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"Mind control is a relatively recent concept. It first emerged in the aftermath of the Korean war, when it was claimed that the Chinese had carried out mind control experiments on US prisoners of war, as depicted in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate.
Since then mind control, or "brainwashing", has been used to explain many different phenomena, from our ad-led consumer culture to some people's willingness to ditch everything and sign up to weird millenarian cults.
There are various hypothetical techniques of mind control: among them
the use of drugs, such as "truth serum", to induce a more relaxed state of mind;
hypnosis, where an individual is put into a trance-like state usually in order to recover memories;
Pavlovian conditioning, named after experiments carried out by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov in the early 20th Century, where he described how we are "conditioned" into certain types of behaviour; and
indoctrination, where an authoritative body uses propaganda or the threat of force to shape individuals' minds and belief systems.
Yet among sociologists and psychologists mind control is a bitterly contested theory.
Some do not believe the human mind can ever fully be controlled by outside forces. While they accept that individuals can be made to behave in a certain way under duress or threat of force ("What wouldn't you do with a gun pressed to your head?" asked one recent article on the subject of mind control), they doubt that individuals can be manipulated against their will by sexy advertising, hypnotists or even cult leaders"
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From:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3682773.stmOK, is it my imagniation or is the BFEE beaming down Churchillian victory rays through my laptop screen saying War is good, vote GWB 2004....?