The Obedience Experiments at 50
“This year is the 50th anniversary of the start of Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking experiments on obedience to destructive orders — the most famous, controversial and, arguably, most important psychological research of our times. To commemorate this milestone, in this article I present the key elements comprising the legacy of those experiments.
Milgram was a 28-year-old junior faculty member at Yale University when he began his program of research on obedience, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which lasted from August 7, 1961 through May 27, 1962.
As we know, in his obedience experiments Milgram made the startling discovery that a majority of his subjects — average and, presumably, normal community residents — were willing to give a series of what they believed were increasingly painful and, perhaps, harmful electric shocks to a vehemently protesting victim simply because they were commanded to do so by an authority (although no shock was actually given). They did this despite the fact that the experimenter had no coercive powers to enforce his commands and the person they were shocking was an innocent victim who did nothing to merit such punishment. Although Milgram conducted over 20 variations of his basic procedure, his central finding obtained in several standard, or baseline, conditions was that about two-thirds of the subjects fully obeyed the experimenter, progressing step-by-step up to the maximum shock of 450 volts.
First and foremost, the obedience experiments taught us that we have a powerful propensity to obey authority. Did we need Milgram to tell us this? Of course, not. What he did teach us is just how strong this tendency is — so strong, in fact, that it can make us act in ways contrary to our moral principles.
Milgram’s findings provided a powerful affirmation of one of the main guiding principles of contemporary social psychology: That often it is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we find ourselves in. To perceive behavior as flowing from within — from our character or personality — is to paint an incomplete picture of the determinants of our behavior. Milgram showed that external pressures coming from a legitimate authority can make us behave in ways we would not even consider when acting on our own.”
Continue reading at APS (Thanks Annette)
Monkey Mind Control
Scientists believe they are a step closer to enabling paralyzed people to walk and use artificial arms after an experiment in which monkeys moved and sensed objects using only their minds.
The monkeys were able to operate a virtual arm to search for objects through brain activity that was picked up by implants — a so-called brain-machine interface.
In a leap forward from previous studies, the primates were also able to experience the sense of touch — a crucial element of any solution for paralyzed people because it enables them to judge the strength used to grasp and control objects.
“This was one of the most difficult steps and the fact that we achieved it opens the door to the dream of a person being able to walk again,” Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist who took part in the study carried out by a team at Duke University in North Carolina.
The results suggest it would be possible to create a kind of robotic “exoskeleton” that people could use to feel and sense objects, he said.
“The success we’ve had with primates makes us believe that humans could perform the same tasks much more easily in the future,” Nicolelis said.
The study was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
You can continue reading this article here
Source: Reuters
Mind-reading car could drive you round the bend
“One of the world’s largest motor manufacturers is working with scientists based in Switzerland to design a car that can read its driver’s mind and predict his or her next move.
The collaboration, between Nissan and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), is intended to balance the necessities of road safety with demands for personal transport.
Scientists at the EPFL have already developed brain-machine interface (BMI) systems that allow wheelchair users to manoeuvre their chairs by thought transference. Their next step will be finding a way to incorporate that technology into the way motorists interact with their cars.
If the endeavour proves successful, the vehicles of the future may be able to prepare themselves for a left or right turn – choosing the correct speed and positioning – by gauging that their drivers are thinking about making such a turn.
However, although BMI technology is well established, the levels of human concentration needed to make it work are extremely high, so the research team is working on systems that will use statistical analysis to predict a driver’s next move and to “evaluate a driver’s cognitive state relevant to the driving environment”.
By measuring brain activity, monitoring patterns of eye movement and scanning the environment around the car, the team thinks the car will be able to predict what a driver is planning to do and help him or her complete the manoeuvre safely.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Laurence)
Mickey Mouse Mind Control?
The article below was published on the Fiji Times:
The latest photo shoots of young TV and music stars reveal some sort of obsession with Mickey Mouse accessories. And there’s definitely no danger of running out of these pictures anytime soon. Tons of them appear in the media every week.
Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” video clip feature scenes where they’re wearing Mickey Mouse hats, sunglasses and minnie mouse trademark lips.
Selena Gomez’s “Kiss and Tell” album cover features her with Minnie Mouse lips.
It has been claimed that Mickey Mouse ears or designs often occultly refer to mind control.
According to Wikipedia encyclopedia, The Mickey Mouse Club is an American variety television show that began in 1955, produced by Walt Disney Productions and televised by the ABC, featuring a regular but ever-changing cast of teenage performers. The Mickey Mouse Club was created by Walt Disney. The series has been revived, reformatted and reimagined several times since its initial 1955-1959 run on ABC.
Walter “Walt” Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century.
Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and has annual revenues of approximately USD $35 billion.
Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world’s most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won twenty-two Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Walt Disney died in on December 15, 1966.
According to several researchers, Disney was part of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program: Its properties were used for mind-control experiments and many of its productions deliberately contained mind-control triggers and symbolism.
You can continue reading at the Fiji Times and, by all means, comment below!
Mind-Reading Tech Reconstructs Videos From Brain Images
“A year and a half ago, we published a great feature on the current state of the quest to read the human mind. It included some then in-progress work from Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at U.C. Berkeley, in which Gallant was attempting to reconstruct a video by reading the brain scans of someone who watched that video–essentially pulling experiences directly from someone’s brain. Now, Gallant and his team have published a paper on the subject in the journal Current Biology.
This is the first taste we’ve gotten of what the study actually produces. Here’s a video of the reconstruction in action:
The reconstruction (on the right, obviously) was, according to Gallant, “obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately.”"
Read more at Pop Sci (Thanks Dan)
A ‘self’ portrait of an artist with memory loss
“She finished the books and wanted more. Before her mother could fetch some, Lonni Sue started making grids with words hidden in them. Thousands of puzzles poured out of her. Wearing thin the pages of a paperback dictionary, she created elaborate word lists, then puzzles from the lists and then images from the puzzles. A grid of words for things that hang in the closet took the shape of a coat hanger. Words related to trousers formed a pair of pants. Her vocabulary seemed to open a new door for her creativity.
Enter Barbara Landau. She had gone to high school with Lonni Sue in the Princeton, N.J., area. (“She was brilliant,” Landau remembers.) Today, Landau is an expert on cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. She had followed Lonni Sue’s career as an artist for years and now, with Hopkins colleague Michael McCloskey, she explored Lonni Sue’s amnesia intensively. It was Landau who brought Lonni Sue’s art to the Walters.
Scientists often work with people who have lost the use of part of the brain to learn how the normal brain works.
After working with Lonni Sue, Landau concludes: “If we think that art and creativity have to be rooted in what we know about ourselves or what we remember about ourselves, that clearly is not the case.”
Lonni Sue has been full of surprises. She can remember how to fly an airplane — “It’s like dancing in the sky,” she said in an interview — but she can’t remember the death of her father.
She can’t recognize art she treasured before her illness — “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh, for example. Yet she can instantly recognize her own past work.
She can’t remember that she was married for 10 years, but she can remember how to play Bach suites on her viola. But if, as she’s putting her instrument away, her mother thanks her for playing, she’s likely to look astonished and say, “Oh, did I play?”
She cannot produce the kind of finished art she once drew, but her work shows flashes of her old skill as well as her characteristic whimsy and puns.
“When you draw a drawing, you can draw people in,” she says.”
The Washington Post (Thanks Annette)
Controlling Your Child
YOUNG students have been offered prizes for singing the Coles “prices are down” jingle in a primary school presentation by store managers promoting the retailer’s “Sports for Schools” program.
Children at a school on Sydney’s northern beaches were led into a hall and schooled on the benefits of the marketing program, The Australian’s Simon Canning reports.
The promotion has led to thousands of schools displaying giant Coles banners, while parents report students are being asked in class to hold up how many vouchers they have collected.
Rita Princi, a child and adolescent psychologist based in Adelaide, said: “What they are doing is almost a form of manipulation and is a brainwashing exercise.”
“It can also cause conflict with parents and is a sign that consumerism has gotten out of hand.”
The Coles program allows schools to swap Coles vouchers for sports equipment. Woolworths has its own “Earn & Learn” promotion, which aims to help schools buy educational resources.
Coles spokesman Jon Church said the supermarket was not aiming to change consumer behaviour but admitted that last year Coles had seen a massive uplift in sales as schools urged parents and members of the local community to shop at its supermarkets.
He said the decision to go into school was a local one taken by managers and could not say how many “Coles assemblies” had been held.
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UPDATE 9.07am: COLES has defended itself against claims of brain washing after primary school students were offered prizes for singing the supermarket chain’s advertising jingle.
The retail giant has been providing schools with banners and PR advice to promote its $7 million sports equipment giveaway.
At least one school held a competition for pupils reciting the “Prices are down” jingle, at the suggestion of a visiting Coles store manager.
Child psychologist Rita Princi said such blatant promotion of the Sports for Schools program was dangerous.
“What they are doing is almost a form of manipulation and is a brainwashing exercise,” Ms Princi told The Australian.
Coles spokesman Jon Church said the claims were ridiculous, and the program was voluntary.
“I gather the store manager ran a bit of a competition for the kids to sing the ‘Down down’ jingle for a bit of fun,” he said.
“To suggest it’s anything more than good community relations and trying to help schools get hold of more equipment is just ridiculous.”
Mr Church said more than 7500 schools nationwide had registered for the Sports for Schools program, which is in its second year.
Parents Victoria spokeswoman Gail McHardy said she couldn’t see an issue with the kids singing a jingle as long as it was done with parental consent.
“Big corporates know that when young people get on board so do families,” she said.
“But it’s just another of example of what schools have to resort to to get money for their schools.”
Under the program, shoppers collect vouchers for every $10 spent in Coles stores. The vouchers are then redeemed for sports equipment.
For example, to qualify for a Sherrin football worth $180, parents would need to spend $30,450.
Hipnotizados!
Forty-one Colombian high school students experienced mass-panic and had to be taken to hospital following a hypnotism show at the culmination of their annual ‘Fun Day’.
Out of an amassed (paying) audience of 590 students, eight were put into a trance by Miller Zambrano Posada who then made them lift their arms, walk in circles, cry like babies, laugh hysterically, bark like dogs and act like chickens (were it not for the setting, one could be forgiven for thinking that they were behaving like a very normal group of teenagers during breaktime).
The performance was concluded to a round of unforced applause, but as the eight students made their way back to their seats the proceedings appeared to go a bit “Pete Tong”.
Some children in the audience began crying while others dived to the ground for no reason Others beat their chests with the palms of their hands and one female student screamed that she could see ‘the devil’
A total of forty one students experienced what has been described as a mass panic, only one of whom had been an on-stage participant in the hypnotism routine.
Whilst the children were escorted to the hospital, Miller Zambrano Posada was escorted off the premises in police custody facing charges of witchcraft from the parents and teachers.
Source: Hispanically Speaking News
Concentrate On The Telly
How often have you lost track of the remote and been forced to face the unwelcome prospect of having to get up out of your seat to change the channel?
Well, Chinese consumer electronics firm Haier are making moves to eliminate that problem with the unveiling of the Haier Cloud Smart TV that you can control with the power of your very own mind.
No really, that’s what it does. By integrating NeuroSky brainwave reader technology into an attractively cumbersome headset, the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is all systems go!
The mind-reading telly is due to go on sale in October. We’re not sure where or how much for, but we doubt that you’d be interested in buying one anyway. You’d probably be much happier just to have a go with one in a shop and leave it at that, wouldn’t you?
Source: Akihabara News
Man with roughly 50-75% of his brain missing works as civil servant, lives normal life
A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.
Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image, right).
“It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50% to 75% reduction,” says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France.
Feuillet and his colleagues describe the case of this patient in The Lancet. He is a married father of two children, and works as a civil servant.
The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg. When Feuillet’s staff took his medical history, they learned that, as an infant, he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus – water on the brain.
The shunt was removed when he was 14. But the researchers decided to check the condition of his brain using computed tomography (CT) scanning technology and another type of scan called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They were astonished to see “massive enlargement” of the lateral ventricles – usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain.
Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled.
“The whole brain was reduced – frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes – on both left and right sides. These regions control motion, sensibility, language, vision, audition, and emotional and cognitive functions,” Feuillet told New Scientist.
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