Alicky Sussman, “A Secret History of Mind Control” (2010)
I am quite a sucker for films on experimental psychology and mind manipulation experiments, especially if these are done for the purpose of mass control. This BBC documentary feeds my prurient little mind adequately with its investigation into the history of this science and the abuses of animals and humans that were done. Beginning with Ivan Pavlov’s experiments on dogs and children back in the early twentieth century, narrator and guide Michael Mosley takes us into the dark alleys of this history and puts human faces onto the scientists who designed and carried out the research, and the people experimented on. A variety of information sources is brought into the film, including archival films, interviews of people who knew the scientists and human guinea pigs in the experiments and camera stills, and the narrator himself subjects himself to the odd experiment or two in behaviour control and manipulation, making for an informative and sometimes very chilling film. Some of the research that was done and which features in the film did generate valuable information and applications of that information; it is troubling in a way to know that some of the most valuable research which is still helpful now couldn’t have been obtained otherwise without people or animals being abused or manipulated cruelly.
The film covers a number of infamous episodes in that history including North Korean brainwashing and a similar project in the United Kingdom during the 1950s – 60s in which patients were put into isolation and given huge amounts of drugs and electric shock therapy to dislocate the nerve connections thought responsible for their mental illnesses, so that later new mental connections might be made and the patients cured. The most infamous of these experiments came under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project and spin-off projects and involved the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and psilocybins. Mosley offers himself as a guinea pig for an experiment into the effects of psilocybins and finds that these do have their uses in opening up the mind by suppressing certain mental functions.
Along the way Mosley meets a surviving participant in Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1962 Yale University experiments that tested how conformist people were to orders given by authority figures. This leads into an inquiry into the effects of social pressure and the desire to please or not please others on the extent to which people conform in the presence or absence of authority figures. After this part of the film, one of the more bizarre episodes in the history of experimental psychology in which a gay man is “cured” of his homosexuality, temporarily anyway, by a psychologist who hires a female prostitute to have sex with the man while he undergoes deep brain stimulation comes under the spotlight.
After observing an experiment on manipulating fruit fly neurons to find out if such manipulation can change fruit fly behaviour, Mosley concludes that in spite of all that has been done to the brain, and the damage and suffering undergone by many people, the human brain, and with it mind and personality, is too complex to ever fully fall under external control. A reassuring conclusion to end the film on but it does injustice to interview subjects like one woman featured in the documentary who had endured isolation, forced drug intake and electric shock therapy as a young girl; her mind full of holes, a part of her personality and identity will always be fragile as a result and though she has never fallen under complete control by someone else, the attempted control that’s already been done has robbed her of wholeness as a human being. There is no suggestion of what compensation, financial or otherwise, was offered to her and other patients who had also been subjected to the same or similar experiments.
The presentation is fairly dry and Mosley flits from one set of experiments and investigations to another quickly enough that most of what is covered seems fairly superficial. The subject matter of the film is wide-ranging enough that a series of films could have been made on the different issues brought up. Importantly, one would like to know all or nearly all the applications of the research done and whether they are still current; it’s known that many of the experiments done under the MK-ULTRA umbrella, originally intended to help people, ended up in CIA torture manuals and are being used in the renditioning of terror suspects by the CIA or US allies in several parts of the world. This aspect of the film is a recurrent weakness in many BBC documentaries: there is no attempt to link much of the information found to modern-day realities or experience. Mosley might as well have been visiting another planet.
Curiously in the section dealing with brainwashing and the MK-ULTRA experiments, there is no mention of the Scottish-Canadian doctor Dr Ewen Cameron who carried out research on sensory deprivation and who was aware that much of what he was doing was practically torture and unethical. The experiments he did over at least two decades were ultimately a failure and the results used in terrible ways. There is also no mention of any involvement by private drug firms in some of the experiments (it’s possible that the decision to omit names or anything associated with the drug firms was based on legal advice) and whether such sponsorship and funding might have influenced the design and methodology of the experiments done. Although there is much informative in this documentary, I do have the feeling that there’s much the film left unsaid that we all should know and the film as a result seems disingenuous.