Event
HSS Workshop: Rebecca Lemov
Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
Literal Brain Control: The Resurgence of Psycho-Surgery and the Search for a Science of Violence in the 1960s and 1970s.
This talk describes a controversial case of Leonard Kille, a talented engineer who in 1968 underwent a psycho-surgical operation at Massachusetts General Hospital for behavioral management (anger management, specifically). The operation was part of a program—undertaken with questionable consent—to pioneer the mass-scale use of biological intervention to quell potential violence in individuals deemed to suffer from “episodic dyscontrol syndrome.” After opposition arose, one of Kille’s two doctors, psychiatrist Frank Ervin, relocated to the University of California, Los Angeles, where a new “Violence Center” was underway. We examine the attempt to create a science that could predict and intervene in violence that had not yet occurred.
Rebecca Lemov's research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human and behavioral sciences. Her forthcoming book, uncovers the history of brainwashing—and its troubling implications for today. Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often cannot recognize it while it is happening—unless we know where to look. In The Instability of Truth, Lemov exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, exploring the history of brainwashing techniques from those employed against North Korean POWs, to unwanted brain implants at a U.S. military hospital, to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behavior-shaping. The new work reveals that anyone can fall under the spell of mind control, especially in our increasingly data-driven world. Identifying invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction, creating coercion and persuasion in everyday life, Lemov offers lessons learned from past mind-control episodes to equip us for the increasing challenges we face from social media, AI, and an unprecedented, global form of surveillance capitalism.