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Psychological Torture: A CIA History

“Advances in the History of Psychology has alerted me to a gripping video lecture on the development of CIA psychological torture techniques from the Cold War to War on Terror. It was an invited lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy who has long specialised in the history of the US secret services.He argues that the results of CIA research into psychological torture can be clearly seen in both the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay and images of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

By contrast when I looked at those photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. For example, that most iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows not the sadism of a few ‘creeps’, but instead, the two key trademarks of the CIA’s psychological torture: the hood was for sensory disorientation and the arms extended for self-inflicted pain.

McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 ‘Manipulation of Human Behavior’ research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 ‘Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual’. He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.”

(via Mind Hacks)

(video:”A Short History of Psychological Torture“)

The Distance Between Spiritual Experience and Interpretation

February 5, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“It is undeniable that human beings in all times and cultures have been hardwired for spiritual experiences – some of course more than others. But is this proof of any of the multiple metaphysical belief systems that we tend, I would suggest, to superimpose onto the experience? The central difficulty here is that the altered state of a spiritual experience is so convincing (and so important, beautiful and meaningful in its own right) and we are so suggestible during and afterward, that it is almost ubiquitous to be convinced that the experience is undeniable (or at the very least strong) proof of whatever belief system the ensuing interpretation is coming from – when in actuality it is nothing of the sort!

Humans love to go into altered states. There is not a culture in the history of the planet that has not come up with some way of fermenting, drinking, eating, fasting, dancing, sweating, drumming, smoking, snorting, chanting, breathing, meditating, stretching, sensory depriving or sensory overloading its way into altered states of consciousness. In addition some people have more labile neurophysiology than others – be they epileptic, hypo-glycemic, bipolar, schizophrenic or merely garden-variety creative, empathic types with thin ego-boundaries.

Thankfully we have developed an ever-deepening understanding of some of the more extreme dysfunctions of the brain and have ways of diagnosing and treating these problems that are more effective than ever before. One cannot help but be curious about the similarities between say religious and schizophrenic statements about reality and wonder how much of the difference is one of degree, and to what extent the vocabulary of experience being used is coming from the same part of the brain.

It is undeniable that to both the person in the grips of an ardent religious conversion and the clinically insane the novel and metaphysical revelations being described are not only convincing but are held as extremely important, often not only for the individual in the grip of the experience, but for all of humanity. I want to suggest that this is an extreme form of an activity of our physiology and its related interior – the psyche, that at its best can be positively transformational, healing and creative and at its worse can be fundamentalist, violent and crazy.”

(via Julian Walker’s Blog)

7 Reasons The 21st Century is Making Us Miserable

January 29, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Scientists call it the naked photo test and it works like this:
Say a photo turns up, of you nakedly doing something that would shame you and your family for generations. Bestiality, whatever. Ask yourself how many people in your life you would trust with that photo. Studies show that for almost everybody, the number of people we really trust is shrinking. About a quarter of the people they talked to said they had NO ONE to confide in. Walk down the street, one out of four people you pass have nobody. Among the people who did have somebody, the average number of people in their circle of trust was two. And that includes spouses and parents. Yes, this is new. The numbers are down a whole bunch since just 1985. The world is becoming a colder and lonelier place. Here’s why.”

(via Pointless Waste Of Time)

The Unburdened Mind

January 28, 2008 / TiamatsVision

In a prior post about “Questioning The Banality Of Evil”, the discussion turned to sociopathy and psychopathy. Here’s an interesting article that goes into it a bit more. (Be sure to click on the link to take a quiz to find out where you are psychologically):

‘I don’t think I feel things the same way you do.’ The man sits at the table in the well-fitted attire of success-charming, witty, and instantly likeable. He is a confident, animated speaker, but he seems to be struggling with this particular point. ‘It’s like… at my first job,’ he continues, ‘I was stealing maybe a thousand bucks a month from that place. And this kid, he was new, he got wise. And he was going to turn me in, but before he got the chance I went to the manager and pinned the whole thing on him.’ Now he is grinning widely. ‘Kid lost his job, the cops got involved, I don’t know what happened to him. And I guess something like that is supposed to make me feel bad, right? It’s supposed to hurt, right? But instead, it’s like there’s nothing.’ He smiles apologetically and shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’

His name is Frank, and he is a psychopath.

In the public imagination, a “psychopath” is a violent serial killer or an over-the-top movie villain, as one sometimes might suspect Frank to be. He is highly impulsive and has a callous disregard for the well-being of others that can be disquieting. But he is just as likely to be a next-door neighbor, a doctor, or an actor on TV-essentially no different from anyone else who holds these roles, except that Frank lacks the nagging little voice which so profoundly influences most of our lives. Frank has no conscience. And as much as we would like to think that people like him are a rare aberration, safely locked away, the truth is that they are more common than most would ever guess.”

(via Damn Interesting)

Scientology, Saucers, Satan and the Sea

January 28, 2008 / TiamatsVision

I’ve read a couple of biographies of Jack Parsons, and I find the the idea of Parsons contacting an alien entity through the Babalon Working fascinating. IMO, he was trying to create a “Magickal Child”. An extension of oneself; a “being” that contain aspects that surpass most of those currently known to (wo)men that roam the earth at the present time. Although the idea that this “being” could be an “extraterrestrial” intrigues me, it also makes me question it that much more. (And yes, I’m familiar with Kenneth Grant and the ideas of the Typhonian OTO). Personally, I’ve always considered Aiwass (Crowley’s channeled “being”) to be an extension of Crowley’s Self and look at the “Book of The Law” as a prophecy. Take a look around you. Is not what’s written there visible and all around us right now? If you really think about it, the ideas in themselves can be interpreted in just about any way you want. Here’s an article looking at Parson’s and L.R. Hubbard’s workings in a different light:

“Well it is all fun and games for the Scientologists at the moment with the video controversy (apparently leading to hacking attacks on their site), the lurid claims of the Andrew Morton’s book and increasing hostility with the Germans. So I want to take a step back and look again at the odd links between them the occult, UFOs and the Navy, as The UFO Iconoclast(s) which makes a number of interesting statements:

Both Hubbard and Jack Parsons were interested in UFOs and that they “associated with Naval Intelligence in the late 1940s and early 1950s and both became advocates for flying saucer technology which was being studied diligently by the Navy.” This is certainly news to me and I’ll have to follow it up.
The Scientology HQ in Florida has a floor purely for the studies of flying saucers (they apparently receive secret Navy documents on this) and that there is a secret part of Scientology that deals with them (which is only available to a select few) – not that surprising considering the nature of their beliefs I suppose.
Dianetics has been used by the Navy as a training manual.
Parsons met a Venusian. Also Hubbard and Adamski swapped UFO stories in the fifties. This would be an interesting link. Adam Gorightly has pointed out some parallels between Parsons and Adamski (the latter’s encounter with a Venusian happened in the Me Desert where Hubbard and Parsons went at the end the Babalon Working, in 1952, the year of Parson’s death) but if confirmed these two both claimed to have met Venusians and they shared a close link through Hubbard.”

(via Cabinet Of Wonders)

Why do some people have good luck?

January 26, 2008 / Klint Finley

Richard Wiseman summarizes the findings presented in his book The Luck Factor for Skeptical Inquirer. This is, of course, pop psychology but I think it’s still pretty interesting:

My research revealed that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

[…]

But this is only part of the story when it comes to chance opportunities. Many of my lucky participants went to considerable lengths to introduce variety and change into their lives. Before making an important decision, one lucky participant would constantly alter his route to work. Another person described a special technique that he had developed to force him to meet different types of people. He had noticed that whenever he went to a party, he tended to talk to the same type of people. To help disrupt this routine, and make life more fun, he thinks of a color before he arrives at the party and then chooses to only speak to people wearing that color of clothing at the party! At some parties he only spoke to women in red, at another he chatted exclusively to men in black.

Full Story: Richard Wiseman (Google HTML).

Or: PDF version.

(Thanks Trevor).

BBC documentary on how the human mind deals with long periods of sensory deprivation

January 24, 2008 / Fell

I love this topic…

“What happens if you are left alone in the dark in solitary confinement for days on end? The result is called sensory deprivation and the human mind struggles to cope with it.”

Git in yer room, comedian!

Sensory deprivation is a controversial subject, with allegations the technique has been used at Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation strategy. And thousands of prisoners around the world are kept in solitary confinement, often with a significant degree of sensory deprivation.

The tests are exploring the theory that sensory deprivation makes subjects much more suggestible.

Some of the first research on this subject was carried out after the Korean War in the 1950s. The Canadian military wanted to investigate what had happened to POWs who appeared at international press conferences confessing that they were war criminals. It was thought they had been brainwashed following solitary confinement.

Whole article via BBC News

Hehe and this is funny, too:

Mickey, a postman is seeing mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head and it’s frightening him.

Claire a psychology student doesn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras. But she gets scared when she suddenly feels somebody is in the room.

“In the dark room there is nothing to focus on,” says Prof Robbins as he monitors their behaviour. “In the absence of information the human brain carries on working and processing information even if there is no information to process and after a while it starts to create that information itself.”

No wonder when I teach people to do their visualisations most of them freak out and never pursue it.

Horizon: Total Isolation is on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 22 January.

Metal as Prismatic Motion

January 24, 2008 / TiamatsVision

Mythic imagination allows us to see the personification of life as an entity not unlike our thought or personalities, a continuous invisible idea expressed in visible terms through discrete objects (including goats).

“The notion of a prism represents the first challenge to our early worlds of concrete time and space. A device that fragments light, and reveals a space within a solid known quantity, seems to us an expansion of dimension. As we get older, we realize the expansion of dimension occurs within ourselves as we assemble a more complex view of the universe.

Metal music as art is composed of sound and lyrics and imagery. The pure aesthetic expands as we analyze it and recognize that it is beauty found in chaos; the songwriting expands as we see that its narrative motivic composition is more poetic than the looping closed circuit cycle of rock or pop; the keyless melodic nature of it becomes in our fertile minds a sense of construction not by a “third party” of rigid harmonic theory but by the unfolding narrative. Metal music like all great art begins by appearing simple, but opens to reveal greater complexity when we look into the dimension that it creates for itself.

From this alone, we might conclude that metal is prismatic in the same way modernist classical composers and the ancient Greek plays that bonded song to poetry to theatre were. Two more elements demand our consideration: that metal represents an escape from the karmic cycle as described by numerous philosophies, and that it inspires mythic imagination in the way both Sophocles and Wagner did.”

(via The Dark Legions Archive)

Brain scans reveal that inflation gets you hot

January 15, 2008 / Fell

From io9:

Inflated prices trigger the pleasure centers in your brain more than fair ones. Not only is the idea of buying something expensive more exciting than buying something on sale, but you’ll actually get more genuine pleasure out of something expensive — even if it’s not worth the cost. A group of social scientists at CalTech and Stanford discovered this not-entirely-unexpected fact when they stuck people into MRI brain scanners and gave them several glasses of wine, assigning each one a random price.

In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people’s pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Yes, marketing can modulate your neurological system. You already knew that, but somehow finding out that there’s an objective truth to it in a brain scanner makes it feel more like Big Brother than Brooks Brothers.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness

What Is He Capable Of? The Presidential Psychology at the End of Days

January 14, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“In defiance of his circumstances as an unpopular, lame duck president with a minority party in Congress, George W. Bush pursues a sharply autocratic tone. He has intimidated both parties in Congress and violated the Constitution. Through dissimulation and delay, he has forced the nations of the world to conclude they must wait until his term ends to negotiate any serious treaty on the imminent perils of climate change.

A sort of thousand-mile stare has descended on the country. Frank Rich writes, “we are a people in clinical depression” as a result of Bush’s leadership. Perhaps, a more apt diagnosis would be “dissociation.” Like a child or spousal victim of a psychological abuser, Bush’s “victims” try to mentally compartmentalize him; they attempt to get on with their lives – even as he keeps on being abusive. You can hear the dissociation when Congressional leaders talk about their inability to make Washington work as it should. Some, including Daniel Ellsberg, who challenged the autocratic aspirations of Richard Nixon by releasing the Pentagon Papers, suggest Bush has already created a “presidential coup.” Ellsberg has said, “If there’s another 9/11 under this regime, it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed.”

We would like to answer several questions here. Is the president psychologically capable of such treasonous behavior? Why and how does his psychology make it so difficult for Democrats and others to stand up against his negativity and destructiveness (what he thinks of as his optimism)? How might they neutralize his psychology, which seems geared to inflict harm?”

(via TruthOut)

(Thanks Pat!)

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