No, I don’t mean torture. Torture will make people say they believe whatever will make the pain stop, but what I am talking about here is using physical mechanisms to make people truly believe something different by literally changing the manner in which their brains function.
“A joint team of American and British scientists have discovered that powerful magnetic pulses to the brain can temporarily change people’s feelings on a variety of subjects – from their belief in God, to their attitude to immigration.
The study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, saw scientists use a metal coil to create strong magnetic fields around certain parts of the brain.
The non-invasive practice is called trancranial magnetic stimulation, and has can be used to treat depression.”
Induced changes in belief do not all go in one political direction:
“Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats”
“Summary: We tested the fixity of political preferences of 136 healthy males during the 2011 U.S. presidential election season by administering synthetic testosterone or placebo to participants who had identified the strength of their political affiliation. Before the testosterone treatment, we found that weakly affiliated Democrats had 19% higher basal testosterone than those who identified strongly with the party (p=0.015). When weakly affiliated Democrats received additional testosterone, the strength of their party fell by 12% (p=.01) and they reported 45% warmer feelings towards Republican candidates for president (p < 0.001). Our results demonstrate that testosterone induces a “red shift" among weakly-affiliated Democrats. This effect was associated with improved mood. No effects were found of testosterone administration for strongly affiliated Democrats or strong or weak Republicans. Our findings provide evidence that neuroactive hormones affect political preferences.”
(Links found via Wilfred Reilly and The Rabbit Hole on Twitter.)
What do you think about this? I make no specific point and ask no specific question, but it seems to me worthy of discussion that it would take only a minor advance on presently available technology to make a lot of dystopian science fiction into reality.
“You don’t think properly, Comrade. You need a lobotomy.”
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
So leftists really are soy boys. Interesting.
You could equally say that right-wingers are hormonal, aggressive due to excess testosterone. Probably adds weight to the idea that a female-dominated world would be more rational, though I don’t personally believe that (what passes for rational thought among most people is regrettably not actually rational thought, just a different set of biases and emotions).
Does rather raise the spectre of forcible medical intervention for those with unusually radical political beliefs. The consequent realignment might put thee and me on edges of acceptable political thought, and thus at risk of such intervention too.
Spend some time reading or listening to what is called the manosphere (sounds like a gay nightclub) or the “Red Pill Community”, and the term “soyboy” occasionally comes up. It draws on the idea that excessive consumption of soy-based products increased the amount of estrogen, and reduces testosterone. Men get fat, grow “breasts”, and lack physical strength. It is all of a piece of the idea that consumption of a plant-based diet, avoidance of meat, etc, leads to less muscle mass, smaller brains, a more passive outlook, and so on. The argument is also made that socialists and others more friendly to a large State like all this because a weaker, more mentally dulled out population is easy to control.
Some of this sounded a bit silly when I heard it. Do those living in Asia, where soybeans are an important crop, and used in making tofu etc, become much more passive than, say, Westerners reared on a different diet? I have not seen any sort of study that would be of the standard of rigour to bear out such claims.
Its bunk. How is a magnet gonna fix the immigrants stealing our jobs? Only Leftist NPCs who have no soul are subject to such manipulation because they are demons in empty shell bodies.
Yes, physical things can affect the mind – but these physical effects can be resisted.
Thus, legalized pot. It’s like the anti-testosterone.
“Probably adds weight to the idea that a female-dominated world would be more rational”
Have you ever had any experience of female dominated environments?
The mind lives in the body.
It’s been long recognized that participating in mass exercise generates a sense of group solidarity. This has been exploited by fascist movements, which featureed mass marches for the members.
It may have reinforced civic loyalty in the city-states of ancient Greece, where essentially the entire voting class performed close-order drill in the phalanx.
Some religious bodies practice “spiritual exercises”, which combine specific physical activities with prescribed prayers and meditation.
And fairly recently, I read of a psychologist who found a set of exercises which cause a couple to fall in love,
The testosterone experiment cited appears to change attitudes rather than beliefs.
Not sure how important this is: the study shows only a short-term effect. There is no evidence that people permanently change their beliefs about religion and immigration.
Still, I think it remarkable that the study shows a change of beliefs towards the PC/woke norm.
That can be interpreted as evidence that ””bigoted”” (i.e. un-woke) opinions are due to dysfunctional brain activity — and that is probably the interpretation favored by the investigators.
But it can equally well be interpreted as evidence that you have to de-activate people’s brains to make them believe woke BS. That seems more likely to me.
— More general remarks about physical determinism in mental processes coming tomorrow.
Maybe.
Yeah, hence the second part of that paragraph which you probably didn’t read.
The second study only (reportedly) shows an effect on weakly-aligned Democrats – not on any Republicans or on strongly-aligned Democrats.
A small fraction of a fairly small sample (to begin with) does not necessarily suggest that these results would be reproducible.
For how else are we to bring Leon Trotsky’s dream of Homo Sovieticus to fruition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus
@Alex: The idea that female dominated environments are more rational and less confrontational is utter bunk, as anyone (including you apparently) who has seen how large groups of women interact with each other knows. Therefore there is no ‘idea’ that a female dominated world would be a better place that can have weight added to it. Reality shows us it’s not true. Its like saying ‘If humans could read minds the world would be a better place’. We can’t so the concept is nonsense.
Homework Assignment: ‘A Fine Madness’ starring Sean Connery. Related parting quote, ‘What’s good for me may not be good for the weak minded.” Capt McRae.
So brain damage corresponds with being leftist? Who’d have thought.
You could say that, because one can say just about anything.
You’d be wrong though. Testosterone doesn’t make one more aggressive. High levels of testosterone are linked with higher levels of serotonin, and lower levels of physical violence.
There are some men who are aggressive and violent, but it doesn’t seem to be driven by testosterone.
Note that most humans can become aggressive in the right (or wrong) circumstances, but it seems like *low* testosterone men tend to resort to violence earlier.
This alleged effect is due to “phytoestrogens” in the soy, and fermenting destroys those, so things like tofu and natto don’t have the same effect.
However this has largely been debunked.
Men and women share similar amounts of evil and irrationality, but testosterone and estrogen lead to different behaviors. Men get the bad rap because their favored evils photograph better, and are easier to explain to a jury.
You could claim modern Republicans suffer from an excess of testosterone if you’re willing to claim all testosterone is excess. Otherwise it’s a pretty absurd claim. Average t levels have been dropping over time to a degree that it ought to be considered a health crisis.
The reproducibility crisis in science (especially in social science, or, one could write, social ‘science’) may yet save us.
1) The oddity of reporting that something as overtly without agenda as a magnetic field causes people to become more woke made me wonder if the experimenters’ views contaminated their experiment.
– The postulated mechanism is that the targeted magnetic field was temporarily ‘shutting down’ or ‘disabling’ (I would suggest ‘confusing’ at maximum) a part of the brain concerned with processing threats. Thus the experimenters’ claim is that people become temporarily less religious because the idea of dying frightens them less (and fear of death motivates religion), and similarly for immigration.
– I like having a mechanism, but see that the correlation of its theory with the (reasonable to conjecture) social-scientist experimenters’ political beliefs is stronger than the measured effect on the subjects. A measurement of how the magnetic field affected subjects’ eagerness to cancel-culture the unwoke might tell us more, for example – but the (AFAICS from this brief report) absence of any such balancing study even occurring to the experimenters tells us more still. Would it occur to them to run it after a dose of the field – would they feel less threatened by it, I wonder? Did that joke occur to them ever, I wonder, let alone as quickly as it did to me?
IIUC, hooding does render subjects for a time more suggestible. If magnetic fields do as much, let alone more, I’ll want more evidence (or to discover, while near a strong magnetic field, that I suddenly don’t feel the need of evidence 🙂 ).
2) The widespread colloquial meaning of the word ‘testosterone’ in modern western society could similarly be influencing the experimenters’ expectations of seeing ‘bad’ (i.e. less-Republican-hating) behaviours in the dosed subjects. Again, the effect as they report it seems astonishingly politics-specific for a general drug; any drugged-into-violence subjects could see more action by joining Antifa or JustStopOil than by joining the Republican party today.
Now there’s a conclusion I can get behind. 🙂 Within seconds of reading it, I had evolved my entire thesis: wokism is a “misery loves company” phenomenon, so any drug that improves the mood of lefties will of course reduce their addiction to their hate-filled and hate-fueled political views while they are under its influence. 🙂
However I soon came up with another. These weakly-Democratic males were of course precisely those beta-males (delta males?) who weakly echo the narrative because they lack the courage to defy it. Of course, a does of testosterone (colloquial meaning) was just what they needed to give them the courage to break (a little bit) free (in their minds and in fact) and express themselves less circumspectly.
It is of course just possible that Niall has-an-opinion Kilmartin might, like the experimenters I conjecturally criticise, contaminate the study with his views, though whether conversation with me would enhance the beta-males’ right-leaning mood improvement or the reverse is debatable. 🙂
(See also Simon Jester above, December 7, 2022 at 7:12 am.)
And thus we get Neil Stephenson’s Allswell – in his Anathem book – the mood drug engineered into common ditch-weed, ubiquitous throughout society, that makes everything in life more bearable.
The admin that figures this one out – how to keep society content and unquestioning – will never lose an election. Think of urban water reservoirs . . .
One reason why i think of psychiatry as a pseudo-science is that psychiatrists seem to think of the brain as a glorified test tube: they seem to think that what you have to do to ensure ‘normal’ brain function, is to get the proper mix of chemicals.
(The other reason is that psychiatrists are only beginning to consider that diet might be a major factor, possibly the only factor in almost all patients, needed to achieve the proper mix of chemicals in the brain — and indeed the development of a healthy brain anatomy.)
(Mind you, psychiatry has been useful: it seems that, before the development of psycho-pharmaceuticals, half of hospital beds were taken up by psychiatric patients.
But the fact that psychiatry works in practice does not make it a science.)
Going back to my first paragraph above: disabling parts of the brain with magnets is a bit more sophisticated than pharmaceutical intervention, because it targets only one part of the brain — but it is still way too coarse: every neuron in the brain carries specific information, and unless one can manipulate neurons individually (which would be like juggling sand), one cannot really control thoughts. At most, one can control emotions.
WRT the testosterone study: of course, i would like to believe that my political opinions are due to rational considerations (grounded on moral intuitions, to avoid problems with the is/ought dichotomy).
That is why i reject Paul Marks’ views of agency: i like to believe that my opinions are entirely determined by reason applied to facts and ethical principles. This implies a determinism incompatible with Paul’s views.
How is my belief affected by the testosterone study? Not a big problem for me, because i can tell myself that the subjects who were affected by the testosterone must be people who, unlike me, base their political opinions on the mood of the moment, instead of reason applied to facts and values.
OK, if we take the basic principle that people’s socio-economic-religio-moral whatevers are complex then is repeatability even an issue here? Consider the popularity of politicians like Reagan or Obama. A lot of that was simply down to charisma. And then consider the Kennedy/Nixon debate. I think this was the first to be on TV. Pollsters recorded the majority of folk who watched it came down for Kennedy. Those who heard it on the radio tended towards Nixon. Could that simply be because JFK was more telegenic? Could it even reflect socio-economic differences between Americans who had a TV at the time. The second is quite interesting because whilst it is a workable hypothesis for back then in 2022 basically eveyone can afford a TV. Yes, increasing numbers don’t bother or sort of don’t. I have a TV. I don’t have TV. I have a smart TV so it’s basically a streaming internet access thing on the wall. BTW does anyone know what ITV are currently playing at?