have free choice," said Fellows. "But I can make it look as though I knew what she would choose depending on the next step I take."

In his book "Easily Fooled: New Insights and Techniques for Resisting Manipulation," Fellows gives a list of common personality traits that make people easily vulnerable to manipulation.

He lists such items as stress, transition, dependency, unassertiveness, gullibility, the desire to want simple answers to complex questions, an idealistic view of things, disillusionment, unfulfilled desire for spirituality, and traumatic experiences.

To sum it up, he said basically, "That is anyone."

Fellows told the audience that one of the reasons people do drugs or make any kind of bad decision, even if they know the right decision is that they put authority in other people. Most people want to be right and be accepted.

"This is what peer pressure is all about," said Fellows. "Manipulation is mind control."

This is a message that Fellows has written in his book and taken as far as the White House. This week he's been visiting schools in Tehama County as part of Red Ribbon Week sponsored by the Tehama County Department of Education's prevention project.

Fellows stressed that a bad attitude can and will hold a person back from success.

"Whatever you think is holding you back, you can overcome it," said Fellows. "You can break free."

In his book, he offers 10 steps to critical thinking.

* Recognize social conditioning. Fellows warns to resist mind control, the ways that groups and certain social situations can manipulate people.
* Remember you can say no. Sometimes we agree with people to just be polite. The problem is that each time we do that we are practicing going along with people.
* Recognize faulty dilemmas. Fellows recommends adding "none of the above" to multiple choices before making a decision.
* Sleep on it. Recognize pressure to decide quickly and don't act under stress.
* Look for the hidden agenda. Fellows advises to look at what is really being said. What is not being said. To whom and why.
* Recognize logical fallacies. Fellows warns of arguments which mix invalid unrelated facts to prove a point. For instance, saying "I'm sure both agree the sky is blue," then the next thing said is, "So it must also be true that..."
* Know what a group or belief a person represents. Fellows notes in his book that many unethical groups change their names and use fronts to fit the situation.
* Recognize flattery. Fellows writes that these are emotional buttons that can get easy results.
* Ask questions. Fellows suggests to challenge claims of authority. Does a person's training, education or background make them an authority on the subject. Is she outside the field.
* Retain self-esteem. Fellows adds that people shouldn't be afraid to be different then everyone around them.

Fellows concludes in his book that the world really is a wonderful place.

"We need to trust people and expect that they will treat us fairly," he writes. "We need to be vulnerable to have relationships that work." He adds that trust, wonder, and innocence are the keys to being fully human.

He said he hopes that those who listen to his message and read his book will be inspired, motivated and entertained to reach beyond established patterns and think outside the box.

In his case it just means escaping from the box, locked in a straitjacket to get his message across.

For additional information on the book, go to www.robertfellows.com.

Brain sees subliminal sexy images

NEW YORK, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- University of Minnesota scientists found sexy subliminal images compete for attention in the brain even when the images are not right before a subject's eyes.

Sheng He, a cognitive neuroscientist, had groups of 10 heterosexual men and women each and 10 homosexual men and 10 homosexual women view erotic pictures directly -- then canceled out vision of the nude image by giving one eye a highly-contrasted image called a Garbo patch, Scientific America.com reported.

The researchers found sexual orientation often determined how the brain reacts to erotic images. Heterosexual women, for example, were more subconsciously tuned in to pictures of naked men, the same reaction exhibited by homosexual men. But homosexual women were equally attuned to naked images of both sexes, a paper in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said.

Sheng He said "it appears that our minds are exquisitely tuned to detect sexual opportunity - especially when it is invisible."

Researchers at the University of Chicago reported in 1994 that 54 percent of men and 19 percent of women admitted they think about sex every day -- or several times a day.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

Marketing and Mind Control

Marketing and Mind Control
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15391587/site/newsweek/
by Wray Herbert

Imagine that I have $100 and I offer you $20 of it, no strings attached. You'd take it, right? Any fool would; it's a windfall. But imagine further that you know I must give away part of my $100 or lose it all. All of a sudden my motives aren't entirely altruistic, but I'm still offering you free money. Take it or leave it, but no negotiation allowed. How would you feel? What would you do?

If you were like a lot of people who have answered these questions in a psychological experiment over the years, you would now feel conflicted. Many of these people actually walked away from the deal, even though it would have meant a no-strings-attached twenty bucks in their pockets. Why? Because the arrangement is fundamentally unfair, and once you know this your basic sense of moral indignation clicks in. Your emotions and principles trump your pure rationality.

Psychologists have demonstrated this in the laboratory, time and time again. It's known as the Ultimatum Game, and its counterintuitive findings are part of a broad new understanding of how the human brain and mind work. As it turns out, we are not very reasonable creatures much of the time, nor are we very aware. Indeed, we are under constant sway of our emotions and intuitions, and most of the time we are not even aware of just how quirky and emotional our everyday decisions are.

Consider another experiment from the emerging field of social neuroscience. Psychologist John Bargh flashed words in front of volunteers, but so rapidly that they did not register in the conscious mind. Some of the words had to do with rudeness (like impolite and obnoxious) while others were the opposite (respect, considerate). The volunteers were later put in a simulated situation in which they could be civil toward one another—or not. Many who had seen the words associated with rudeness were not. Two-thirds of the volunteers who had been primed with rudeness words interrupted another person afterward, compared to only 16 percent of those primed with politeness words.

I don't know about you, but I find this very sobering. It seems Bargh was able to make human beings behave politely or rudely, and without all that much effort, simply by fiddling with the automatic, emotional parts of their brain. What does this say about our autonomy, our free will? This is the basic question raised by neurologist Richard Restak in his new, somewhat dystopian book, "The Naked Brain," published late last month by Harmony Books. It's worth reading, both as a solid primer on a fascinating new psychological science and as a warning about the potential misuse of brain science for nefarious purposes.

The power of our emotional brain is not a good thing or a bad thing entirely. It depends on the situation. It's probably good that our righteous moral indignation clicks on automatically sometimes; our personal finances may suffer a bit, but we're better people for it. But how about other fast, automatic emotions, like fear? Cognitive psychologist Michael Gazzaniga has done many experiments with patients who, for medical reasons, have had their brains' hemispheres disconnected. This means that the left hemisphere, in charge of language, isn't communicating with the right hemisphere. Using distressing pictures and words, Gazzaniga in effect creates negative emotion in the brain's right hemisphere, out of conscious awareness. The subjects experience the emotion, but they don't understand it, so the rational left hemisphere attempts to interpret the mysterious emotion, and it sometimes makes mistakes. So an unexplained dip in mood or a sensation of discomfort might be wrongly attributed to, say, a spouse's selfishness or even infidelity—with untoward consequences.

One of the most fascinating and potentially alarming findings to come out of social neuroscience has to do with specialized brain cells called "mirror neurons." Mirror neurons closely intertwine emotion with movement. They are what make you smile when a baby smiles, or make me grimace when I see you in pain. And the physical act of smiling or grimacing unleashes emotions of joy or suffering. In short, mirror neurons are the neurological foundation of empathy, which is a building block of compassion. But as Restak explains, such a potent connection between two brains could have a flip side: It means that all I have to do to manipulate your mind is to get your attention.

Marketers and politicians are already familiar with these advances in brain science, and are using this knowledge to control our behavior. Or at least they are trying to do so. Advertisements are deliberately designed to target the emotional brain and create bonds, even cravings (one of our basest and most powerful emotional drives). Extensive research shows that our brains have certain hardwired propensities that might be exploited. For example, our brains tend to register frequently heard facts as true, even if they are patently false. As a result, our memories and beliefs are highly malleable and unreliable. We also tend, if unchecked by the conscious reasoning mind, to focus overly on risk, inconvenience, hassles—anything negative. And researchers have found that we all carry around an innate hostility toward "otherness," which means anyone not like us.

These hardwired traits are difficult to shake, in part because they were adaptive when our early ancestors were evolving on the savannahs and have been reinforced ever since. But they are clearly no longer adaptive, and indeed make us vulnerable to all sorts of subtle conditioning. Should we be worried? In the final analysis, Restak does not believe that brain science has advanced far enough yet to give marketers any persuasive powers they didn't have already. Despite remarkable progress in understanding the brain's anatomy and biochemistry, the organ is far too complex an array of interconnected circuits to be that easily manipulated with simple subliminal stimuli. Advertisers may be disappointed to hear it, but there is no "Buy now!" switch hidden among the neurons and synapses.

That strikes me as a reasoned conclusion, just what one would expect from a deliberative scientific mind systematically weighing the available facts. So why do I have this nagging, unexplained sense of foreboding coming from some recess in my brain?

Wray Herbert writes the "We're Only Human . . ." blog. It appears at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Subliminal Nude Pictures Focus Attention

A few people have shown an interest in my subliminal web page project I think there is something in this article that we can use.

JK

From Scientific American

Nothing focuses the mind's eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference.

Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye's image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract--and visually arresting--shape. "Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict," he explains. "We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image."

Into the canceled out image slot, the researchers slipped an erotic image; for example, a naked woman displayed for a heterosexual man. To ensure that subjects did not consciously detect the invisible image, they were asked to press a specific key if they noticed any difference between the left and right images. Over the course of 32 trials, men were significantly better at detecting the orientation of Gabor patches when they appeared in the slot formerly occupied by an invisible image of a nude woman.

The heterosexual men, however, had a more difficult time detecting the same orientation when it was located where an invisible picture of a nude man had been; this was not the case for heterosexual women when viewing their own sex naked. And the homosexual men’s response was similar to that of the heterosexual women, as were the bisexual women’s and heterosexual men’s. This focus benefit did not carry over, however, when the participants were allowed to consciously see the naked photos, the researchers report in the paper published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. It may have been that the erotic images were on display too long, they speculate; previous studies have shown that it is difficult to maintain attention in one spot. Or it could be that social or cultural norms take over. "Maybe you don't want to look at the nude pictures," he suggests. Regardless, it appears that our minds are exquisitely tuned to detect sexual opportunity--especially when it is invisible. --David Biello

Satan group heads toward Australia for Halloween!

DEVIL worshippers who will gather in Brisbane for Halloween have promised to hold a series of "shock rituals", outraging church leaders and prompting police to step up patrols of cemeteries. The Church of Satan has sent emails to members nationwide, urging them to attend a gathering at a secret "grotto" in the city on October 31.

Details of the meeting emerged after a goat was beheaded on Friday the 13th this month at a church in Bellbowrie in western Brisbane.

Melbourne satanist Drew Sinton, who will not be taking part in the Halloween gathering, said the meeting was an act of rebellion and would involve "destructive rituals".

He said Brisbane was an increasingly popular area for satanic cults.

"Queensland is a very Christian state and so holding the meeting in its capital is an act of rebellion," he said.

Balmoral Cemetery in eastern Brisbane, is a regular meeting place for devil worshippers.

Friends of Balmoral Cemetery president Kelvin Johnston said: "I want these people to know that they can do what they want, providing they stay out of the cemeteries.

"They should have respect for people who have other beliefs."

Queensland police said they were aware of the Halloween gathering and would be monitoring the satanists.

Sergeant Barry Bullion, of Morningside, said patrols would be increased around Balmoral Cemetery.

"The episode with the goat was a bit alarming and so we will urge our patrols to be extra vigilant, especially around cemeteries," he said.

Father Adrian Farrelly, of St Agatha's Catholic Church, at Clayfield in northern Brisbane, vowed to take a stand.

"We will combat their actions with the love and understanding of Christ," he said.

The RSPCA warned satanists not to carry out any animal sacrifices.

But Mr Sinton said he was fed up with people thinking badly of all satanists.

"We do have a bad reputation, and I think that's unfair because we are not evil and we do not carry out animal or human sacrifices," he said.

Science has designs on your brain

By Jane Elliott
Health reporter, BBC News

How could your brain be developed in the future?

Should technology be used to stimulate and improve the brain - improving grades for instance?

These are just some of the questions posed by a new exhibition at London's Science Museum: NEURObotics - the future of thinking?

It investigates how medical technology could boost our brains, read our thoughts or give us mind-control over machines.

Creativity

It will also show how a shock to the brain could improve creativity, how a scan could reveal your deepest thoughts, or how your brainwaves could enable movement in a virtual world.

Visitors will be able to use some of the interactive exhibits.


One of the exhibits shows how classical pianist Cassie Yukawa significantly boosted her performance - and creativity - by undergoing EEG (electroencephalogram) neurofeedback treatment.

This monitors brainwave activity, and gives the subject instant feedback about changes they could make to reach the next level of achievement.

Professor John Gruzelier, professor of psychology at Goldsmith College, London, found after studying 97 students from the Royal College of Music that the technique, which involves you seeing your brain activity on a screen represented as sound and then trying to influence it, had improved performance by as much as 17%.

Cassie, who was a student at the Royal College of Music when she took part in the research, said it had been a very interesting experiment - and had helped to enhance her awareness of the creative process.

"I was monitored for about a year and it was fantastic because it gave me invaluable time to think about performance.

"I was wired up to electrodes and they did two different types of monitoring.

"I just think it was an invaluable pursuit to explore your 'creative zones' whilst free from the physicality of playing the piano.

"It allowed me to draw on a myriad of resources, and after using it I would have a much larger palette to explore when performing and it helped make things more fluid."

Ethics

The Science Museum will also be launching a debate about how technologies like these are used.

Emma Hedderwick, exhibition manager, said: "Researchers have already been able to use today's technology to diagnose and treat many conditions that affect the brain, allowing new insight into how our brains work.

"But in the future, could it become common to use these technologies for personal enhancement?


"This new research is both exciting and fascinating, but it is important to consider the ethical issues of using it to better our brains.

"This technology is here and has the potential to radically affect what it means to be human in the 21st Century.

"We have to think about where we want the boundaries to be, both morally and in terms of legislation."

Uses

Anders Sandberg, research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford, said that although the technology is still often crude, neurobotics is very much a reality.

But he agreed that increasing applications would necessitate ethical debate, particularly if children were using the techniques for enhancement as they are unable to give informed consent.

He added that in some cases people might be found to be negligent if they didn't use the new techniques to enable them to do their work more safely.

"If we are talking about a doctor working in a hospital, would he not be being ethical if he did not take something to improve his attention."

The exhibition, sponsored by Siemens, will also look at fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans which can show whether a person is lying, simply by scanning their brain activity.

If proved to be accurate, this has the potential to be used as evidence in court cases.

But the exhibition also asks whether this form of modern mind reading could effectively end the centuries' old tradition of a defendant's right to remain silent.

And shows how a TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) machine can be used to activate, or knock-out, part of the brain with magnetic pulses. This technology has been used to give ordinary people a glimpse into what it would be like to have extraordinary brain powers.

The use of brain chips and brain caps - including the highly advanced 100 electrode plus Berlin version - which allow people to control objects with their brain power, will also be showcased.

Rachel Bowden, of the museum, said one of the most fun exhibits would probably be the Mindball game, which allows users to play a ball game with their brain waves.

"People can have a go and see how they can move the ball with the power of their mind," she said.

The exhibition runs for six months until April 2007 and is free.
The museum, in South Kensington, London, is open between 10am-6pm.

How to Control Americans—thought control, mind control, disinformation and other naughty things

By Moss David Posner The American Chronicle

(picture of Alfred Korsybski)

“…They took over the Pavlovian experiments on animals and extended them to people. They did so with the objective of changing human nature and creating a “new Soviet man.” People, they anticipated, would react voluntarily under Pavlovian pressures, in the way the dog does, to Communist orders, exactly as ants do in their collectivized society.

MR. ARENS: What were the results of their application of these techniques to people?

MR. HUNTER: We have been witnessing the results without knowing how they came about for 30 years and more. We saw the first results in the Moscow trials, when the Old Bolsheviks, who had dedicated their lives to Communist ideology and had successfully captured the Russian Revolution away from the democratic elements, appeared in open court and beat their breast and pleaded for execution as traitors to the Bolshevism they had set up. We heard confessions that came from the mouths of these people, but which no sense to us because they fit into no logical framework that we could as true. We saw such developments go on, not only with a small group of people picked for trial, but in a curiously similar fashion with large parts of the population in Communist areas, in their schools and in their villages. We saw the fine brain of Cardinal Mindszenty cracked in open court, and heard him brand himself everything we all knew the cardinal was not.”

(Excerpt from HUAC investigation, 85th Congress)

Now that I’ve got your attention….

We are controlled everyday, in every way, continuously, and without any recognition of what is taking place. Much of this is deliberate, and is in part by explicit intention; another part is without the awareness of either controller or “controlee.”

I first started thinking about this subject in 1967, when I can across a remarkable book, “Man the Manipulator” by Everett L. Shostrom. [i] In it, the author discusses the subject of manipulation by advertisers, and for the first time as far as I know. While this was recognized in a general sense, as it applied to advertising, it was not generally known—or taught—that there existed a vast science of behavior modification and manipulation, which has been continued and perfected over the last half a century.

After the Korean War, and after brainwashing by the Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean War years[ii] became common knowledge, the general idea of mind manipulation came into the public awareness; but this was considered a world apart and away from Madison Avenue. Unfortunately, these are not as far apart as one might think.

As I have discussed in previous article, there exists a well-documented history of the creation and use of such manipulation. These methods of control, which could be considered abusive and intrusive, are unfortunately well documented; and I can think of no better single source than “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate” by John Marks. In particular, the appearance of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, who publicly confessed crimes that clearly he did not commit, was the first public demonstration of such a state.

As I described in my previous article, there is a long, deliberate history of such experimentation, starting in the U.S. and in Canada, at virtually every major known American university. They were exported to Nazi Germany, where they were continued under the cover of war but financed generously and independently, and subsequently returned to this country to be continued as MKULTRA, Operation Paperclip, and others. Joost Meerloo a doctor, who was on both sides of the interrogation process, gives one of the more graphic descriptions, and describes this is unnerving detail in “The Rape of the Mind.” I strongly advise anyone who know that they may be triggered by such graphic descriptions to be aware before reading.

Lest anyone think that that’s “all in the past,” think again: As recently as 1995, experimentation in 1991 at Vacaville State Prison in California was documented in a series of articles by Harry Martin and David Caul, in The “Napa Sentinel.”

The apocryphal document on the subject is the notorious “Greenbaum Speech,” another landmark document, originally entitled “Hypnosis in MPD” (Multiple Personality Disorder) and written by Dr. D. Corydon Hammond. For anyone wishing to read this, I strongly urge him or her to be aware that it is virtually assured that this can and will trigger any previously implanted material.

Finally, Carole Smith, a respected Psychoanalyst, has attempted to draw together in a responsible way the history of mental experimentation with its attendant production of mental disorders, with the need for classification as found in the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical and Disease Manual for mental disorders) in “On the Need for New Criteria of Diagnosis of Psychosis in the Light of Mind Invasive Technology.” The fact that such technology exists is now beyond any reasonable doubt.

The use of less physically intrusive yet very influential methods has been codified in the field of Neuro linguistic Programming (NLP:)

This was developed about 1973 by Richard Bandler and Dr. Robert Grinder. Although Bandler is the most known expositor and advocate, he remains quite controversial; yet his influence is beyond question. Robert Grinder is a Professor of linguistics. Bandler got the idea from the work of the highly respected Psychoanalyst and master hypnotist, Dr. Milton Erickson.

We all have heard or have seen people hypnotized by a stage hypnotist. Most hypnotists will tell you that it is not possible to hypnotize people against their will; yet they all know this is a barefaced lie. Should you doubt this, ask yourself one simple question: Do you seriously think that any of those hypnotized subjects would do—or could do—the things that they do in a non-hypnotized, waking state?

The most important idea that has evolved, any controversy regarding ethics or efficacy notwithstanding, is the recognition of the very power and subtlety of words and gestures, used in explicit and learned fashion, so as to influence the thoughts and actions of others, and to do so by design, without the explicit permission of the subject or subjects. It is no longer necessary—nor even practicable--to induce a “formal” hypnotic trance state to achieve the desired effects, nor is it necessary to resort to the historically harsher.

What is crucial for most of us to understand is that, absent any personal and grotesque experiences with mind control or formal programming, the power of “trance” used in a generic sense, is omnipresent. Dr. Adam Crabtree has written “Trance Zero--The Psychology of Maximum Experience.” It describes the power of trance to influence individuals, groups, and even nations.[iii]

How does one know if they have been so influenced or if others have been?

Ironically, the proof is often staring us in the face. Have you ever asked yourself—how on earth can he or she believe such-and-such a story? Sometimes we are not even sure if a speaker, or news commentator, or whoever—actually believes what they are saying. The truth of the matter, however, is often more subtle:

There are degrees of awareness; and in those cases where we know that what we are hearing is patently absurd or indefensible, that speaker may have started by knowing better; but over a period of time, by virtue of their motivation, known or unknown, they have come to be convinced otherwise.

Case in point: Nazi Germany. Or coming perhaps close to home, the gullibility of the American public in the face of the policies of George W. Bush.

To confound the picture further, even though we can actually be aware of the influences upon us and yet be virtually incapable of changing our behavior, even though we wish to do so.

Several years ago, a little-known book caught my eye, entitled “The Action Approach,” by George Weinberg, PhD.[iv] In the introduction to the book, the author quotes William James, the great American Psychologist and writer who said, (and I paraphrase,) it is generally understood that thought can lead to action; but what is not generally recognized is that action can profoundly influence thought: We get “in the habit” of doing things in a certain way, and we unconsciously assume that that’s the way things have to be.

This last point is crucial: We often wonder how on earth political leaders can continue to say the same, ridiculous things and the most inane rationalizations for what is occurring or is being done, when common sense dictates the contrary. What we fail to realize is that the speaker knows the simple truth at least as well as you or I know it; but what he also knows is that if he keeps repeating it over and over, in the fact of the fact that we do nothing to change it—either because we cannot or will not—the profound psychological effect is the same. Unconsciously, we will come to believe that the connection is inevitable. (Weinberg suggests exercises to reverse this process.)

Consider the song from “The King and I:”

“Whenever I feel afraid

I hold my head erect

And whistle a happy tune

So no one will suspect

--I’m afraid.”

Later on, we hear:

“The result of this deception

Is very strange to tell

For when I fool the people I fear

I fool myself as well.”

Please take this very seriously. Several years ago there was a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. The customers were taken hostage and held for several days, clearly against their will. Days later when the authorities came subsequently to rescue the hostages, not only did they not welcome the police, but many of them actually threw themselves in front of the robbers in an attempt to shield them from being killed in a hail of bullets. This phenomenon is recognized as “The Stockholm Syndrome.”

It was I believe the film “Bridge over the River Kwai,” in which the leader of a British force captured by the Japanese is ordered to build a bridge. At first, with resistance, then with reluctance, he begins to build the bridge. By the time the Allied forces come to rescue him and his men, he was at the point of attacking his allies in order to defend his creation. In one dramatic moment, he looks squarely at the camera and says, with quiet horror, “My God! What have I done?”

On a wider scale, we see this behavior in the success of cults. On the other hand, cutting off a person from the outside world, constantly and repetitively indoctrinating them, and accompanying this with threats of social group disapproval on the one hand, and loving acceptance based upon obedience, on the other, can drastically change a person’s behavior changed in a chillingly short period of time.

The aspect of the appeal to authority, in whatever form, is profound in its effect. Several years ago Stanley Milgram and his co-workers did an experiment to see the extent to which this appeal could actually override life long instilled moral values. Milgram was influenced by the apparent willingness of Adolph Eichman and others of the German people to participate in the depravity of the experiments conducted during the Second World War. He was horrified to discover how easily an appeal from an abstract authority figure could contradict a personal moral code.

Very well then, how do we rise above such influences, so as to be truly free and independent in thought and action?

The very first thing to do is to be aware of the issue. The purpose of this discussion is to give some background and basic awareness of the subject and the magnitude of the problem and its influence. The second step is to assume that we are unaware—that we are, in fact, under such an influence unknowingly. Operationally, this is a wise assumption.

Now here’s the hard part: The medieval philosopher Spinoza said that, in order truly to discuss or debate an issue, you must first be able to state your opponent’s viewpoint—to their satisfaction. So the next step is to seek out those who disagree with us, and in particular those who rankle us for precisely that reason. If you are a Liberal, seek out a Conservative; and if Conservative, find yourself a Liberal.

State your position to that person; and ask them to respond. Don’t rebut what is said. Continue to revise your understanding of their point of view until they are satisfied with your final version of their point of view. This may—and usually does—require making some assumptions on your part, and for the purpose of discussion. Remember, your interest is truly selfish: you want to be right. So your task is to find the right, or winning position, as you understand it, to your satisfaction, and to no one else’s satisfaction.

That field of knowledge that has to do with words and the origins of their meanings is known as “Semantics.” Alfred Korzybski created the term and the initial body of knowledge so defined. Sessue Hayakawa, who later became a senator from California, popularized the field in his magnum opus “Language in Thought and Action.” The book is informative and yet highly entertaining. I can think of no better way to start to become aware of language and of its subtle influences upon us than to read this book.

How do we become aware of the motives behind the words and actions of others—friends, relatives and political leaders? How do we not only become aware that others are attempting to influence us, but how do we know their agendas, hidden from us and often hidden from themselves? There are several techniques for accomplishing this. This will be the purpose of my next article.

…to be continued.

[i] Despite several new editions, which clearly show a demand for the book, not one person has written a review of the book on “Amazon.com,” a fact which is distinctly counter-intuitive; however[i] Amazon picked up the book long after the first edition, which was in 1967.

[ii] See “The Manchurian Candidate” both the original film and the remake.

[iii] Crabtree unfortunately is “entranced” with his highly convoluted notions, which are the thrust of his book; however, he does touch upon the ability to influence groups and even civilizations; and the recognition of that fact in my view is the most significant part of his book.

[iv] The author speaks of what he calls the “Direct effect,” the “indirect effect,” and the “vantage point effect.” There are enormous implications in this. If interested, please contact me.

Watching a Master In Action

Here is a great video on Milton Erickson, one of hte most respected mind control-hypnotists alive.

You'll see some great examples of how to speak hypnotically.

X-Day - The East Coast Burning Man

Here is a great chance to bring out your cult loving mind control knowedge and just have a fun time

http://www.modemac.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/The_End_Is_Coming