In Montgomery Alabama
Brainwashing - Mind Control
Copyright
2003
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This site is about a conflict of human physiology that shaped history but was undetected until the 1960's.
In the entire history of man on the planet Earth this phenomenon was discovered only once.
It caused mental breaks for office workers.
You will find this material hard to believe.
This phenomenon is explained in first semester psychology lectures where students don't believe it either.
For that reason I wrote a demonstration that will allow you to experience the phenomenon.
The Everquest Connection page has the explanation and assumes you have not taken basic psychology.
The solution for this problem was the office Cubicle.
This site argues that the this phenomenon causes College Suicides and Missing Students.
The phenomenon causes mental events around the world, Chaco Canyon.
If you use computers in unprotected workspace such as homes, dorms, student apartments, and small business offices read ...Prevention... at the bottom of most pages.
Long term exposure can cause severely altered mental states. Qi Gong Kundalini Yoga
If you are visiting the site as part of a school project send the person responsible for controlling violence at your school to this site.
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Brainwashing and Mind Control
To understand the power of this phenomenon remember the psychotic paranoid rant by Seng-Hui Cho.
The Virginia Tech shooter had created the "special circumstances" for Subliminal Distraction exposure.
The term brainwashing was coined after the Heaven's Gate mass suicide in an effort to explain what allows cults to gain control of members. There are many sites with psychobabble explanations of why people submit to cult control. None of the writers of those sites is aware of a small problem with human physiology.
Cult leaders are not aware of what they do to bring a 'conflict of physiology' into play. They have a system that works and they continue to use that system. I suspect they believe the outcomes are due to their persuasive abilities.
Some of the beliefs of these groups are bizarre. Haven't you ever wondered how anyone could give all their possessions to the group and sometimes share wives?
The Phenomenon that causes the change in mental state and reinforces beliefs taught in cults was discovered because it caused mental breaks for office workers in the 1960's.
It does not matter if you use a large room with many people, like a business office, or a small room with small numbers of people, like cult training sessions.. When a person engages mental investment, such as concentrating on the speaker, they must ignore movement in their peripheral vision. If they could not do that the small but detectable movements of those near them would constantly break their concentration with a startle and vision reflex. But ignoring threat movement does not turn the warning system off. The subliminal action of the system prevents your being aware that threat movement is still being detected.
What is the evidence of this happening?
In the 1970's a new phenomenon appeared sponsored by a former used car salesman, Large Group Awareness Training Seminars, LGATS's. Werner Erhard believed that hour after hour of confrontation and lectures would break down a person's resistance, expose poor habits, and allow the person to start over with correct methods and new goals. It seemed to work for some. Others said they gained nothing.
There were a very few cases of psychotic mental breaks associated with the training seminars. Lawsuits were eventually filed but none succeeded. Psychologists studied the seminars but could only find that the mental breaks happened in those sessions where the more aggressive lecturers were used.
When participants dissociate slightly while concentrating on the words of a speaker they can subliminally detect the small movements of those in their peripheral vision. We dissociate like this when we read a book, use a computer, or become totally involved in watching TV or a movie. When reading a book the mechanics of your eyes following the words on the page fade away and you become an observer participant in the story. In those cases it is called 'suspension of disbelief.' Daydreaming is another case of slight dissociation. This is a normal part of all human physiology.
While you maintain the dissociating mental state the constant subliminal detection of movement around you is a "Subliminal Distraction." The repeating subliminal incidents of threat detection eventually color thought and reason, creating fear and paranoia. When you reach a threshold of exposure the mental break happens. (Explaining how repeating subliminal threat detection causes mental events is discussed on the Psychotic Mental Illness page.)
If instead, the exposure is too low to cause the mental break other outcomes are possible. If your brain understands the stimulus from the detection of movement and the failed efforts to cause a peripheral vision reflex as reinforcement for contemporaneous activity, Accidental Subliminal Operant Conditioning happens. Evidence of the many possible outcomes happened aboard the Belgian Polar Expedition of 1898. Dr. Fredrick Cook's observations are quoted on the Astronauts and Insanity page.
This form of operant conditioning has not been previously recognized in psychology. It is particularly powerful because the stimulus is received at a level in your brain that is below thought, reason, and consciousness. It alters thought and through that method, alters belief.
That operant conditioning can reinforce the message of the cult, your contemporaneous activity. When users of Qi Gong, the slow motion martial arts exercise, perform the exercise for health benefits they are told not to think of the specific complaint they have. Rather they think of general good health. By performing the exercise in groups they subliminally detect those moving around them and operant conditioning causes an apparent improvement.
It may be difficult for you to think of health improvement and cult beliefs as similar, of course they are not, but the beliefs are both human thought. They can be shaped by operant conditioning. The subject feels nothing and believes that the changes are their own normal decisions and thought processes.
The LGATS training methods, used by cults, usually involve the same conditions, many people sitting in rooms while attending lectures by cult trainers. Those arrangements create "special circumstances" that allow exposure to Subliminal Distraction.
What is the Conflict of Physiology?
The term 'conflict of physiology' is unique to this site. It comes, in part, from a psychology lecture I attended in the 1990's. The engineering/design discovery was mentioned and explained in a psychophysics lecture.
The explanation given was as the subject continued to resist the startle and vision reflex a conflict arose in the mind then built to a mental break.
The conflict is that although our conscious mind can attach a zero level of attention to detected movement in our peripheral vision, we cannot stop seeing anything in our vision field. A thin slice of your vision field, past the periphery of conscious vision, functions subliminally. It only detects movement. Stationary objects located in this area are invisible. The subliminal operation prevents your being aware the movement is still being detected and your brain is still attempting to force a startle and vision reflex.
Threat detection of movement in your peripheral vision is the trigger. The evaluation and formation of the reflex happens in a primitive level in your brain. This can be said to be located below thought, reason, and consciousness. This is part of your subconscious.
To experience this phenomenon perform the psychology demonstration here.
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The text below is repeated on several pages.
There is a problem with human physiology related to the human vision startle reflex that was discovered in the 1960’s when it caused mental breaks for knowledge workers. They were using new movable close-spaced workstations. Psychologists determined that Subliminal Sight and Peripheral Vision Reflexes had operated in those special circumstances to cause the mental breaks. Outside the United States in the field of Design the problem is called Subliminal Distraction. That term has a limited definition here. It usually refers to sounds subliminally perceived while attempting to concentrate in a busy environment.
Herman Miller Inc. introduced modern close-spaced workstations, the Action Office 1, in 1964 but modified it by adding vision-blocking panels in 1968. This created the Action Office System, cubicle, and the mental breaks stopped. Although they must have known it is a ‘conflict of physiology’ not a problem of office space, when they solved their problem they didn’t investigate further. Today so few people are aware of why the cubicle was created the problem is never considered when there is a first psychotic episode, student suicide, strange disappearance, or mass school shooting. (The Redlake shooter left a journal entry that tells what he did to cause exposure.)
Two exercises create the same circumstances for exposure, Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga. They both produce first psychotic episodes when too many exercise periods are performed in a compact time frame. But when exposure is low level and persistent over long periods the exercises create narrowly focused, psychotic, altered mental states. Qi Gong masters begin to believe they have superhuman strength and supernatural powers. They think they can cast energy, chee, from their fingertips to strike opponents. Some Kundalini Gurus believe they can levitate, dematerialize, become invisible, walk through solid objects, and that they can read your thoughts or control your actions through mental telepathy. This happens when they experience the Awakening of Kundalini. Qi Gong Psychotic Deviation is included as a Culture Bound Syndrome in the DSM but not the Awakening of Kundalini even though they are near identical activities and produce similar mental outcomes.
When these exercises are performed eyes-open concentration, meditation, is substituted for the mental investment and slight dissociation necessary to perform knowledge work. Movement of others in the exercise group creates the threat movement detected when office staff walks close beside an unprotected knowledge worker.
Classrooms create the same situation as the 1960’s business office. But students do the same things at the same time so that exposure is limited. When puberty increases body size, exposure spikes. That’s why schizophrenia on sets in adolescence. Schizophrenia can be explained as an altered mental state without the narrow focus encountered when exposure is coupled with instruction in bizarre belief systems. This altered mental state can be layered on any other disorder, neurological problem, or illness. Only the blind are fully immune.
Hutterite colonies have very low levels of schizophrenia. They intermarry thus genetics are being investigated to find a reason for that low incidence. But Hutterites stop schooling in the ninth grade before the full effect of increased exposure to subliminal distraction would be realized.
The designers and psychologists who discovered this phenomenon did not understand what they had found. They made three basic mistakes. They thought their encounter was the first time the phenomenon had been created. Its temporary period of confusion and pseudo-psychotic behavior was believed to be harmless and the only outcome of exposure. Massive exposure such as in the business office was believed to be necessary to cause any psychiatric outcome. None of that is true.
The jumping diseases, startle-matching behaviors, provide a path to understand the phenomenon. They are so strange it cannot be argued that the cases are some other disorder. Victims exhibit hyper-startle and hyper-suggestibility at the point of startle. They have behaviors, usually only seen in catatonic schizophrenia.
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine was discovered when lumberjacks lived in bunkhouses in 1880’s Maine. When a lumberjack chooses an open unprotected location to perform an activity requiring mental investment to the point of slight dissociation they can be exposed. There are no desks and filing cabinets but the mental investment and exposure are the same as those 1960’s offices. That syndrome disappeared when modern logging equipment replaced bunkhouses of men in remote lumber camps. Rather than the eight-hour business day exposure is limited to nights and those days too inclement to work outside. This is higher level of exposure but lower intensity exposure than the one or two exercise periods each week for Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga.
In Malaysia entire villages live in a single longhouse. Without electrical power for lighting they must sit near a window or door to perform craftwork requiring mental investment. Other villagers walk by to enter or exit creating exposure. Latah is the jumping disease of Malaysia. Jumping diseases as well as Culture Bound Syndromes are found around the world where either of two conditions is met, many people living and working in a large single-room arrangement, or when two or more people live in too-small primitive single-room housing. There have been single cases happening as a result of exposure on factory work floors. Concentration to operate a lathe, punching machine, or even a Post Office mail-sorting machine creates the opportunity for exposure if there is repeating detectable movement in peripheral vision.
M. H. Saint-Hilaire has proposed that Jumping Frenchmen of Maine can be explained as being caused by operant conditioning. But without knowledge of the 1960’s discovery no one was able to suggest a source of stimulus to create operant conditioning. The subliminal detection of threat movement together with the internal brain efforts to force a startle and vision reflex are that source. When your brain understands that stimulus to be reinforcement of contemporary thought and activities ‘accidental subliminal operant conditioning’ happens. That repeating subliminal appreciation of threat eventually colors thought and reasoning creating psychotic paranoia.
The crowded single-room living situation has produced mental breaks with violence. Fur trappers, mountain men, preferred to over-winter alone rather than risk that a cabin mate would go berserk and try to kill them. It was called Cabin Fever. There have been mental breaks on Russian space missions, Soyuz 21/Salut-5. The too-small capsule and scientific work create opportunities for exposure. Just as in ICU Psychosis, Culture Bound Syndromes, and the early office workplace experience non-violent victims usually recover without treatment.
Brainwashing Page Links
The Battle for Your Mind Persuasion &
Brainwashing Techniques Being Used on the Public Today
By Dick Sutphen
The following is an expanded version of a lecture Dick Sutphen delivered at the World Congress of Professional Hypnotists Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada.
"Conversion is a “nice” word for brainwashing . . . and any study of brainwashing has to begin with a study of Christian revivalism in eighteenth century America. Apparently, Jonathan Edwards accidentally discovered the techniques during a religious crusade in 1735 in Northampton, Massachusetts."
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sm4csi/nwo/MindControl/battle_for_your_mind.htm
Peripheral Vision Links
I recommend this site. But you will have to browse several pages.
"Early in evolution, human ancestors had only peripheral vision. The role of this early vision system (still preserved in our eyes) was to detect motion and set off protective reflexes."
http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm
Peripheral vision Lego tester
Adobe file with tester construction and data results sample
http://www.edex.com.au/lego/support/activities/032_peripheral_vision.pdf
Nightwalking
"In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange abitlity."
The method suggested to engage peripheral vision is to suspend an object from the bill of a baseball cap and practice staring at it rather than looking straight ahead as we all normally do.
The site has a page on the physiology of the eye and sight. It describes the normal field of vision.
http://www.navaching.com/hawkeen/nwalk.html#Anchor-The-59125
Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation
Don't let the site name put you off. This site has several pages which explain sight and how the brain deals with two vision systems.
http://www.wayfinding.net/index.htm
This page has the vision material. http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm#four
Speed Reading (peripheral vision)
http://www.ababasoft.com/wider_eye_span/
Vision, is a set of brain level subsystems
This page explains the M & P pathways and vision processing.
http://www.wayfinding.net/visanal.htm
The Red Myth
Color in Vision
http://stlplaces.com/night_vision.html
University of Missouri
The first paragraph on this page refers to psychological factors effecting pupil dilation.
"Interestingly, the pupil/iris combination also changes in response to psychological factors. One sign of activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is a system important in arousal, fight, and flight, is dilated pupils. For example, sexual interest results in pupil dilation. (This piece of information may come in handy some time.)"
http://web.umr.edu/~psyworld/eye.htm
University of Utah
John Moran Eye Center -- Anatomy
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/
Kimball's Biology Pages
A simple explanation of the eye and sight.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/V/Vision.html
Understanding Human Vision
This site deals with color.
http://www.pitir.com/pentile/Human_Vision.html
Vision and the Brain
Block diagrams of vision paths through the brain explain the M and P channels.
http://www.thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_02/i_02_cr/i_02_cr_vis/i_02_cr_vis.html#2
Study Notes Vision
http://www.utmed.com/studynotes/neuro/VisualProcessing.pdf
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Prevention:
This section is now repeated at the bottom of most pages.
The rare occurrence of the
injury establishes that is difficult to create enough exposure to cause an
injury. But when it does happen the consequences are serious, possibly fatal.
Our personal experience
was intermittent human traffic during eight-hour workdays for thirty calendar
days.
If you have a tower CPU mount
it under your desk. That's the way they position it in a cubicle. The hard drive
busy light is about the height of your low peripheral vision if you put the
tower on the desk. Desktop reading of text or writing notes beside the keyboard
on the side of the monitor away from the tower makes the blinking hard drive
busy light appear to approach from behind when you turn to view the screen
again.
If you have a computer work
station/desk in which you turn ninety degrees to write or do other non computer
work, turn off the monitor when you turn aside. Remove screen savers in this
instance. The movement, animation for example, in your screensaver,
two-dimensional movement, might well be detected by your peripheral vision at
close range. Alternately cover the monitor screen.
All home, apartment, or
dorm computer workstations are in unprotected workspace.
To change that put the computer in a quiet room with no possible movement. If
that is not possible in a dorm or apartment position the computer so that your
peripheral vision can see only stationary walls as you use the computer in a
busy room. In Cubicles and 'Systems Furniture' these protective features are
achieved with peripheral vision blocking panels and corner seating positions. It
is called 'Cubicle Level Protection.'
If you use computer or CD-ROM
games for many hours day after day, the game playing position should follow the
same rules as the computer workstation. Battery operated games will not run long
enough on a single rechargeable battery to cause a risk for SPVP.
Although a laptop does not
have a visible blinking light in peripheral vision the same rules apply to your
work position. There should not be human traffic moving to you from
behind. There should be nothing behind you, which could enter your subliminal
peripheral vision field as you turn your head while working at the laptop and be
mistaken for threat movement.
Only movement coming from
behind you into your Subliminal Peripheral Vision can cause a peripheral vision
reflex. If the movement source approaches you from ahead then enters your
Subliminal Peripheral Vision from conscious sight there can be no peripheral
vision reflex.
Repeated for Emphasis:
A single session or rare
sessions will not cause this problem.
It is the same day after day
long hours of play or computer use with detectable movement in ‘Subliminal
Peripheral Vision,’ which would form the basis of a risk for SPVP injury.
The brain’s detection system only evaluates movement. There is little recognition of the nature of the object in peripheral vision. If you have several hours exposure from human traffic at the library, while reading at an open table or seated in a reading room chair, followed by long hours watching TV with a critically misplaced ceiling fan sweeping detectable shadows around the room, the combination of those two behaviors might cause the problem. The suggestion is that either activity alone would not consume enough exposure time even if the critical movement is present.
Copyright 2003
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