Mind Games – Science’s Attempts at Thought Control

Mind Games – Science’s Attempts at Thought Control: "The concept of brainwashing was first used to describe certain obscure procedures carried out in early Communist China, but the idea of “cleansing the mind” can be traced back all the way to fourth century Confucian thinkers.

In Popular Western culture, the word immediately evokes George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 and experiments by Nazi scientists and the CIA, as well as Soviet intelligence services. Science’s interest in the possibility of controlling the mind dates back some 20 years before Orwell’s publication of his novel. The first published research on the subject was Chaffee and Light’s A Method for Remote Control of Electrical Stimulation of the Nervous System from 1934. The article recounted experiments carried out on animals using brain implants and electric waves to control brain and motor functions, including getting a monkey to sleep or inducing gastric secretions in a dog."