1321 Dr Rebecca Lemov / The Instability of Truth Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion

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Today I have a great first time guest who is a Professor of the History of science and author of several books including her just released "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion"

Dr Rebecca Lemov

Areas of Research: Science & Technology Studies, Technology & Society, Media Studies, Human Sciences

Rebecca Lemov's research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human and behavioral sciences. Her forthcoming book, The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion 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.

Her other books include Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (how scientists between 1942 and 1963 attempted to map the elusive and subjective parts of the human psyche via once-futuristic data-storage techniques), and World As Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (about the scientific dream of behavioral engineering). She is a co-author of How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality.

Rebecca teaches courses on the history and future of big data; animal studies; human experiments; and technologies of mind control, as well as the history of the social and human sciences more broadly. A Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 2010-11, and again in 2013-14, she took part in two working groups there, on the Sciences of the Archive and Historicizing Big Data. Her doctoral work was at U.C. Berkeley in Anthropology and she graduated from Yale University where she studied English literature.

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