Mar 25, 2025
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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"
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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