Preparation for Brainwashing

Depriving the human mind of all sensation is the best preparation for brainwashing. Dr. Robert H. Felix, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, recently told the Senate Appropriations Committee about a new mind-purging technique worked out by Dr. John C. Lilly, one of his Institute colleagues.

Serving as his own guinea pig, Dr. Lilly stripped himself naked, put on a skin-diver's mask for breathing, and was suspended face down in a tank of warm, slowly flowing water. In this "dead man's float" position, he was almost as out of this world as if he were still unborn. He could see nothing. He could hear nothing except his own breathing and faint water sounds from the piping. Except for the face mask and the gently touching supports, he could feel nothing. The temperature of the water, 94DEG F., made it feel neither hot nor cold.

Lust & Reveries. For about 45 minutes, says Dr. Lilly, he was conscious of his surroundings and of recent events. He even enjoyed the sensation of being suspended in silence and darkness, with nothing whatever to do. But slowly during the next hour he developed an overwhelming "lust" for any kind of stimulus or action. In spite of his intention to keep perfectly still, he made surreptitious swimming motions or stroked one finger with another. Such small delights gave him great satisfaction. He found that if he denied himself all such stimulus, the tension grew unbearable, and he had to get out of the tank for relief.

The peak of tension eventually passed. Then, says Dr. Lilly, "one notices that one's thoughts have shifted . . . to reveries and fantasies of a highly personal and emotionally charged nature. These are too personal to relate publicly, and probably vary greatly from subject to subject. The individual reactions to such fantasy material also probably vary considerably, from complete suppression to relaxing and enjoying them."

A Black Curtain. After passing his two ordeals of tension and fantasy, which took about 2 1/2 hours. Dr. Lilly entered a stage that he calls "projection of visual imagery." The black curtain that had been hanging in front of his eyes gradually opened into a three-dimensional dark, empty space. The change was striking and intensely interesting; he waited eagerly to see what would happen next. Then out of the darkness came "small, strangely shaped objects with self-luminous borders. A tunnel whose inside 'space' seemed to be emitting a blue light then appeared straight ahead."

At this moment Dr. Lilly's mask started to leak, and he had to get out of the tank to keep from drowning. So he never learned what lay at the end of the blue-lighted tunnel.

The "dead man's float" experiment has been tried so far with only one person besides Dr. Lilly, but other scientists, especially in Canada (TIME, Oct. 4, 1954), have subjected many human guinea pigs to degrees of isolation almost as complete. All have reported strange and often alarming effects on the mind, and usually a good deal of difficulty in becoming readjusted to normal life.

Dr. Felix told the Senators that isolation experiments explain how brainwashing works. The brainwashers, he said, do not use anything as elegant as Dr. Lilly's tank. A long period of imprisonment in a dark, nearly silent cell is almost as effective. With normal sensation cut off, the prisoner's thinking is disorganized. He grows desperately hungry for any kind of information, however unreliable, from the outside world.

Bit by bit, explained Dr. Felix, the brainwashers feed the prisoner's mind with their own brand of information. It is usually accepted and becomes like normal thinking, because it is the only "feed-in" that the hungry mind gets. This system, said Dr. Felix, can break down anyone, no matter what his background or how he has been indoctrinated.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.