ENTERING A DREAM
If we can communicate with a dreaming person, then is it also possible to alter someone’s dream from the outside? Quite possibly.
First, as we have seen, scientists have already made the initial steps in videotaping a person’s dream, and in the coming years, it should be possible to create much more accurate pictures and videos of dreams. Since scientists have already been able to establish a communication link between the real world and the lucid dreamer in the fantasy world, then, in principle, scientists should be able to deliberately alter the course of a dream. Let’s say that scientists are viewing the video of a dream using an MRI machine as the dream unfolds in real time. As the person wanders around the dreamscape, the scientists can tell where he is going and give directions for him to move in different ways.
So in the near future, it might be possible to watch a video of a person’s dream and actually influence its general direction. But in the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio goes much further. He is able not only to watch another person’s dream, but also to enter it. Is this possible?
We saw earlier that we are paralyzed when we dream so that we don’t carry out our dream fantasies, which might be disastrous. However, when people are sleepwalking, they often have their eyes open (although their eyes look glazed over). So sleepwalkers live in a hybrid world, part real and part dreamlike. There are many documented instances of people walking around their homes, driving cars, cutting wood, and even committing homicides while in this dream state, where reality and the fantasy world are mixed. Hence it is possible that physical images that the eye actually sees can freely interact with the fictitious images that the brain is concocting during a dream.
The way to enter someone’s dream, then, might be to have the subject wear contact lenses that can project images directly onto their retinas. Already, prototypes of Internet contact lenses are being developed at the University of Washington in Seattle. So if the observer wanted to enter the subject’s dream, first he would sit in a studio and have a video camera film him. His image could then be projected onto the contact lenses of the dreamer, creating a composite image (the image of the observer superimposed upon the imaginary image the brain is manufacturing).
The observer could actually see this dream world as he wanders around the dream, since he, too, would be wearing Internet contact lenses. The MRI image of the subject’s dream, after it has been deciphered by computer, would be sent directly into the observer’s contact lenses.
Furthermore, you could actually change the direction of the dream you have entered. As you walk around in the empty studio, you would see the dream unfold in your contact lens, so you could start to interact with the objects and people appearing in the dream. This would be quite an experience, since the background would change without warning, images would appear and disappear without reason, and the laws of physics would be suspended. Anything goes.
Further into the future, it might even be possible to enter another person’s dream by directly connecting two sleeping brains. Each brain would have to be connected to MRI scanners that were connected to a central computer, which would merge the two dreams into a single one. The computer would first decipher each person’s MRI scans into a video image. Then the dream of one person would be sent into the sensory areas of the other person’s brain, so that the other dreamer’s dream would merge with the first dreamer’s dream. However, the technology of videotaping and interpreting dreams would have to become much more advanced before this could become a possibility.
But this raises another question: If it’s possible to alter the course of someone’s dream, is it possible to control not only that person’s dream but that person’s mind as well? During the Cold War, this became a serious issue as both the Soviet Union and the United States played a deadly game, trying to use psychological techniques to control other people’s wills.
Minds are simply what brains do.
—MARVIN MINSKY
8 CAN THE MIND BE CONTROLLED?
A raging bull is released into an empty arena in Cordoba, Spain. For generations, this ferocious beast has been carefully bred to maximize its killer instinct. Then a Yale professor calmly enters the same arena. Rather than donning a tweed jacket, he is dressed like a dashing matador, wearing a bright golden jacket and waving a red cape defiantly in front of the bull, egging him on. Instead of running away in terror, the professor looks calm, confident, and even detached. To a bystander, it appears as if the professor has gone mad and wants to commit suicide.
Enraged, the bull locks onto the professor. Suddenly the bull charges, aiming his deadly horns at him. The professor does not run away in fear. Instead, he holds a small box in his hand. Then, in front of the cameras, he presses a button on the box, and the bull stops dead in his tracks. The professor is so confident of himself that he has risked his life to prove a point, that he has mastered the art of controlling the mind of a mad bull.
The Yale professor is Dr. José Delgado, who was years ahead of his time. He pioneered a series of remarkable but unsettling animal experiments in the 1960s, in which he put electrodes into their brains with the aim of trying to control their movement. To stop the bull, he inserted electrodes into the striatum of the basal ganglia at the base of the brain, which is involved with motor coordination.
He also did a series of other experiments on monkeys to see if he could rearrange their social hierarchy with the push of a button. After implanting electrodes into the caudate nucleus (a region associated with motor control) of the alpha male within the group, Delgado could reduce the aggressive tendencies of the leader on command. Without threats of retaliation, the delta males began to assert themselves, taking over the territory and privileges normally reserved for the alpha male. The alpha male, meanwhile, appeared to have lost interest in defending his territory.
Then Dr. Delgado pressed another button, and the alpha male instantly sprung back to normal, resuming his aggressive behavior and reestablishing his power as the king of the hill. The delta males scrambled in fear.
Dr. Delgado was the first person in history to show that it was possible to control the minds of animals in this way. The professor became the puppet master, pulling the strings of living puppets.
As expected, the scientific community looked at Dr. Delgado’s work with unease. To make matters worse, he wrote a book in 1969 with the provocative title Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. It raised an unsettling question: If scientists like Dr. Delgado are pulling the strings, then who controls the puppet master?
Dr. Delgado’s work puts into sharp focus the enormous promise and perils of this technology. In the hands of an unscrupulous dictator, this technology might be used to deceive and control his unfortunate subjects. But it can also be used to free millions of people who are trapped in mental illness, hounded by their hallucinations, or crushed by their anxieties. (Years later, Dr. Delgado was asked by a journalist why he initiated these controversial experiments. He said that he wanted to correct the horrendous abuses being suffered by the mentally ill. They often underwent radical lobotomies, in which the prefrontal cortex was scrambled by a knife resembling an ice pick, which was hammered into the brain above the eye socket. The results were often tragic, and some of the horrors were exposed in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was made into a movie with Jack Nicholson. Some patients became calm and relaxed, but many others became zombies: lethargic, indifferent to pain and feelings, and emotionally vacuous. The practice was so widespread that in 1949, Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for perfecting the lobotomy. Ironically, in 1950, the Soviet Union banned this technology, stating that “it was contrary to the principles of humanity.” Lobotomies, the Soviet Union charged, turned “an insane person into an idiot.” In total, it is estimated that forty thousand lobotomies were performed in the United States alone over two decades.)
MIND CONTROL AND THE COLD WAR
Another reason for the chilly
reception of Dr. Delgado’s work was the political climate of the time. It was the height of the Cold War, with painful memories of captured U.S. soldiers being paraded in front of cameras during the Korean War. With blank stares, they would admit they were on secret spy missions, confess to horrific war crimes, and denounce U.S. imperialism.
To make sense of this, the press used the term “brainwashing,” the idea that the communists had developed secret drugs and techniques to turn U.S. soldiers into pliable zombies. In this charged political climate, Frank Sinatra starred in the 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate, in which he tries to expose a secret communist “sleeper” agent whose mission is to assassinate the president of the United States. But there is a twist. The assassin is actually a trusted U.S. war hero, someone who was captured and then brainwashed by the communists. Coming from a well-connected family, the agent seems above suspicion and is almost impossible to stop. The Manchurian Candidate mirrored the anxieties of many Americans at that time.
Many of these fears were also stoked by Aldous Huxley’s prophetic 1931 novel Brave New World. In this dystopia, there are large test-tube-baby factories that produce clones. By selectively depriving oxygen from these fetuses, it is possible to produce children of different levels of brain damage. At the top are the alphas, who suffer no brain damage and are bred to rule society. At the bottom are the epsilons, who suffer significant brain damage and are used as disposable, obedient workers. In between are additional levels made up of other workers and the bureaucracy. The elite then control society by flooding it with mind-altering drugs, free love, and constant brainwashing. In this way, peace, tranquility, and harmony are maintained, but the novel asked a disturbing question that resonates even today: How much of our freedom and basic humanity do we want to sacrifice in the name of peace and social order?
CIA MIND-CONTROL EXPERIMENTS
The Cold War hysteria eventually reached the highest levels of the CIA. Convinced that the Soviets were far ahead in the science of brainwashing and unorthodox scientific methods, the CIA embarked upon a variety of classified projects, such as MKULTRA, which began in 1953, to explore bizarre, fringe ideas. (In 1973, as the Watergate scandal spread panic throughout the government, CIA director Richard Helms canceled MKULTRA and hurriedly ordered all documents pertaining to the project destroyed. However, a cache of twenty thousand documents somehow survived the purge and were declassified in 1977 under the Freedom of Information Act, revealing the full scope of this massive effort.)
It is now known that, from 1953 to 1973, MULTRA funded 80 institutions, including 44 universities and colleges, and scores of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and prisons, often experimenting on unsuspecting people without their permission, in 150 secret operations. At one point, fully 6 percent of the entire CIA budget went into MKULTRA.
Some of these mind-control projects included:
• developing a “truth serum” so prisoners would spill their secrets
• erasing memories via a U.S. Navy project called “Subproject 54”
• using hypnosis and a wide variety of drugs, especially LSD, to control behavior
• investigating the use of mind-control drugs against foreign leaders, e.g., Fidel Castro
• perfecting a variety of interrogation methods against prisoners
• developing a knockout drug that was fast working and left no trace
• altering people’s personality via drugs to make them more pliable
Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window.
Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said.
Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “neuro-scientific impossibility.”
But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person.
Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.
Of course, the military was not the first to experiment with mind control. In ancient times, sorcerers and seers would claim that giving magic potions to captured soldiers would make them talk or turn against their leaders. One of the earliest of these mind-control methods was hypnotism.
YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY.…
As a child, I remember seeing TV specials devoted to hypnosis. In one show, a person was placed in a hypnotic trance and told that when he woke up, he would be a chicken. The audience gasped as he began to cluck and flap his arms around the stage. As dramatic as this demonstration was, it’s simply an example of “stage hypnosis.” Books written by professional magicians and showmen explain that they use shills planted in the audience, the power of suggestion, and even the willingness of the victim to play along with the ruse.
I once hosted a BBC/Discovery TV documentary called Time, and the subject of long-lost memories came up. Is it possible to evoke such distant memories through hypnosis? And if it is, can you then impose your will on another? To test some of these ideas, I had myself hypnotized for TV.
BBC hired a skilled professional hypnotist to begin the process. I was asked to lie down on a bed in a quiet, darkened room. The hypnotist spoke to me in slow, gentle tones, gradually making me relax. After a while, he asked me to think back into the past, to perhaps a certain place or incident that stood out even after all these years. And then he asked me to reenter that place, reexperiencing its sights, sounds, and smells. Remarkably, I did begin to see places and people’s faces that I had forgotten about decades ago. It was like watching a blurred movie that was slowly coming into focus. But then the recollections stopped. At a certain point, I could not recapture any more memories. There was clearly a limit to what hypnosis could do.
EEG and MRI scans show that during hypnosis the subject has minimal sensory stimulation in the sensory cortices from the outside. In this w
ay, hypnosis can allow one to access some memories that are buried, but it certainly cannot change one’s personality, goals, or wishes. A secret 1966 Pentagon document corroborates this, explaining that hypnotism cannot be trusted as a military weapon. “It is probably significant that in the long history of hypnosis, where the potential application to intelligence has always been known, there are no reliable accounts of its effective use by an intelligence service,” it read.
It should also be noted that brain scans show that hypnotism is not a new state of consciousness, like dreaming and REM sleep. If we define human consciousness as the process of continually building models of the outside world and then simulating how they evolve into the future to carry out a goal, we see that hypnosis cannot alter this basic process. Hypnosis can accentuate certain aspects of consciousness and help retrieve certain memories, but it cannot make you squawk like a chicken without your permission.
MIND-ALTERING DRUGS AND TRUTH SERUMS
One of the goals of MKULTRA was the creation of a truth serum so that spies and prisoners would reveal their secrets. Although MKULTRA was canceled in 1973, U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals declassified by the Pentagon in 1996 still recommended the use of truth serums (although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that confessions obtained in this way were “unconstitutionally coerced” and hence inadmissible in court).
Anyone who watches Hollywood movies knows that sodium pentathol is the truth serum of choice used by spies (as in the movies True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Meet the Fockers with Robert De Niro). Sodium pentathol is part of a larger class of barbiturates, sedatives, and hypnotics that can evade the blood-brain barrier, which prevents most harmful chemicals in the bloodstream from entering the brain.