A Question of Torture | IsabellaValentine.com

A Question of Torture

Mind Reading: A Question of Torture

A Question of Torture By Alfred W. McCoy

ISBN: 0-805-8041-4

Published By: Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Pages 39-40

A team of four Harvard University psychiatrists conducted a similar but larger experiment in 1957 that the CIA found promising, though still limited. Although these researchers cited concern for polio patients as the project’s justification, their experiment, like many, was funded by the ONR’s covert behavioral program (Nonr 1866 [29]). And even they admitted the findings were relevant to “brainwashing.” Instead of immersion in water, this test’s seventeen paid volunteers were “placed in a tank-type respirator with a specially built mattress” arranged “to inhibit movement and tactile contact.” To create an atmosphere of sensory monotony, the respirator’s motor ran constantly for “a dull, repetitive auditory stimulus” and low “artificial light was minimal and constant.” After seventeen hours, one subject, a twenty-five-year-old dental student, “began to punch and shake the respirator,” his “eyes full of tears, and his voice shaking,” as he struggled in vain to break out of the iron lung until an attendant released him. At least four volunteers terminated from “anxiety and panic,” and only five subjects remained for the experiment’s full thirty-six hours. Among the seventeen subjects, half had hallucinations and all suffered “degrees of anxiety.” Apparently addressing their covert patrons, the Harvard psychiatrists concluded that “sensory deprivation can produce major mental and behavioral changes in man,” and recommended its capacity to induce psychosis as “more ‘natural’ than pharmacological and physical methods currently used” – not, of course, in polio treatment, but if we can finish their sentence, in CIA torture. In the words of the agency’s later interrogation manual, this Harvard study “confirmed earlier findings” that:

1. the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress;
2. the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects;
3. the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and
4. some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects.

Page 42-43
A respected researcher and past president of the American Psychiatric Association, [Dr. Ewen] Cameron claimed, in scientific papers, that he had duplicated “the extraordinary political conversions… in the iron curtain countries, “ in one case “using sleeplessness, disinhibiting agents [drugs], and hypnosis.”…. As Cameron explained in the American Journal of Psychiatry, he had used “an adaptation of Hebb’s psychological isolation” by bombarding patients with endless repetitions of taped messages about parental rejections or incestuous longings while they were in drug-induced “clinical coma,” or in “hypnosis under stimulus drugs” such as LSD. The combined effect produced a state “analogous to… the breakdown of the individual under continuous interrogation.”

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy this brainwashing recording available as an mp3 download titled “Lint Trap.”