Andreas Killen, Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War. HarperCollins, 2023. 307 pp. + xxiv. Illus.

Reviewed by Nadine Weidman <weidman@fas.harvard.edu>

In this compelling and lucidly written book, the historian Andreas Killen identifies the 1950s as the decade that revolutionized brain science, treating it not as a prelude to later developments in the 1980s and 90s, but on its own terms and in its own context. During that decade, new technologies (electroencephalography [EEG], stroboscopes, sensory deprivation chambers) opened the brain to experimental observation and manipulation in much less invasive ways than the neurosurgeries, lobotomies, and electroshock therapies of previous decades. Killen focuses squarely on these pieces of the material culture of 1950s brain science, following their travels through laboratory and clinic, CIA-sponsored interrogation manuals and settings, consumer culture and counterculture. He argues persuasively that 1950s brain science had two sides: a mind-control side and a transcendental side. The former, in 1950s “paranoid style,” fueled, and was fueled by, fears of brainwashing and the growth of mass media, while the latter reached toward countercultural consciousness exploration and expansion. These two “mutant offspring” of brain science—however different they may appear—were, Killen shows, deeply connected, springing from the same root and often practiced by the same people. These are histories too often told separately. One great contribution of Killen’s book is to trace their interconnections to each other and to the brain sciences that fostered both. In so doing, Killen puts the “brain” back into brainwashing and shows how the 1950s transformed into the 1960s.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the midcentury sciences of brain and mind, with chapters on W. Grey Walter’s use of EEG and stroboscope, a light flickering in rhythm with brain waves that could experimentally reproduce the symptoms of epilepsy, and on Wilder Penfield, who elicited emotion and memory by touching the brain of an awake patient with an electrode. Part two turns to the entanglements of science and politics, showing how American fears of Soviet and Chinese brainwashing resonated with the contemporaneous neurotechnologies. One chapter takes up Edward Hunter’s account of Communist mind control, which he explained via Pavlovian conditioning, of American POWs in the Korean War; another chapter explains how these fears came home to roost, as the US sponsored its own mind control program, MK-Ultra, which culminated in a classified interrogation manual known as KUBARK. Channeling funds to a range of neuro-workers, from Martin Orne to Donald Hebb to Ewen Cameron, the CIA sponsored experiments with hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and “psychic driving” that showed that assumptions about the stability and integrity of the self were wrong. Elements of these experiments, notably the “Prisoner’s Cinema,” an all-encompassing hallucination produced either by overstimulation (drugs or strobe) or understimulation (sensory deprivation), then showed up in KUBARK. In part three, Killen discusses the cultural and especially countercultural uptake of mind-control technologies. One chapter deals with Aldous Huxley’s and Marshall McLuhan’s warnings about the subliminal messaging encoded in film and TV, especially advertising. These warnings were echoed in pulp science fiction like Donovan’s Brain (1953) and reached their apogee in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which implicates the mass media in the phenomenon of mind control. Killen finds references to the work of Grey Walter and Penfield in Huxley’s warnings. The two final chapters turn to the counterculture. The Beat poets, especially William S. Burroughs, used Grey Walter’s flicker technology to produce vivid hallucinations, the source of which was uncertain, but which Burroughs was convinced gave access to authentic, “unconditioned” consciousness. The last chapter centers on John Lilly, whose story neatly encapsulates the continuities between brain science, CIA sponsored efforts in mind control, and 1960s counterculture. Lilly started out as a brain researcher with an interest in psychoanalysis, his work cited in the KUBARK manual; he then turned to the isolation tank as an experimental setup, suspending himself in warm water, in perfect darkness, to trigger hallucinations—a practice he introduced to the counterculture.

Interspersed among the chapters are six fascinating “clinical tales,” with which Killen makes patients’ perspectives and voices part of the story. These range from the case of Henry Molaison, the man who lost his ability to form memories after a brain operation for epilepsy and, as Patient HM, became the original subject of memory research; to Barbara O’Brien’s memoir of mental illness; to the tragedy of Allen Dulles, the son of the CIA director, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the Korean War; to several accounts of brainwashing experienced by prisoners of war; to the story of Paul Linebarger, psywar specialist, Scientology disciple, and science fiction author. Killen reminds us of the morally fraught nature of brain research and of the suffering of real people that accompanied it.

Several key themes run through Killen’s book. Though he emphasizes the newness of 1950s brain science, its “paradigm shift” away from behaviorism, he underscores its continuity with its past: the ideas of Freud, Pavlov, and the cyberneticians figure prominently. Lawrence Kubie, the psychoanalyst, collaborated with Penfield; Edward Hunter used principles of Pavlovian conditioning to explain how brainwashing worked. Killen stresses that the scientists were themselves embodied; Lilly, for example, was a migraine sufferer and sought out analogies between the auras of migraine and the effects produced by hypnosis, strobe, and sensory deprivation. 1950s media—film and especially TV—served as a ready source of analogies, metaphors, and explanations for how consciousness functioned. And the science fictions invented not only by Orwell, Huxley, Koestler, and L. Ron Hubbard, but also, in some cases, by the scientists themselves, came virtually to have the status of fact. In all this, Killen succeeds in situating the brain sciences in their historical context, a context often missing from the heroic origin stories of neuroscience. He points out too that this history is closer to the present day than we might care to admit. The 21^st century controversy surrounding psychologists’ involvement in “enhanced interrogations” of political detainees in the Global War on Terror (and the APA’s sanctioning of such involvement) shows that, like the brain scientists and dreamers of the 1950s, we are still transfixed by the fantasy of mind control.

To get more information about the book, click here.