On ‘modified human agents’: John Lilly and the paranoid style in American neuroscience

Abstract

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.

Solitude, Psychological Science and the Cold War Imagination

“…As I have argued elsewhere, they supported Lilly's narrative that touted flotation as a tool of self-brainwashing, in which one could learn to rewrite the underlying programmes of the human mind and resist other pervasive influences and threats to the mind. 33 In the decade prior to the pandemic, the floatation tank experienced something of a revival, with hundreds of centres opening in North America and Europe. Seen as a way of disconnecting from the sensory overload of everyday life, floatation has been described as a technology with similar benefits to meditation and mindfulness.…”

The paranoid style in the sociology of financial reporting principles

“…Paranoid style analysis has been conducted on scholarly discourse in domains as diverse as legal scholarship (see, for example, Mootz, 1994; Schneiderman, 2016; Short, 2012), history of science (see, for example, Reisch, 2012; Williams, 2019), literary-critical theory (see, for example, Beckman, 2020; Bywater, 1990) and political science (see, for example, Moss and Oey, 2010). The circumstances in which academic discourse is constructed are generally very different to those associated with the paranoid style in the political arena.…”

Future of Sex and Gender

“…Orgasms could be produced instantaneously. Nevertheless, this is nothing new, and we do need self-regulation to control our desire to get satisfied and pleasured (Williams, 2019). In an experiment from 1958, John C. Lilly generated a sixteenhour orgasm!…”

“…He just wanted to push that button and had forgotten to eat, drink, etc., for many days. Direct stimulation without control mechanisms can also cause harm for a human (Williams, 2019).…”