In the next chapter called Mind Control, McCoy discusses how the Cold War brought up concern about Soviet mind-control techniques. “This created research and the CIA spent billions of dollars over the next decade to research the mechanisms of mass persuasion and the effects of coercion on individual consciousness” The Soviets were able to extract public confessions from people they were torturing and the CIA was disturbed by that. The Soviets had mind control methods that included utilizing drugs, physical duress, electric shock, and possibly hypnosis against their enemies. Another big portion of the chapter talked about Dr. Hebb’s experiment where he found the impact of sensory deprivation. He found out that after forty-eight hours of isolation, most subjects experienced hallucinations similar to the effect of the drug mescaline. Hebb’s experiment concluded that isolation makes the brains cortex impaired so it behaves abnormally. These experiments got me wondering how this could affect torture and how the CIA could use these results to get information out of enemies.
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