The long-term effect on functional outcome of endoscopic brainwashing for intraventricular hemorrhage compared to external ventricular drainage alone: A retrospective single-center cohort study.

Background: Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) is a complex condition with both mechanical and chemical effects, resulting in mortality rates of 50-80%. Recent reports advocate for neuroendoscopic treatment, particularly endoscopic brainwashing (EBW), but long-term functional outcomes remain insufficiently explored. This study aims to outline the step-by-step procedure of EBW as applied in our institution, providing results and comparing them with those of external ventricular drainage (EVD) alone. Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of adult patients with IVH who underwent EBW and patients submitted to EVD alone at our institution. All medical records were reviewed to describe clinical and radiological characteristics. Results: Although both groups had similar baseline factors, EBW patients exhibited a larger hemoventricle (median Graeb score 25 vs. 23 in EVD, P = 0.03) and a higher prevalence of chronic kidney disease and diabetes. Short-term mortality was lower in EBW (52% and 60% at 1 and 6 months) compared to EVD (80% for both), though not statistically significant (P = 0.06). At one month, 16% of EBW patients achieved a good outcome (Modified Rankin scale < 3) versus none in the EVD group (P = 0.1). In the long term, favorable outcomes were observed in 32% of EBW patients and 11% of EVD patients (P = 0.03), with no significant difference in shunt dependency. Conclusion: Comparing EBW and EVD, patients submitted to the former treatment have the highest modified Graeb scores and, at a long-term follow-up, have better outcomes, demonstrated by the improvement of the patients in the follow-up.

How I do it: brainwashing for purulent ventriculitis.

BACKGROUND: The management of ventriculitis remains controversial, with no single management strategy that can provide a good outcome. There are few articles describing the brainwashing technique, and most for neonatal intraventricular hemorrhage. This technical note is important because it describes a practical way to perform brainwashing in case of ventriculitis, and it is more feasible compared to endoscopic lavage in developing countries. METHOD: We describe in a stepwise fashion the surgical technique of ventricular lavage. CONCLUSION: Ventricular lavage is a neglected technique that can help to improve ventricular infection and hemorrhage prognosis.

The work of Donald Ewen Cameron: from psychic driving to MK Ultra.

Donald Ewen Cameron is known as the Canadian psychiatrist behind the Montreal Experiments, a series of brainwashing experiments. As part of a larger Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project known as MK Ultra, the CIA regarded these experiments as a potential military weapon during the Cold War. However, a closer look into Cameron's research and project MK Ultra shows that these experiments began long before Cameron was contacted by the CIA. Additionally, Cameron received funding for his experiments indirectly, so he was probably never aware the money was from the CIA. In this paper, I analyse the published work of Dr Cameron from the beginning of his career to his role in MK Ultra, and evaluate his own possible reasoning behind these experiments.

Psychiatric Casualties during the Korean War: Focusing on American and Common Wealth Soldiers.

A crucial gap in the medical history of the Korean War is the history of psychiatry during the Korean War. War puts those who participate in it through physical and mental extremes, inflicting not only physical injuries but also psychological trauma and damage. However, studies of the medical aspects of the Korean War have been limited to topics related to physical injuries and their treatment, and there are no studies that systematically summarize the traumatic effects on the human mind thrown into the midst of the war, the consequences of these effects, and the medical efforts made to deal with these problems. As the Korean War was fought only five years after the end of the Second World War, the experiences and achievements of the Second World War were used in the Korean War. In terms of personnel, many of the soldiers who fought in the Second World War also fought in the Korean War. This continuity with the Second World War had both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, treatment and transport systems were quickly put in place to respond to the large numbers of soldiers with psychiatric problems on the front lines early in the war. This is an example of a positive use of the legacy of the Second World War. On the other hand, the negative side of the coin was the much higher frequency of psychiatric symptoms among veterans of the Second World War. This could be explained by the fact that the psychological trauma experienced on the battlefield during the Second World War remained latent and was reactivated in the Korean War as a kind of conditioned reflex. In addition, the brainwashing of prisoners of war and their subsequent psychological problems are also characteristic of the Korean War in the context of the Cold War. These psychiatric features of the Korean War will provide a useful historical example for understanding and helping those who are inevitably involved in war and suffer from mental distress.

Lavagem cerebral: ciência, mito e pseudociência do controle psicológico / Lavado de cerebro: ciencia, mito y pseudociencia del control psicológico / Brainwashing: science, myth, and pseudoscience of psychological control

Resumo O interesse pela possibilidade de reconfigurar a mente humana foi recorrente na história da humanidade, sob diferentes formas aliadas principalmente à religião, à guerra e à política. Somente a partir de 1950, entretanto, é que psicólogos, psiquiatras e outros pesquisadores se dedicaram com maior profundidade ao tema, popularizado pelo termo genérico de lavagem cerebral. O objetivo deste artigo é revisar as bases teórico-conceituais e metodológicas desses esforços, assim como sua manifestação atualizada na psicologia social, quando se busca a modificação de atitudes, crenças e comportamentos. São analisados criticamente os usos da lavagem cerebral para gerar mudanças significativas por técnicas de pressões psicológicas e tortura física, os mitos de sua implementação e sua (ir)reversibilidade.

Resumen El interés por la posibilidad de reconfigurar la mente humana ha sido recurrente en la historia de la humanidad, en diferentes formas, principalmente aliadas a la religión, la guerra y la política. Sin embargo, sólo después de 1950, psicólogos, psiquiatras y otros investigadores se dedicaron con mayor profundidad al tema, popularizado por el término genérico de lavado de cerebro. El objetivo de este artículo es revisar las bases teórico-conceptuales y metodológicas de estos esfuerzos, así como su manifestación actualizada en la psicología social, cuando se busca modificar actitudes, creencias y conductas. Se analizan críticamente los usos del lavado de cerebro para generar cambios significativos a través de técnicas de presión psicológica y tortura física, los mitos de su implementación y su (ir)reversibilidad.

Abstract The interest in the possibility of reconfiguring the human mind has been recurrent in the history of humanity, in different forms, mainly allied to religion, war, and politics. Only after 1950, however, did psychologists, psychiatrists, and other researchers dedicate themselves in greater depth to the topic, popularized by the generic term brainwashing. The aim of this paper is to review the theoretical-conceptual and methodological bases of these efforts, as well as their updated manifestation in social psychology, when one seeks to modify attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The uses of brainwashing to generate significant change through techniques of psychological pressure and physical torture, the myths of its implementation, and its (ir)reversibility, are critically analyzed.

Psychedelics as Tools for Belief Transmission. Set, Setting, Suggestibility, and Persuasion in the Ritual Use of Hallucinogens.

The use of psychedelics in the collective rituals of numerous indigenous groups suggests that these substances are powerful catalysts of social affiliation, enculturation, and belief transmission. This feature has recently been highlighted as part of the renewed interest in psychedelics in Euro-American societies, and seen as a previously underestimated vector of their therapeutic properties. The property of psychedelics to increase feelings of collective belonging and transmission of specific cultural values or beliefs raise, however, complex ethical questions in the context of the globalization of these substances. In the past decades, this property has been perceived as problematic by anticult movements and public authorities of some European countries, claiming that these substances could be used for "mental manipulation." Despite the fact that this notion has been widely criticized by the scientific community, alternative perspectives on how psychedelic experience supports enculturation and social affiliation have been yet little explored. Beyond the political issues that underlie it, the re-emergence of the concept of "psychedelic brainwashing" can then be read as the consequence of the fact that the dynamic through which psychedelic experience supports persuasion is still poorly understood. Beyond the unscientific and politically controversed notion of brainwashing, how to think the role of psychedelics in the dynamics of transmission of belief and its ethical stakes? Drawing on data collected in a shamanic center in the Peruvian Amazon, this article addresses this question through an ethnographic case-study. Proposing the state of hypersuggestibility induced by psychedelics as the main factor making the substances powerful tools for belief transmission, I show that it is also paradoxically in its capacity to produce doubt, ambivalence, and reflexivity that psychedelics support enculturation. I argue that, far from the brainwashing model, this dynamic is giving a central place to the agency of the recipient, showing that it is ultimately on the recipient's efforts to test the object of belief through an experiential verification process that the dynamic of psychedelic enculturation relies on. Finally, I explore the permanence and the conditions of sustainability of the social affiliation emerging from these practices and outline the ethical stakes of these observations.

On 'modified human agents': John Lilly and the paranoid style in American neuroscience.

The personal papers of the neurophysiologist John C. Lilly at Stanford University hold a classified paper he wrote in the late 1950s on the behavioural modification and control of 'human agents'. The paper provides an unnerving prognosis of the future application of Lilly's research, then being carried out at the National Institute of Mental Health. Lilly claimed that the use of sensory isolation, electrostimulation of the brain, and the recording and mapping of brain activity could be used to gain 'push-button' control over motivation and behaviour. This research, wrote Lilly, could eventually lead to 'master-slave controls directly of one brain over another'. The paper is an explicit example of Lilly's preparedness to align his research towards Cold War military aims. It is not, however, the research for which Lilly is best known. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lilly developed cult status as a far-out guru of consciousness exploration, promoting the use of psychedelics and sensory isolation tanks. Lilly argued that, rather than being used as tools of brainwashing, these techniques could be employed by the individual to regain control of their own mind and retain a sense of agency over their thoughts and actions. This article examines the scientific, intellectual, and cultural relationship between the sciences of brainwashing and psychedelic mind alteration. Through an analysis of Lilly's autobiographical writings, I also show how paranoid ideas about brainwashing and mind control provide an important lens for understanding the trajectory of Lilly's research.

Brainwashing the cybernetic spectator: The Ipcress File, 1960s cinematic spectacle and the sciences of mind.

This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how 'brainwashing' was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney J. Furie, starr. Michael Caine) provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media, as it exemplifies the era's innovations for depicting 'brainwashing' on screen: the film's protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the 'rhythm of brainwaves'. This article describes the making of The Ipcress File's brainwashing sequence and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture (developments that were also influencing the 1960s psychedelic counter-culture). I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science and media was a vision of the human mind as a 'cybernetic spectator': a subject who scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, and seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects.

Historical perspectives on music as a cause of disease.

The relationship between music and medicine is generally understood in the benign context of music therapy, but, as this chapter shows, there is a long parallel history of medical theories that suggest that music can cause real physical and mental illness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of music as an expression of universal harmony was challenged by a more mechanistic model of nervous stimulation. By the 1790s, there was a substantial discourse on the dangers of musical overstimulation to health in medicine, literature, and etiquette books. During the nineteenth century, the sense of music as a pathogenic stimulant gained in influence. It was often linked to fears about sexuality, female gynecological health, and theories of hypnosis and degeneration. In the twentieth century, the debate on the medical perils of the wrong kinds of music became overtly politicized in Germany and the Soviet Union. Likewise, the opponents of jazz, particularly in the United States, often turned to medicine to fend off its supposed social, moral, and physical consequences. The Cold War saw an extensive discourse on the idea of musical "brainwashing," that rumbled on into the 1990s. Today, regular media panics about pathological music are mirrored by alarming evidence of the deliberate use of music to harm listeners in the context of the so-called War on Terror. Can music make you ill? Music therapy is a common if perhaps rather neglected part of medicine, but its diametric opposite, the notion that music might lead to real mental and physical illness, may seem improbable. In fact, over the last two hundred years, there have been many times when as much was written about the medical dangers of music as about its potential benefits. Since the eighteenth century, fears about music's effects on the nerves and the mind have created a remarkably extensive discourse on pathological music based on a view of both music and the causation of disease as matters of nervous stimulation (Kennaway, 2010, 2012a). From concerns about young ladies fainting from excessive stimulation while playing the keyboard in the Georgian period and Victorian panics about Wagner to the Nazi concept of "degenerate music" and Cold War anxieties about musical brainwashing, the debate on the medical dangers of music has generally combined a theoretical and terminological basis in the medicine of the period concerned with broader agendas about gender, sexuality, race, and social order. Each generation has tended to regard the music it grew up with as the epitome of rationality and healthy mindedness while ascribing hair-raising medical consequences to newer music. This debate has continued right up to the present day, with the depressing difference that, with the systematic use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror, the idea that music can be bad for you has become a much more realistic prospect. Although the debate about music's ill effects has largely been bogus, there are ways in which music can in fact adversely affect health. Most directly of all, there is of course the power of sheer volume to cause psychological strain and hearing damage. It was only really with the advent of the modern age, with its industrial noise, expanded orchestras, and amplified sound systems, that this became a widespread concern. Although the high-decibel sound can include music, it is not its character as music that causes health problems, so it falls rather outside our purview. Medical problems that do relate to specifically to music itself include the rare conditions of arousal-related arrhythmia and musicogenic epilepsy, but in both of these contexts, music is essentially a trigger rather than a fundamental cause of sickness (Sharp, 1997; Viskin, 2008; Wieser et al., 1997). There is a long history of medical accounts of musical hallucinations, which are certainly sometimes associated with serious medical conditions, but they are by no means always experienced as pathological (Berrios, 1990; Evers and Tanja, 2004). It should also be remembered that it is quite possible that many of the accounts of music causing disease refer to real physical symptoms and suffering, albeit generally with a psychosomatic rather than direct physiological explanation. This kind of psychological impact of music has meant it has been linked to a variety of culturally bound syndromes. Having said that, it is also clear that the most of the discourse on pathological music is basically fallacious. Over and over again, fundamentally moral objections to music relating to sexuality, gender, social order, and self-control have been clear beneath a veneer of medical language.