Jacobsen, A.. (2015). The Pentagon’s brain : an uncensored history of DARPA, America’s top secret military research agency. Little, Brown US
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“First edition. since its inception in 1958, the defense advanced research projects agency, or darpa, has grown to become the defense department’s most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science research and development agency. created by president eisenhower to prevent another sputnik, and to focus primarily on defensive programs against nuclear weapons, the agency–and its imagination and scope–has expanded enormously with each passing year. from agent orange in vietnam to insect-sized drones in use today, from the earliest networked computers and the internet to smart rockets and war zones under 24-hour video surveillance, darpa is responsible for innovations that have changed the course of war, national security, and strategic planning at the highest levels. to uncover the secret history of darpa in action, journalist annie jacobsen tracked down key players in darpa’s smart weapons program, past and present; neuroscientists building an artificial brain, cell biologists working on limb regeneration, the nobel laureate who invented the laser. from darpa’s earliest defensive advances to hundreds of ongoing programs, jacobsen exposes both sides of the darpa coin: the fantastic technological advances from which we all benefit, and the darker side drawn up in a race for military supremacy. based on information from inside sources, exclusive interviews, private documents, and declassified memos, the pentagon’s brain reads like science fiction but is absolutely true, a groundbreaking look behind the scenes at the clandestine intersection of science and the american military.–publisher information. the cold war : the evil thing ; war games and computing machines ; vast weapons systems of the future ; emergency plans ; sixteen hundred seconds until doomsday ; psychological operations — the vietnam war : techniques and gadgets ; rand and coin ; command and control ; motivation and morale ; the jasons enter vietnam ; the electronic fence ; the end of vietnam — operations other than war : rise of the machines ; star wars and tank wars ; the gulf war and operations other than war ; biological weapons ; transforming humans for war — the war on terror : terror strikes ; total information awareness ; ied war ; combat zones that see ; human terrain — future war : drone wars ; brain wars ; the pentagon’s brain.”
Moreno, J. D.. (2012). Mind wars : brain science and the military in the twenty-first century. Bellevue Literary Press
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“Minority report meets dr. strangelove in the true story of how neuroscience and related technologies are shaping national defense. acknowledgments; introduction; 1. darpa on your mind; 2. of machines and men; 3. mind games; 4. how to think about the brain; 5. brain reading; 6. building better soldiers; 7. enter the nonlethals; 8. toward an ethics of neurosecurity; sources; index; about the author.”
Miranda, R. A., Casebeer, W. D., Hein, A. M., Judy, J. W., Krotkov, E. P., Laabs, T. L., … Ling, G. S. F.. (2014). DARPA-funded efforts in the development of novel brain-computer interface technologies.. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 244, 52–67.
“The defense advanced research projects agency (darpa) has funded innovative scientific research and technology developments in the field of brain-computer interfaces (bci) since the 1970s. this review highlights some of darpa’s major advances in the field of bci, particularly those made in recent years. two broad categories of darpa programs are presented with respect to the ultimate goals of supporting the nation’s warfighters: (1) bci efforts aimed at restoring neural and/or behavioral function, and (2) bci efforts aimed at improving human training and performance. the programs discussed are synergistic and complementary to one another, and, moreover, promote interdisciplinary collaborations among researchers, engineers, and clinicians. finally, this review includes a summary of some of the remaining challenges for the field of bci, as well as the goals of new darpa efforts in this domain.”
Sir Francis Galton, was an English Victorian era statistician, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician. He was knighted in 1909.
Galton produced over 340 papers and books. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.
He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself and the phrase “nature versus nurture”. His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.
As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology and the lexical hypothesis of personality. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none by its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for. His quest for the scientific principles of diverse phenomena extended even to the optimal method for making tea.
LibriVox
Hereditary Genius
A biographical summary of the pre-eminent men of Britain grouped by profession. The extensive survey draws from information including college graduation, reputation during career, fellowships, and even known relatives. Includes discussions on findings and observations as well as referenced appendices. - Summary by Leon Harvey
„We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem… We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.“ — Joseph Goebbels
„The people’s community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy. Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland.“ — Joseph Goebbels
A lesser known fact is that Goebbels stratagems were “inspired” by Edward Bernays (who authored the book entitled “Propaganda” in 1928).
Bernays stated the following in his 1965 autobiography:
They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.
Further References
Doob, L. W.. (1950). Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda. Public Opinion Quarterly
“For almost a dozen years german propaganda minister goebbels was recognized as a master of his trade by those who fought and by those who acclaimed the nazi state. this article, based on both the published and unpublished portions of goebbels’ diary, summarizes the major propaganda principles which he followed.”
Meyer, M., & Welch, D.. (2006). Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945. The History Teacher
“This is the most comprehensive analysis to date of nazi film propaganda in its political, social, and economic contexts, from the pre-war cinema as it fell under the control of the propaganda minister, joseph goebbels, through to the end of the second world war. david welch studies more than one hundred films of all types, identifying those aspects of nazi ideology that were concealed in the framework of popular entertainment.”
Propaganda and mass persuasion: a historical encyclopedia, 1500 to the present. (2013). Choice Reviews Online
“This fascinating survey provides a comprehensive introduction to propaganda, its changing nature, its practitioners, and its impact on the past five centuries of world history. written by leading experts, it covers the masters of the art from joseph goebbels to mohandas gandhi and examines enormously influential works of persuasion such as ‘uncle tom’s cabin,’ techniques such as films and posters, and key concepts like black propaganda and brainwashing. case studies reveal the role of mass persuasion during the reformation, and wars throughout history. regional studies cover propaganda superpowers, such as russia, china, and the united states, as well as little-known propaganda campaigns in southeast asia, ireland, and scandinavia. the book traces the evolution of propaganda from the era of printed handbills to computer fakery, and profiles such brilliant practitioners of the art as third reich film director leni riefenstahl and 19th-century cartoonist thomas nast, whose works helped to bring the notorious boss tweed to justice.”
Herf, J.. (2005). The “jewish War”: Goebbels and the antisemitic campaigns of the Nazi propaganda ministry. Holocaust and Genocide Studies
“How the nazi leadership translated radical antisemitism into a narrative of an innocent, besieged germany striking back at an ‘international jewry’ it accused of starting and prolonging world war ii forms the subject of this study. in the nazis’ paranoid conspiracy theory ‘jewry’ comprised powers behind the scenes in london, moscow, and washington. in response to the ‘war of extermination’ that jewry had supposedly launched against germany, the nazi leadership publicly threatened to ‘exterminate’ and ‘annihilate’ the jews as an act of justified retaliation. in their minds and in their policy, the ideological connection between the ‘final solution’ and the second world war was inherent, rather than contingent. the following analysis suggests why a centuries-old hatred led to mass murder between 1941 and 1945.”
Welch, D.. (1993). Manufacturing a consensus: Nazi propaganda and the building of a ‘national community’ (volksgemeinschaft). Contemporary European History
“The point has to be made at once that any attempt to quantify public reaction to nazi propaganda is fraught with difficulties. accurate measurement of the effectiveness of nazi propaganda is weakened by the absence of public opinion surveys and the fact that, in a society that resorted so readily to coercions and terror, reported opinion did not necessarily reflect the true feelings and moods of the public, especially if these views were opposed to the regime. nevertheless, to state that public opinion in the third reich ceased to exist is not strictly true. after the nazi ‘seizure of power’ in 1933, propaganda minister joseph goebbels stressed the importance of co-ordinating propaganda with other activities. in a dictatorship, propaganda must address itself to large masses of people and attempt to move them to a uniformity of opinion and action. but the nazis also understood that propaganda is of little value in isolation. to some extent this explains why goebbels impressed on all his staff at the ministry of popular enlightenment and propaganda the imperative necessity constantly to gauge public moods. goebbels therefore regularly received (as did all the ruling élites) extraordinarily detailed reports from the secret police (sd reports) about the mood of the people and would frequently quote these in his diary. hitler, too, was familiar with these reports, and his recorded determination to avoid increasing food prices at all costs for fear that this would undermine the regime’s popularity suggests a political sensitivity to public opinion. to assure themselves of continued popular support was an unwavering concern of the nazi leadership, and of hitler and goebbels in particular.”
George Lakoff could write a book on the “conceptual metaphor” employed in the title of the whitepaper. George Orwell is turning in his grave (the “digital algorithmic ministry of truth”).
Here are the “three foundational pillars” of the whitepaper (expressis verbis):
Improve our products so they continue to make quality count;
Counteract malicious actors seeking to spread disinformation;
Give people context about the information they see.
“F the metaphorical understanding of a situation functions in two parts irst, there is a widespread, relatively fixed set of metaphors that structure how fc we think. for example, a decision to go to war might be seen as a form o ost-benefit analysis, where war is justified …”
Steuter, E., & Wills, D.. (2008). At war with metaphor. Nueva York: Rowman and …
“BACKGROUND:pedomorphism is the retention of ancestrally juvenile traits by adults in a descendant taxon. despite its importance for evolutionary change, there are few examples of a molecular basis for this phenomenon. notothenioids represent one of the best described species flocks among marine fishes, but their diversity is currently threatened by the rapidly changing antarctic climate. notothenioid evolutionary history is characterized by parallel radiations from a benthic ancestor to pelagic predators, which was accompanied by the appearance of several pedomorphic traits, including the reduction of skeletal mineralization that resulted in increased buoyancy.results:we compared craniofacial skeletal development in two pelagic notothenioids, chaenocephalus aceratus and pleuragramma antarcticum, to that in a benthic species, notothenia coriiceps, and two outgroups, the threespine stickleback and the zebrafish. relative to these other species, pelagic notothenioids exhibited a delay in pharyngeal bone development, which was associated with discrete heterochronic shifts in skeletal gene expression that were consistent with persistence of the chondrogenic program and a delay in the osteogenic program during larval development. morphological analysis also revealed a bias toward the development of anterior and ventral elements of the notothenioid pharyngeal skeleton relative to dorsal and posterior elements.conclusions:our data support the hypothesis that early shifts in the relative timing of craniofacial skeletal gene expression may have had a significant impact on the adaptive radiation of antarctic notothenioids into pelagic habitats.”
Thibodeau, P. H., Hendricks, R. K., & Boroditsky, L.. (2017). How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
“Language helps people communicate and think. precise and accurate language would seem best suited to achieve these goals. but a close look at the way people actually talk reveals an abundance of apparent imprecision in the form of metaphor: ideas are ‘light bulbs’, crime is a ‘virus’, and cancer is an ‘enemy’ in a ‘war’. in this article, we review recent evidence that metaphoric language can facilitate communication and shape thinking even though it is literally false. we first discuss recent experiments showing that linguistic metaphor can guide thought and behavior. then we explore the conditions under which metaphors are most influential. throughout, we highlight theoretical and practical implications, as well as key challenges and opportunities for future research. metaphors pervade discussions of abstract concepts and complex issues: ideas are ‘light bulbs’, crime is a ‘virus’, and cancer is an ‘enemy’ in a ‘war’. at a process level, metaphors, like analogies, involve structure mapping, in which relational structure from the source domain is leveraged for thinking about the target domain. metaphors influence how people think about the topics they describe by shaping how people attend to, remember, and process information. the effects of metaphor on reasoning are not simply the result of lexical priming. metaphors can covertly influence how people think. that is, people are not always aware that they have been influenced by a metaphor.”
Hülsse, R., & Spencer, A.. (2008). The metaphor of terror: Terrorism studies and the constructivist turn. Security Dialogue
“Terrorism studies is fascinated with the terrorist actor. though this may seem natural, the present article argues that a different perspective can be fruitful. from a constructivist point of view, terrorism is a social construction. the terrorist actor is a product of discourse, and hence discourse is the logical starting point for terrorism research. in particular, it is the discourse of the terrorists’ adversaries that constitutes terrorist motivations, strategies, organizational structures and goals. hence, the article suggests a shift of perspective in terrorism studies – from an actor-centred to a discourse-centred perspective. it develops a discourse approach that emphasizes the crucial role of metaphors in the making of reality. to illustrate this approach, the metaphorical construction of al-qaeda in the german popular press in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in new york and washington ( 2001), madrid ( 2004) and london ( 2005) is analysed. terrorism was first constituted as war, but from 2004 onwards the principal metaphor shifted from war to crime, constructing al-qaeda as a criminal rather than a military organization. this shift has transformed al-qaeda from an external to an internal threat, which has entailed a shift in counter-terrorism practices from a military to a judicial response.”
Ferrari, F.. (2007). Metaphor at work in the analysis of political discourse: Investigating a “preventive war” persuasion strategy. Discourse and Society
“The crucial historical moment represented by post 9/11 may undoubtedly be considered responsible for the subsequent hardening of american political rhetoric. and yet, the sudden increase of consensus catalysed by george w. bush and the consequences of his international policy bring his modus persuadendi up for discussion. the aim of this article is to present a framework for a metaphor-based critical analysis of persuasion in political discourse. our object of observation is george w. bush’s public speeches to the nation (2001–4). more specifically, the analysis is focused on the persuasion strategy enacted to promote the preventive war in iraq. in our approach, conceptual metaphor as related to emotion constitutes the fundamental argumentative feature and crucial tool to address the matter of persuasion in text, contributing to identifying both the ideological root and the persuasive strategy of a given discourse in the long run. synthesis of our results shows the potentialities of metaphor as a privileged cognitive tool for abstracting and constructing discourse strategies.”
Thibodeau, P., Mcclelland, J. L., & Boroditsky, L.. (2009). When a bad metaphor may not be a victimless crime : The role of metaphor in social policy. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
“Metaphors are pervasive in our discussions of abstract and complex ideas (lakoff & johnson, 1980), and have been shown to be instrumental in problem solving and building new conceptual structure (e.g., gentner & gentner, 1983; nersessian, 1992; boroditsky, 2000). in this paper we look at the role of metaphor in framing social issues. our language for discussing war, crime, politics, healthcare, and the economy is suffused with metaphor (schön, 1993; lakoff, 2002). does the way we reason about such important issues as crime, war or the economy depend on the metaphors we use to talk about these topics? might changing metaphors lead us to different conceptions and in turn different social policies? in this paper we focused on the domain of crime and asked whether two different metaphorical systems we have for talking about crime can lead people to different ways of approaching and reasoning about it. we find that framing the issue of crime metaphorically as a predator yielded systematically different suggestions for solving the crime problem than when crime was described as a virus. we then present a connectionist model that explores the mechanistic underpinnings of the role of metaphor.”
Spencer, A.. (2012). The social construction of terrorism: Media, metaphors and policy implications. Journal of International Relations and Development
“The article illustrates a constructivist understanding of studying terrorism and counter-terrorism by applying metaphor analysis to a british tabloid media discourse on terrorism between 2001 and 2005 in the sun newspaper. it identifies four conceptual metaphors constituting terrorism as a war, a crime, an uncivilised evil and as a disease, and it illustrates how these understandings make certain counter-terrorism policies such as a military response, judicial measures or immigration policies acceptable while at the same time excluding from consideration other options, such as negotiations. it thereby re-emphasises that a metaphorical understanding of political phenomena such as terrorism can give international relations insights into how certain policies become possible while others remain outside of the range of options thought to be appropriate.”
At war with metaphor: media, propaganda, and racism in the war on terror. (2013). Choice Reviews Online
“A valuable contribution to our growing understanding of the ways in which we talk ourselves into war, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. it causes us to wonder what might happen if we had the courage to deal with our rivalries and conflicts in a realistic manner rather than dehumanizing and demonizing those we consider enemies. ” —sam keen, author of faces of the enemy when photographs documenting the torture and humiliation of prisoners at abu ghraib came to the attention of a horrified public, national and international voices were raised in shock, asking how this happened. at war with metaphor offers an answer, arguing that the abuses of abu ghraib were part of a systemic continuum of dehumanization. this continuum has its roots in our public discussions of the war on terror and the metaphors through which they are repeatedly framed. arguing earnestly and incisively that these metaphors, if left unexamined, bind us into a cycle of violence that will only be intensified by a responsive violence of metaphor, erin steuter and deborah wills examine compelling examples of the images of animal, insect, and disease that inform, shape, and limit our understand-ing of the war on terror. tying these images to historical and contemporary uses of propaganda through a readable, accessible analysis of media filters, at war with metaphor vividly explores how news media, including political cartoons and talk radio, are enmeshed in these damaging, dehumanizing metaphors. analyzing media through the lenses of race and orientalism, the book invites us to hold our media and ourselves accountable for the choices we make in talking war and making enemies.”
Kövecses, Z.. (2016). Conceptual metaphor theory. In The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language
“In a radical departure from theories based on digital, amodal accounts of cognition and language, lakoff and johnson (1980) proposed an account of metaphor as fundamentally conceptual, arguing that familiar linguistic metaphors are but surface manifestations of underlying conceptual relationships. they claimed that most conceptual thought is metaphorical, and conceptual domains are instantiated and expressed in families of conceptual metaphors, such as ‘more is u’, ‘emotionallyintimate is physically close’, ‘argument is war’, ‘love is a journey’, and ‘theories are buildings’. these conceptual metaphors number in the hundreds (gibbs, 1994b; lakoff and johnson, 1999), and they combine to serve as the foundation for new metaphors. for many of these families of metaphors lakoff and johnson trace the underlying metaphor to a literal concept based on embodied physical experience.”
Navaro-Yashin, Y.. (2009). Affective spaces, melancholic objects: Ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“This article critically engages with recent theoretical writings on affect and non-human agency by way of studying the emotive energies discharged by properties and objects appropriated during war from members of the so-called ‘enemy’ community. the ethnographic material comes from long-term fieldwork in northern cyprus, focusing on how it feels to live with the objects and within the ruins left behind by the other, now displaced, community. i study turkish-cypriots’ relations to houses, land, and objects that they appropriated from the greek-cypriots during the war of 1974 and the subsequent partition of cyprus. my ethnographic material leads me to reflect critically on the object-centred philosophy of actor network theory and on the affective turn in the human sciences after the work of gilles deleuze. with the metaphor of ‘ruination’, i study what goes amiss in scholarly declarations of theoretical turns or shifts. instead, proposing an anthropologically engaged theory of affect through an ethnographic reflection on spatial and material melancholia, i argue that ethnography, in its most productive moments, is trans-paradigmatic. retaining what has been ruined as still needful of consideration, i suggest an approach which merges theories of affect and subjectivity as well as of language and materiality.”
Koller, V., Hardie, A., Rayson, P., & Semino, E.. (2008). Using a semantic annotation tool for the analysis of metaphor in discourse. Metaphorik.De
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“This paper describes the application of semantic annotation software for analysing metaphor in corpora of different genres. in particular, we outline three projects analysing religion and politics metaphors in corporate mission statements, the war metaphor in business magazines, and machine and living organism metaphors in a novel and in a second collection of business magazine articles. this research was guided by the hypotheses that a) semantic tags allocated by the software can correspond to source domains of metaphoric expressions, and b) that more conventional metaphors feature a source domain tag as first choice in the type’s semantic profile. the tagger was adapted to better serve the needs of metaphor research and automate to a greater extent the extraction of first choice and secondary semantic domains. two of the three studies represent re-analyses of previous manual and/or lexical corpus-based investigations, and findings indicate that semantic annotation can yield more comprehensive results. in”
Yanık, L. K.. (2009). The Metamorphosis of Metaphors of Vision: “Bridging” Turkey’s Location, Role and Identity After the End of the Cold War. Geopolitics
“During the cold war, ‘buffer’ or ‘bastion’ seemed a popular metaphor to describe turkey. after the cold war, ‘bridge,’ (and, to some extent, the ‘crossroad’) metaphor started to dominate the turkish foreign policy dışcourse. this article traces the use of ‘bridge’ metaphor in this dışcourse in the post-cold war period by the turkish foreign policy elite. it develops two arguments. first, the word bridge is a ‘metaphor of vision’ combining turkey’s perceived geographical exceptionalism with an identity and a role at the international level. as a ‘metaphor of vision,’ the employment of the word ‘bridge’ highlighted turkey’s liminality and justified some of its foreign policy actions to eurasia and then to the middle east. second, because the bridge metaphor was used in different context to justify different foreign policy choices, its meaning has changed, illustrating that metaphors are not static constructs. it concludes by sayıng that the continuous use of ‘bridge’ metaphor might reinforce turkey’s ‘liminality,’ placing turkey in a less classifiable category than the regular ‘othering’ practices.”
Take first the question of food and population. At present
the population of the globe is increasing at the rate of about
20 millions a year. Most of this increase is in Russia and
Southeast Asia. The population of Western Europe and
the United States is nearly stationary. Meanwhile, the food
supply of the world as a whole threatens to diminish, as a
result of unwise methods of cultivation and destruction of
forests. This is an explosive situation. Left to itself, it must
lead to a food shortage and thence to a world war. Technique,
however, makes other issues possible.
Vital statistics in the West are dominated by medicine
and birth control: the one diminishes the deaths, the other
the births. The result is that the average age in the West
increases: there is a smaller percentage of young people and
a larger percentage of old people. Some people consider that
this must have unfortunate results, but speaking as an old
person, I am not sure.
The danger of a world shortage of food may be averted
for a time by improvements in the technique of agriculture.
But, if population continues to increase at the present rate,
such improvements cannot long suffice. There will then be
two groups, one poor with an increasing population, the
other rich with a stationary population. Such a situation can
hardly fail to lead to world war. If there is not to be an
endless succession of wars, population will have to become
stationary throughout the world, and this will probably have
to be done, in many countries, as a result of governmental
measures. This will require an extension of scientific tech-
nique into very intimate matters. There are, however, two
other possibilities. War may become so destructive that, at
any rate for a time, there is no danger of overpopulation; or
the scientific nations may be defeated and anarchy may de-
stroy scientific technique.
Biology is likely to affect human life through the study of
heredity. Without science, men have changed domestic
animals and food plants enormously in advantageous ways.
It may be assumed that they will change them much more,
and much more quickly, by bringing the science of genetics
to bear. Perhaps, even, it may become possible artificially to
induce desirable mutations in genes. (Hitherto the only muta-
tions that can be artificially caused are neutral or harmful.)
In any case, it is pretty certain that scientific technique will
very soon effect great improvements in the animals and
plants that are useful to man.
When such methods of modifying the congenital character
of animals and plants have been pursued long enough to make
their success obvious, it is probable that there will be a
powerful movement for applying scientific methods to human
propagation. There would at first be strong religious and
emotional obstacles to the adoption of such a policy. But sup-
pose (say) Russia were able to overcome these obstacles
and to breed a race stronger, more intelligent, and more
resistant to disease than any race of men that has hitherto
existed, and suppose the other nations perceived that unless
they followed suit they would be defeated in war, then either
the other nations would voluntarily forgo their prejudices, or,
after defeat, they would be compelled to forgo them. Any
scientific technique, however beastly, is bound to spread if
it is useful in war— until such time as men decide that they have
had enough of war and will henceforth live in peace. As
that day does not seem to be at hand, scientific breeding of
human beings must be expected to come about. I shall return
to this subject in a later chapter.
Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific tech-
nique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov
and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view
that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure
will be built on their foundations is still in doubt.
I think the subject which will be of most importance polit-
ically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically
speaking, not a very advanced study, and so far its professors
have not been in universities: they have been advertisers,
politicians, and, above all, dictators. This study is immensely
useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich
or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science,
founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has
employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a
kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been
enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of
propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called
"education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one;
the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.
What is essential in mass psychology is the art of per-
suasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler's with a speech of
(say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been
made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went
wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man
is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this
hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band
do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant
train of syllogisms. It may be hoped that in time anybody will
be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch
the patient young and is provided by the State with money
and equipment.
Man muß das Wahre immer wiederholen, weil auch der Irrtum um uns her immer wieder gepredigt wird, und zwar nicht von einzelnen, sondern von der Masse. In Zeitungen und Enzyklopädien, auf Schulen und Universitäten, überall ist der Irrtum oben auf, und es ist ihm wohl und behaglich, im Gefühl der Majorität, die auf seiner Seite ist. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Transl.: Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.)
The following statistical tools are of great value in this context because they enable researchers to investigate Wikipedia (e.g., “Edit Wars”) in an empirical fashion (see also Aceto & Pescapé, 2015; Darer, Farnan, & Wright, 2018; Gosain, Agarwal, Shekhawat, Acharya, & Chakravarty, 2018; Wright, Darer, & Farnan, 2018):
Darer, A., Farnan, O., & Wright, J. (2018). Automated discovery of internet censorship by web crawling. In WebSci 2018 – Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science. doi.org/10.1145/3201064.3201091
Gosain, D., Agarwal, A., Shekhawat, S., Acharya, H. B., & Chakravarty, S. (2018). Mending wall: On the implementation of censorship in India. In Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, LNICST. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78813-5_21
Rackley, M. (2009). Internet Archive. In Encylopedia of Library and Information Science, 3rd edition (pp. 2966–2976). doi.org/10.1081/E-ELIS3-120044284
Wright, J., Darer, A., & Farnan, O. (2018). On identifying anomalies in tor usage with applications in detecting internet censorship. In WebSci 2018 – Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science. doi.org/10.1145/3201064.3201093
José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado (August 8, 1915 – September 15, 2011) was a Spanish professor of physiology at Yale University, famed for his research on mind control through electrical stimulation of the brain.
Delgrado used permanent brain implants to control behaviour. Later he utilised non-inversive methods.
José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado (1969). Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. Harper and Row. ISBN 978-0-06-090208-7.
Delgado JM (1977–1978). “Instrumentation, working hypotheses, and clinical aspects of neurostimulation”. Applied Neurophysiology. 40 (2–4): 88–110.
Delgado, Jose M.; et al. Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and recording in Completely Free Patients, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol 147(4), 1968, 329-340.
Delgado, José M.R. (1964). Free Behavior and Brain Stimulation. International Review of Neurobiology. 6. pp. 349–449. doi:10.1016/S0074-7742(08)60773-4.
Abstract - Free behaviour and brain stimulation (1964)
Of the methods used to investigate the neurophysiological basis of behavior, perhaps the most direct and dramatic is electrical stimulation of the brain. Direct stimulation of the brain is considered a crude method for the exploration of cerebral functions, and the understanding of the results is limited. The chapter describes methodology for cinemanalysis, telerecording, and telestimulation to study free behavior during brain stimulation. It also demonstrates that spontaneous activities are recorded, identified and quantified, allowing the systematic study of free and evoked behavior on both individual and social levels. The chapter also discusses the types and significance of behavior evoked by brain stimulation in unrestrained subjects and presents a theory of fragmental organization of behavior. Brain stimulation evokes (1) stereotyped tonic or phasic activity without any emotional disturbance, (2) driving activity to reach an objective with a motor performance adapted to the relations between subject and purpose, (3) changes in behavioral tuning that are detected in isolated animals because of the lack of manifestations, but may modify decisively the character of response to normal stimuli, (4) inhibition of spontaneous or evoked behavior, and (5) abnormal effects such as tremor or seizures. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0074774208607734
Rodríguez Delgado’s research interests centered on the use of electrical signals to evoke responses in the brain. His earliest work was with cats, but he later did experiments with monkeys and humans, including psychiatric patients.[3][4]
Much of Rodríguez Delgado’s work was with an invention he called a stimoceiver, a radio which joined a stimulator of brain waves with a receiver which monitored E.E.G. waves and sent them back on separate radio channels. Some of these stimoceivers were as small as half-dollars. This allowed the subject of the experiment full freedom of movement while allowing the experimenter to control the experiment. This was a great improvement from his early equipment which included visual disturbance in those whose wires ran from the brain to bulky equipment that both recorded data and delivered the desired electrical charges to the brain. This early equipment, while not allowing for a free range of movement, was also the cause of infection in many subjects.[5]
The stimoceiver could be used to stimulate emotions and control behavior. According to Rodríguez Delgado, “Radio Stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses.” Rodríguez Delgado stated that “brain transmitters can remain in a person’s head for life. The energy to activate the brain transmitter is transmitted by way of radio frequencies.”[6]
Using the stimoceiver, Rodríguez Delgado found that he could not only elicit emotions, but he could also elicit specific physical reactions. These specific physical reactions, such as the movement of a limb or the clenching of a fist, were achieved when Rodríguez Delgado stimulated the motor cortex. A human whose implants were stimulated to produce a reaction were unable to resist the reaction and so one patient said “I guess, doctor, that your electricity is stronger than my will”. Some consider one of Rodríguez Delgado‘s most promising finds is that of an area called the septum within the limbic region. This area, when stimulated by Rodríguez Delgado, produced feelings of strong euphoria. These euphoric feelings were sometimes strong enough to overcome physical pain and depression.[2]
Rodríguez Delgado created many inventions and was called a “technological wizard” by one of his Yale colleagues. Other than the stimoceiver, Rodríguez Delgado also created a “chemitrode” which was an implantable device that released controlled amounts of a drug into specific brain areas. Rodríguez Delgado also invented an early version of what is now a cardiac pacemaker.[2]
In Rhode Island, Rodríguez Delgado did some work at what is now a closed mental hospital. He chose patients who were “desperately ill patients whose disorders had resisted all previous treatments” and implanted electrodes in about 25 of them. Most of these patients were either schizophrenics or epileptics. To determine the best placement of electrodes within the human patients, Delgado initially looked to the work of Wilder Penfield, who studied epileptics’ brains in the 1930s, as well as earlier animal experiments, and studies of brain-damaged people.[2]
The most famous example of the stimoceiver in action occurred at a Córdoba bull breeding ranch. Rodríguez Delgado stepped into the ring with a bull which had had a stimoceiver implanted within its brain. The bull charged Delgado, who pressed a remote control button which caused the bull to stop its charge. Always one for theatrics, he taped this stunt and it can be seen today.[7] The region of the brain Rodríguez Delgado stimulated when he pressed the hand-held transmitter was the caudate nucleus. This region was chosen to be stimulated because the caudate nucleus is involved in controlling voluntary movements.[2] Rodríguez Delgado claimed that the stimulus caused the bull to lose its aggressive instinct.
Although the bull incident was widely mentioned in the popular media, Rodríguez Delgado believed that his experiment with a female chimpanzee named Paddy was more significant. Paddy was fitted with a stimoceiver linked to a computer that detected the brain signal called a spindle which was emitted by her part of the brain called the amygdala. When the spindle was recognized, the stimoceiver sent a signal to the central gray area of Paddy’s brain, producing an ‘aversive reaction’. In this case, the aversive reaction was an unpleasant or painful feeling. The result of the aversive reaction to the stimulus was a negative feedback to the brain.[2] Within hours her brain was producing fewer spindles as a result of the negative feedback.[8] As a result, Paddy became “quieter, less attentive and less motivated during behavioral testing”. Although Paddy’s reaction was not exactly ideal, Rodríguez Delgado hypothesized that the method used on Paddy could be used on others to stop panic attacks, seizures, and other disorders controlled by certain signals within the brain.[2] [9][10]
Publication
José Rodríguez Delgado authored 134 scientific publications within two decades (1950-1970) on electrical stimulation on cats, monkeys and patients – psychotic and non-psychotic. In 1963, New York Times featured his experiments on their front page. Rodríguez Delgado had implanted a stimoceiver in the caudate nucleus of a fighting bull. He could stop the animal mid-way that would come running towards a waving red flag.[11]
He was invited to write his book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society as the forty-first volume in a series entitled World Perspectives edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. In it Rodríguez Delgado has discussed how we have managed to tame and civilize our surrounding nature, arguing that now it was time to civilize our inner being. The book has been a centre of controversy since its release.[1] The tone of the book was challenging and the philosophical speculations went beyond the data. Its intent was to encourage less cruelty, and a more benevolent, happier, better man, however it clashed religious sentiments.
José Rodríguez Delgado continued to publish his research and philosophical ideas through articles and books for the next quarter century. He in all wrote over 500 articles and six books. His final book in 1989, was named Happiness and had 14 editions.
Delgado later learned he could duplicate the results he got with the stimoceiver without any implants at all, using only specific types of electromagnetic radiation interacting with the brain. He lamented he didn’t have access to the technology when Franco was in power, as it would have allowed him to control the dictator at a distance.
Maggie Scarf (1971-11-25). “Brain Researcher Jose Delgado Asks “What Kind of Humans Would We Like to Construct?““. New York Times.
Delgado JM (1977–1978). “Instrumentation, working hypotheses, and clinical aspects of neurostimulation”. Applied Neurophysiology. 40 (2–4): 88–110. doi:10.1159/000102436. PMID101139.
Books
Elliot S. Valenstein (1973). Brain Control: A Critical Examination of Brain Stimulation and Psychosurgery. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN978-0-471-89784-2.
Delgado, J. M. R.. (1970). SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES. Zygon®
“A brief study of the generic features of science and of man’s patterns of behaviour shows that there is scope for the establishment of a science in the field of human values. an essential premise to the argument is that there can be an absolute form of contingence without absolute determination of the actual course of events, the law of nature providing alternative consequences depending on the subject’s choice of action.”
Blackwell, B.. (2012). Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado. Neuropsychopharmacology
“Presents an obituary of jose manuel rodriguez delgado (1915-2011). jose enrolled in madrid medical school in 1933 to study both medicine and physiology. in 1936, the spanish civil war erupted, his mentor juan negri fled the country and jose joined the republican side as a medical corpsman. from 1942 to 1950, he began research in neurophysiology on selective brain ablation and electrical stimulation in animals, published 14 articles and won several prizes. in 1950, delgado won a scholarship to the yale university in the department of physiology under the direction of john fulton whose pioneer work on pre-frontal lobotomy in chimpanzees encouraged the portuguese psychiatrist egas moniz to perform the operation in schizophrenic patients, for which he received the noble prize in 1949. delgado positioned himself between growing disapproval of mutilating brain surgery and his own belief that electrical stimulation of specific brain areas was scientifically superior to oral administration of drugs whose effects were mitigated by liver metabolism, the blood-brain barrier, and uncertain distribution. in the last years of his life, jose and his wife returned to america and lived in san diego where he died unheralded. unjustly treated and harshly judged by segments of the public and his profession, jose delgado’s ground breaking research, benevolent philosophy, and memory deserve better recognition. his career trajectory may provide budding scientists with a cautionary note about the pitfalls of mingling science with philosophy. (psycinfo database record (c) 2016 apa, all rights reserved)”
Delgado-García, J. M.. (2000). Why move the eyes if we can move the head?. Brain Research Bulletin
“To see while moving is a very basic and integrative sensorimotor function in vertebrates. to maintain visual acuity, the oculomotor system provides efficient compensatory eye movements for head and visual field displacements. other types of eye movement allow the selection of new visual targets and binocular vision and stereopsis. motor and premotor neuronal circuits involved in the genesis and control of eye movements are briefly described. the peculiar properties and robust biomechanics of the oculomotor system have allowed it to survive almost unchanged through vertebrate evolution. (c) 2000 elsevier science inc.”
Delgado-García, J. M.. (2001). Estructura y función del cerebelo. Revista de Neurologia
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“INTRODUCTION the cerebellum is a neural structure, of a crystalline like organization, present in all vertebrates. its progressive growth from fishes to mammals, and particularly in primates, takes place following the repetition of a primitive cellular plan and connectivity. development the cerebellum is organized in folia located one behind the other in the rostrocaudal axis, and placed transversally on the brain stem. the cerebellar cortex has five types of neuron: purkinje, stellate, basket, golgi and granule cells. apart from granule cells, the other cell types are inhibitory in nature. afferent fibers to the cerebellar cortex are of two types (mossy and climbing) and carry information from somatosensory, vestibular, acoustic and visual origins, as well as from the cerebral cortex and other brain stem and spinal motor centers. the only neural output from the cerebellar cortex is represented by purkinje axons that synapse on the underlying deep nuclei. cerebellar nuclei send their axons towards many brain stem centers and, by thalamic relay nuclei, act on different cortical areas. functionally, the cerebellum seems to be organized in small modules, similar in structure, but different in the origin and end of their afferent and efferent fibers. the cerebellum is involved in the coordination or integration of motor and cognitive processes. conclusion although cerebellar lesion does not produce severe motor paralysis, loss of sensory inputs or definite deficits in cognitive functions, its certainly affects motor performance and specific perceptive and cognitive phenomena.”
Wilder, J.. (2018). Physical Control of the Mind. Toward a Psychocivilized Society. American Journal of Psychotherapy
“Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jos%c3%a9_manuel_rodriguez_delgado josé manuel rodriguez delgado from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia jump to: navigation, search ‘jose delgado’ redirects here. for the comic book character, see gangbuster. text document with red question mark.svg tthis article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (may 2010) dr. josé manuel rodriguez delgado (born august 8, 1915) is a spanish professor of physiology at yale university, famed for his research into mind control through electrical stimulation of regions in the brain. contents [hide] * 1 biography * 2 research * 3 references * 4 further reading * 5 external links [edit] biography delgado was born in ronda, spain in 1915. he received a doctor of medicine degree from the university of madrid just before the outbreak of the spanish civil war, in which he served as a medical corpsman on the republican side. after the war he had to repeat his m.d. degree, and then took a ph.d. at the cajal institute in madrid. ”
Molaee-Ardekani, B., Márquez-Ruiz, J., Merlet, I., Leal-Campanario, R., Gruart, A., Sánchez-Campusano, R., … Wendling, F.. (2013). Effects of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) on cortical activity: A computational modeling study. Brain Stimulation
“Of the methods used to investigate the neurophysiological basis of behavior, perhaps the most direct and dramatic is electrical stimulation of the brain. direct stimulation of the brain is considered a crude method for the exploration of cerebral functions, and the understanding of the results is limited. the chapter describes methodology for cinemanalysis, telerecording, and telestimulation to study free behavior during brain stimulation. it also demonstrates that spontaneous activities are recorded, identified and quantified, allowing the systematic study of free and evoked behavior on both individual and social levels. the chapter also discusses the types and significance of behavior evoked by brain stimulation in unrestrained subjects and presents a theory of fragmental organization of behavior. brain stimulation evokes (1) stereotyped tonic or phasic activity without any emotional disturbance, (2) driving activity to reach an objective with a motor performance adapted to the relations between subject and purpose, (3) changes in behavioral tuning that are detected in isolated animals because of the lack of manifestations, but may modify decisively the character of response to normal stimuli, (4) inhibition of spontaneous or evoked behavior, and (5) abnormal effects such as tremor or seizures.”
Delgado, J. M. R., Hamlin, H., & Chapman, W. P.. (1952). Technique of Intracranial Electrode Implacement for Recording and Stimulation and its Possible Therapeutic Value in Psychotic Patients. Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery
“THe method for the permanent placement of multiple lead electrodes in the brain of animals was developed by one of us four years ago. during this time, its use in the conscious cat and monkey has revealed that motor effects and changes in behavior can be elicited by electrical stimulation of various parts of the brain; the placement of the electrode has not been associated with infection and during several months time has caused only slight gliosis formation about the needle electrode. with this experience in animals and in the hope that it might be helpful in establishing a more physiological basis for psychosurgical procedures, we have modified this technique for use in psychotic patients.”
Delgado-García, J. M., & Gruart, A.. (2005). Firing activities of identified posterior interpositus nucleus neurons during associative learning in behaving cats. Brain Research Reviews
Márquez-Ruiz, J., Ammann, C., Leal-Campanario, R., Ruffini, G., Gruart, A., & Delgado-García, J. M.. (2016). Synthetic tactile perception induced by transcranial alternating-current stimulation can substitute for natural sensory stimulus in behaving rabbits. Scientific Reports
“The use of brain-derived signals for controlling external devices has long attracted the attention from neuroscientists and engineers during last decades. although much effort has been dedicated to establishing effective brain-to-computer communication, computer-to-brain communication feedback for closing the loop” is now becoming a major research theme. while intracortical microstimulation of the sensory cortex has already been successfully used for this purpose, its future application in humans partly relies on the use of non-invasive brain stimulation technologies. in the present study, we explore the potential use of transcranial alternating-current stimulation (tacs) for synthetic tactile perception in alert behaving animals. more specifically, we determined the effects of tacs on sensory local field potentials (lfps) and motor output and tested its capability for inducing tactile perception using classical eyeblink conditioning in the behaving animal. we demonstrated that tacs of the primary somatosensory cortex vibrissa area could indeed substitute natural stimuli during training in the associative learning paradigm.”
The nucleus accumbens has a significant role in the cognitive processing of motivation, aversion, reward (i.e., incentive salience, pleasure, and positive reinforcement), and reinforcement learning (e.g., Pavlovian-instrumental transfer).
Sagittal MRI slice with highlighting (red) indicating the nucleus accumbens.
The nucleus accumbens (NAc or NAcc), also known as the accumbens nucleus, or formerly as the nucleus accumbens septi (Latin for nucleus adjacent to the septum) is a region in the basal forebrain rostral to the preoptic area of the hypothalamus.[1] The nucleus accumbens and the olfactory tubercle collectively form the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum and dorsal striatum collectively form the striatum, which is the main component of the basal ganglia.The dopaminergic neurons of the mesolimbic pathway project onto the GABAergic medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens and olfactory tubercle. Each cerebral hemisphere has its own nucleus accumbens, which can be divided into two structures: the nucleus accumbens core and the nucleus accumbens shell. These substructures have different morphology and functions.
Different NAcc subregions (core vs shell) and neuron subpopulations within each region (D1-type vs D2-type medium spiny neurons) are responsible for different cognitive functions. As a whole, the nucleus accumbens has a significant role in the cognitive processing of motivation, aversion, reward (i.e., incentive salience, pleasure, and positive reinforcement), and reinforcement learning (e.g., Pavlovian-instrumental transfer); hence, it has a significant role in addiction. In addition, part of the nucleus accumbens core is centrally involved in the induction of slow-wave sleep. The nucleus accumbens plays a lesser role in processing fear (a form of aversion), impulsivity, and the placebo effect. It is involved in the encoding of new motor programs as well.
Dölen, G., Darvishzadeh, A., Huang, K. W., & Malenka, R. C.. (2013). Social reward requires coordinated activity of nucleus accumbens oxytocin and serotonin. Nature
“Social behaviours in species as diverse as honey bees and humans promote group survival but often come at some cost to the individual. although reinforcement of adaptive social interactions is ostensibly required for the evolutionary persistence of these behaviours, the neural mechanisms by which social reward is encoded by the brain are largely unknown. here we demonstrate that in mice oxytocin acts as a social reinforcement signal within the nucleus accumbens core, where it elicits a presynaptically expressed long-term depression of excitatory synaptic transmission in medium spiny neurons. although the nucleus accumbens receives oxytocin-receptor-containing inputs from several brain regions, genetic deletion of these receptors specifically from dorsal raphe nucleus, which provides serotonergic (5-hydroxytryptamine; 5-ht) innervation to the nucleus accumbens, abolishes the reinforcing properties of social interaction. furthermore, oxytocin-induced synaptic plasticity requires activation of nucleus accumbens 5-ht1b receptors, the blockade of which prevents social reward. these results demonstrate that the rewarding properties of social interaction in mice require the coordinated activity of oxytocin and 5-ht in the nucleus accumbens, a mechanistic insight with implications for understanding the pathogenesis of social dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism.”
Trezza, V., Damsteegt, R., Achterberg, E. J. M., & Vanderschuren, L. J. M. J.. (2011). Nucleus Accumbens -Opioid Receptors Mediate Social Reward. Journal of Neuroscience
“Positive social interactions are essential for emotional well-being and proper behavioral development of young individuals. here, we studied the neural underpinnings of social reward by investigating the involvement of opioid neurotransmission in the nucleus accumbens (nac) in social play behavior, a highly rewarding social interaction in adolescent rats. intra-nac infusion of morphine (0.05-0.1 μg) increased pinning and pouncing, characteristic elements of social play behavior in rats, and blockade of nac opioid receptors with naloxone (0.5 μg) prevented the play-enhancing effects of systemic morphine (1 mg/kg, s.c.) administration. thus, stimulation of opioid receptors in the nac was necessary and sufficient for morphine to increase social play. intra-nac treatment with the selective μ-opioid receptor agonist [d-ala(2),n-mephe(4),gly(5)-ol]enkephalin (damgo) (0.1-10 ng) and the μ-opioid receptor antagonist cys-tyr-d-trp-arg-thr-pen-thr-nh(2) (ctap) (0.3-3 μg) increased and decreased social play, respectively. the δ-opioid receptor agonist dpdpe ([d-pen(2),d-pen(5)]-enkephalin) (0.3-3 μg) had no effects, whereas the κ-opioid receptor agonist u69593 (n-methyl-2-phenyl-n-[(5r,7s,8s)-7-(pyrrolidin-1-yl)-1-oxaspiro[4.5]dec-8-yl]acetamide) (0.01-1 μg) decreased social play. intra-nac treatment with β-endorphin (0.01-1 μg) increased social play, but met-enkephalin (0.1-5 μg) and the enkephalinase inhibitor thiorphan (0.1-1 μg) were ineffective. damgo (0.1-10 ng) increased social play after infusion into both the shell and core subregions of the nac. last, intra-nac infusion of ctap (3 μg) prevented the development of social play-induced conditioned place preference. these findings identify nac μ-opioid receptor stimulation as an important neural mechanism for the attribution of positive value to social interactions in adolescent rats. altered nac μ-opioid receptor function may underlie social impairments in psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, or personality disorders.”
Day, J. J., Roitman, M. F., Wightman, R. M., & Carelli, R. M.. (2007). Associative learning mediates dynamic shifts in dopamine signaling in the nucleus accumbens. Nature Neuroscience
“The ability to predict favorable outcomes using environmental cues is an essential part of learned behavior. dopamine neurons in the midbrain encode such stimulus-reward relationships in a manner consistent with contemporary learning models, but it is unclear how encoding this translates into actual dopamine release in target regions. here, we sampled dopamine levels in the rat nucleus accumbens on a rapid (100 ms) timescale using electrochemical technology during a classical conditioning procedure. early in conditioning, transient dopamine-release events signaled a primary reward, but not predictive cues. after repeated cue-reward pairings, dopamine signals shifted in time to predictive cue onset and were no longer observed at reward delivery. in the absence of stimulus-reward conditioning, there was no shift in the dopamine signal. consistent with proposed roles in reward prediction and incentive salience, these results indicate that rapid dopamine release provides a reward signal that is dynamically modified by associative learning.”
Wise, R.. (1989). Brain Dopamine And Reward. Annual Review of Psychology
“While the evidence is strong that dopamine plays some fundamental and special role in the rewarding effects of brain stimulation, psychomotor stimulants, opiates, and food, the exact nature of that role is not clear. one thing is clear: dopamine is not the only reward transmitter, and dopaminergic neurons are not the final common path for all rewards. dopamine antagonists and lesions of the dopamine systems appear to spare the rewarding effects of nucleus accumbens and frontal cortex brain stimulation (simon et al 1979) and certainly spare the rewarding effects of apomorphine (roberts & vickers 1988). it is clear that reward circuitry is multisynaptic, and since dopamine cells do not send axons to each other or receive axons from each other, dopamine can at best serve as but a single link in this circuitry. if dopamine is not a final common path for all rewards, could it be an intermediate common path for most rewards? some workers have argued against such a view, but at present they must do so on incomplete evidence. for example, phillips (1984) has argued that there must be multiple reward systems, functionally independent and organized in parallel with one another. his primary evidence, however, is the fact that brain stimulation is rewarding at different levels of the nervous system. as we have seen in the case of midline mesencephalic stimulation, the location of the electrode tip in relation to the dopamine cells and fibers tells us little about the role of dopamine in brain stimulation reward. it seems clear that the ventral tegmental dopamine system plays a critical role in midline mesencephalic reward, despite the distance from the electrode tip to the dopamine cells where morphine causes its dopamine-dependent facilitory effects or to the dopamine terminals where low-dose neuroleptics presumably cause theirs. until pharmacological challenge has been extended to the cases discussed by phillips, we can only speculate as to the role of dopamine in each of those cases. in the cases where pharmacological challenge has been examined, only nucleus accumbens and frontal cortex have been found to have dopamine-independent reward sites. it is not consistent with the dopamine hypothesis that dopamine-independent reward sites should exist in these areas, since any reward signals carried to nucleus accumbens or frontal cortex by dopamine fibers would-unless we are to believe that reward ‘happens’ at these sites-have to be carried to the next stage of the c…”
www.uni-kiel.de/psychologie/mausfeld/ Mausfeld_Why do the lambs remain silent_2015
Mausfeld focuses on perceptual psychology and also works on the theoretical foundations of experimental psychology and the psychology of understanding. He also deals with the rivalry of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience in cognitive science. Another area of interest is the history of ideas in the natural sciences. He sees a major problem of the relationship between psychology and biology in neurological neo-reductionism. In contrast to biologistic approaches, he sees the peculiarity of the spiritual, inter alia, in the intrinsic multiperspectivity of the mind.
Mausfeld points out that knowledge of neural circuitry and activity is not enough to explain consciousness and thought processes. Not even the behavior of nematodes can be deduced from the activity of their 302 neurons. According to Mausfeld’s view, the relationship between nature and mind must be below the neural level in the sphere of physics. Evidence is given by the fact that nature is actually more enigmatic to us than our consciousness in itself. In modern physics it has become clear that the physical does not have the properties of matter ascribed to it. Mausfeld sees the special aspect of consciousness in the simplicity and wholeness of the subjective experience, which, however, reveals itself to the psychologist as a complex interaction of unconscious factors. The intrinsic multiperspectivity of thinking, which first opens up the possibilities for thought and action alternatives to humans after mouse field, results from the complex interplay of the most varied of factors. White torture and responsibility of science
In his work, Mausfeld illustrates the role of psychologists in the development, application and justification of modern white torture methods. These goals are not, as claimed, the extraction of information, but rather breaking the will, disciplining, humiliating and shaming the victims. In his account, an American Psychological Association (APA) working group to investigate the involvement of psychologists acting on behalf of the Defense Secretary. Mausfeld uses the example of torture research to define ethical and legal principles and limits of scientific work. He regards the observance of human rights as fully binding.
Mausfeld, R.. (2009). Psychology , ’ white torture ’ and the responsibility of scientists. Psychologische Rundschau
According to Mausfeld, the cognitive ones are more important than the affective techniques, since opinions are more stable than emotions. Here Mausfeld examines the following methods:
Representation of facts as opinion
Fragmenting coherent facts so that the context, such as the historical context, is lost
Decontextualization of facts: The context of the facts is removed, so that the facts become incomprehensible isolated individual cases, which have no general relevance
Misleading recontextualization: Information is embedded in a foreign context, so that they take on a different character and, for example, no longer lead to outrage in human rights violations.
Repetition supports the “perceived truth”
Designing the range of opinions so that the desired seems to be in the middle, which most people strive for, if they are unfamiliar, because they then keep to the middle seein it as “neutral and balanced”
Making facts invisible through media selection, distraction and attention control
“Meta-propaganda”: It is part of every propaganda to claim that the news of the enemy is wrong because it is propaganda
The development of more efficient manipulation techniques rests on identifying psychological “weak spots” – those intrinsic design aspects of our mind and principles of human information processing that can be exploited for manipulation purposes. Most importantly, such principles are, by the very nature of our cognitive architecture, beyond conscious control. (…) Our mind has many hard-wired weaknesses that can be exploited for manipulative purposes, that facilitate our utilitarian abuse by the political and economic elites for maintaining and expanding their power. However, we also innately dispose of a rich repertoire of ways to use our reasoning capabilities to recognize manipulative contexts and to actively avoid them. This repertoire is akin to a natural cognitive immune system against being manipulated, but we have to take the deliberate decision to actually use it.
“The cognitive neurosciences are based on the idea that the level of neurons or neural networks constitutes a privileged level of analysis for the explanation of mental phenomena. this paper brings to mind several arguments to the effect that this presumption is ill-conceived and unwarranted in light of what is currently understood about the physical principles underlying mental achievements. it then scrutinizes the question why such conceptions are nevertheless currently prevailing in many areas of psychology. the paper argues that corresponding conceptions are rooted in four different aspects of our common-sense conception of mental phenomena and their explanation, which are illegitimately transferred to scientific enquiry. these four aspects pertain to the notion of explanation, to conceptions about which mental phenomena are singled out for enquiry, to an inductivist epistemology, and, in the wake of behavioristic conceptions, to a bias favoring investigations of input-output relations at the expense of enquiries into internal principles. to the extent that the cognitive neurosciences methodologically adhere to these tacit assumptions, they are prone to turn into a largely a-theoretical and data-driven endeavor while at the same time enhancing the prospects for receiving widespread public appreciation of their empirical findings.”
Mausfeld, R., & Heyer, D.. (2012). Colour Perception: Mind and the physical world. Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World
“ContentsnPrefacen1. perspectives on colour space , jan j. koenderink and andrea j. van doornncommentaries: from physics to perception through colorimetry: a bridge too far? , donald i.a. macleodncolorimetry fortified , paul whittlen2. light adaptation, contract adaptation, and human colour vision , michael a. websterncommentary: adaptation and the ambiguity of response measures with respect to internal structure , franz fauln3. contrast colours , paul whittlencommentaries: a background to color vision , michael a. websterncontrast coding and what else? , hans irteln4. colour and the processing of chromatic information , michael d’zmurancommentary: the processing of chromatic information , laurence t. maloneyn5. the pleistochrome: optimal opponent codes for natural colours , donald i.a. macleod and t. von der twerncommentary: thinking outside the black box , michael a. webstern6. objectivity and subjectivity revisited: colour as a psychobiological property , gary hatfieldncommentary: why is this game still being played? , paul whittlen7. a computational analysis of colour constancy , donald i.a. macleod and jurgen golzncommentary: the importance of realistic models of surface and light in the study of human colour vision , laurence t. maloneyn8. backgrounds and illuminants: the yin and yang of colour constancy , richard o. brownncommentaries: colour construction , don hoffmannfitting linear models to data , laurence t. maloneyn9. surface colour perception and environmental constraints , laurence t. maloneyncommentaries: on the function of colour vision , gary hatfieldnintrinsic colours – and what it is like to see them , zoltan jacobn10. colour constancy: developing empirical tests of computational models , david h. brainard, james m. kraft, and philippe longerencommentaries: surface colour perception and its environments , laurence t. maloneyncomparing the behaviour of machine vision algorithms and human observers , vebjorn ekroll and jurgen golzn11. the illuminant estimation hypothesis and surface colour perception , laurence t. maloney and joong nam yangncommentary: surface colour appearance in nearly natural images , david h. brainardn12. the interaction of colour and motion , donald d. hoffmanncommentary: the interaction of perceived colour and perceived motion , richard brownn13. the dual coding of colour: ‘Surface colour’ and ‘illumination colour’ as constituents of the representationalformat of perceptual primitives…”
Mausfeld, R.. (2005). The Physicalistic Trap in Perception Theory. In Perception and the Physical World
“This chapter contains sections titled: * introduction * the physicalistic trap in elementaristic approaches to perception * the physicalistic trap in functionalist and computational approaches to perception * perception theory beyond the physicalistic trap * appendix * acknowledgement * notes * references”
Mausfeld, R.. (2012). Der Schein des Realen.. Näher Dran? Zur Phänomenologie Des Wahrnehmens
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“Die traditionelle wahrnehmungspsychologie hat durch ihre physiologistische und physikalistische orientierung und die damit verbundene fokussierung auf elementaristische wahrnehmungsattribute die interne struktur der wahrnehmung und damit die explanatorischen aufgaben der wahrnehmungs- psychologie in grundlegender weise mißverstanden. ihre zugangsweise ist nicht nur phänomenolo- gisch inadäquat, sondern hat sich auch explanatorisch als unfruchtbar erwiesen. dieser beitrag zeigt dies am beispiel des wahrnehmungsattributs ‚phänomenal real’ auf, das in der traditionellen wahr- nehmungspsychologie als wenig erklärungsbedürftig angesehen wird. tatsächlich stellt jedoch ‚real‘ ein internes attribut dar, dessen zuweisung zu wahrnehmungsobjekten und situationen eigenen psychologischen gesetzmäßigkeiten folgt, die sich aus physiologistischer und physikalistischer per- spektive nicht verstehen lassen. erst in den letzten jahren wird im zusammenhang mit problemen, die sich insbesondere bei virtual reality environments ergeben, die frage nach den auslösebedingungen für das attribut ‚real’ wieder thematisiert. offensichtlich verfügt unser wahrnehmungssystem über eine (biologisch vorgegebene und kulturell überformte) ‚interne semantik‘ für die zuschreibung des attributes ‚real‘, von deren komplexen möglichkeiten wir in der kultur (z.b. beim film oder theater) vielfältigen gebrauch machen. i.”
Mausfeld, R.. (2009). Psychologie, weiße folter’ und die verantwortlichkeit von wissenschaftlern. Psychologische Rundschau
Wendt, G., Faul, F., & Mausfeld, R.. (2008). Highlight disparity contributes to the authenticity and strength of perceived glossiness. Journal of Vision
“The disparity of highlights on specular reflecting surfaces usually differs from the disparity of the surface points. a. kirschmann (1895) proposed that this fact may be used as a binocular cue for gloss perception. this was confirmed by a. blake and h. bülthoff (1990) who found that subjects judged the glossiness of convex ellipsoidal surfaces as most realistic if the disparity of the highlights was close to the physical correct one. extending on this finding, we investigate more closely whether the effect of highlight disparity depends on the sharpness of the highlight and the relative amount of diffuse and specular reflection. we measured the effect of highlight disparity on both perceived strength and perceived authenticity of gloss. we used complex, three-dimensional curved surfaces that were stereoscopically presented on a crt. the reflection characteristics were varied using the phong lighting model. highlights were presented either with or without highlight disparity. in a rating experiment, subjects were asked to judge the strength and the authenticity of the perceived surface glossiness. the presence of highlight disparity lead to an enhancement of both the authenticity and the strength of perceived glossiness. the latter finding was confirmed in an additional matching experiment.”
Mausfeld, R.. (2010). Psychologie, biologie, kognitive neurowissenschaften zur gegenwärtigen dominanz neuroreduktionistischer positionen zu ihren stillschweigenden grundannahmen. Psychologische Rundschau
“The cognitive neurosciences are based on the idea that the level of neurons constitutes a privileged level of analysis for the explanation of mental phenomena. this paper brings to mind several arguments to elucidate that this presumption is ill-conceived and unwarranted in light of what is currently understood about the physical principles underlying mental achievements. it then scrutinizes the question why nevertheless such conceptions are currently prevailing in many areas of psychology. the paper argues that neuroreductionist conceptions are rooted in four different aspects of our common-sense conception of mental phenomena and their explanation that are illegitimately transferred to scientific inquiry. these four aspects pertain to the notion of explanation, to conceptions about which mental phenomena are singled out for inquiry, to an inductivist epistemology, and, in the wake of behavioristic conceptions, to a bias favoring investigations of input-output relations at the expense of inquiries into internal principles. to the extent that the cognitive neurosciences methodologically adhere to these tacit assumptions, they are prone to turn into a largely atheoretical and data-driven endeavour while at the same time receiving wide-spread public appreciation of their empirical findings. (psycinfo database record (c) 2012 apa, all rights reserved)”
Heyer, D., & Mausfeld, R.. (2002). Perception and the physical world: psychological and philosophical issues in perception. Perception
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“The focus of this book is on conceptual and philosophical issues of perception including the classic notion of unconscious inferences in perception. the book consists of contributions from a group of internationally renowned researchers who spent a year together as distinguised fellows at the german centre for advanced study. each chapter concludes with a lively, informative debate in the form of comments and replies from the contributors of the book. contributors are of prominent international reputation each chapter concludes with comments and replies from the contributors of the book to give informative debate the only book available to blend perception and philosophy in this fashion”
Narens, L., & Mausfeld, R.. (1992). On the Relationship of the Psychological and the Physical in Psychophysics. Psychological Review
“Presents a theory of the relationship of the psychological and the physical and uses it to formulate a new kind of meaningfulness principle for psychophysical application. this new principle calls into question the psychological relevance of many kinds of quantitative psychophysical relationships. as an illustration, it is used to study comparisons of sensitivity involving weber fractions, particularly comparisons across sensory modalities. the methods of the illustration extend easily to other psychophysical situations. (psyclit database copyright 1992 american psychological assn, all rights reserved)”
Mausfeld, R.. (2012). “Colour” As Part of the Format of Different Perceptual Primitives: The Dual Coding of Colour. In Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World
“The field of colour perception has often been praised in recent years as a paradigm of cognitive science. while this certainly has some validity, it contrasts with the fact that the field makes very little contact with the sort of inquiries into mental representations to be found elsewhere in cognitive science (understood as naturalistic inquiries of the mind/brain). i find this quite puzzling, because in the earlier literature of the field it was clearly recognised-for instance by bühler, gelb, kardos, koffka-that ʹcolourʹ could be understood only as part of the general problem of perceptual representations. their insights could not, of course, take advantage of the theoretical language provided by what has been called the cognitive revolution. for that reason, and also because they were overshadowed by the success of more technical fields, they fell almost entirely into oblivion. the technical fields, successful with respect to their own specific goals, were colorimetry, neurophysiological investigations into peripheral colour coding, and more recently, functionalist-computational approaches that emphasise certain pre-given performance criteria.. the success of these fields has not been hampered by the fact that they share certain common-sense conceptions of colour, particularly the idea that colour is an autonomous attribute that can be studied almost in isolation from other perceptual attributes. because such common-sense conceptions of colour appear to be, by and large, innocuous to advances in these fields, no need has arisen so far to relinquish them. however, precisely because of the successes of these fields inquiries into colour perception, understood as the endeavour to develop explanatory frameworks for the role of ʹcolourʹ within our perceptual and cognitive architecture, have suffered a less fortunate fate. the conceptual vocabulary which inquiries into colour perception 1 borrowed from fields, such as neurophysiology, that pursue different explanatory purposes has remained alien to its intrinsic structure and has veiled its core problems. my interest in colour perception (which, a long time ago, was incited by russellʹs problems of philosophy) has been motivated by the question of how we can, within naturalistic inquiry, describe the conceptual structure with which our perceptual system is biologically endowed. such questions have long been pursued in ethology and have yielded intriguing results. the theoretical picture that is emerging h…”
Mausfeld, R.. (2013). The Attribute of Realness and the Internal Organization of Perceptual Reality. In Handbook of Experimental Phenomenology: Visual Perception of Shape, Space and Appearance
“The chapter deals with the notion of phenomenal realness, which was first systematically explored by albert michotte. phenomenal realness refers to the impression that a perceptual object is perceived to have an autonomous existence in our mind-independent world. perceptual psychology provides an abundance of phenomena, ranging from amodal completion to picture perception, that indicate that phenomenal realness is an independent perceptual attribute that can be conferred to perceptual objects in different degrees. the chapter outlines a theoretical framework that appears particularly well-suited for dealing with corresponding phenomena. according to this framework, perception can be under- stood as a triggering of conceptual forms by sensor inputs. it is argued that the attribute of phenomenal realness is based on specific types of internal evaluation functions which deal with the segregation of causes conceived as ‘external’ from those conceived as ‘internal’. these evaluation functions integrate different internal sources of ‘knowledge’ about the potential causes for the activation of conceptual forms and provide markers by which conceptual forms can be tagged as ‘external world objects’. ‘reality’,”
Mausfeld, R.. (2001). What’s within? Can the internal structure of perception be derived from regularities of the external world?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
“Page 1. table 1. commentators for special sleep and dreams issue target article and precommentary authors commentators shepard barlow hecht kubovy & epstein schwartz tenenbaum & griffiths todorovic baddeley, r., osorio, d., jbt”
Mausfeld, R., & Andres, J.. (2002). Second-order statistics of colour codes modulate transformations that effectuate varying degrees of scene invariance and illumination invariance. Perception
“We argue, from an ethology-inspired perspective, that the internal concepts ‘surface colours’ and ‘illumination colours’ are part of the data format of two different representational primitives. thus, the internal concept of ‘colour’ is not a unitary one but rather refers to two different types of ‘data structure’, each with its own proprietary types of parameters and relations. the relation of these representational structures is modulated by a class of parameterised transformations whose effects are mirrored in the idealised computational achievements of illumination invariance of colour codes, on the one hand, and scene invariance, on the other hand. because the same characteristics of a light array reaching the eye can be physically produced in many different ways, the visual system, then, has to make an ‘inference’ whether a chromatic deviation of the space-averaged colour codes from the neutral point is due to a ‘non-normal’, ie chromatic, illumination or due to an imbalanced spectral reflectance composition. we provide evidence that the visual system uses second-order statistics of chromatic codes of a single view of a scene in order to modulate corresponding transformations. in our experiments we used centre surround configurations with inhomogeneous surrounds given by a random structure of overlapping circles, referred to as seurat configurations. each family of surrounds has a fixed space-average of colour codes, but differs with respect to the covariance matrix of colour codes of pixels that defines the chromatic variance along some chromatic axis and the covariance between luminance and chromatic channels. we found that dominant wavelengths of red-green equilibrium settings of the infield exhibited a stable and strong dependence on the chromatic variance of the surround. high variances resulted in a tendency towards ‘scene invariance’, low variances in a tendency towards ‘illumination invariance’ of the infield.”
Mausfeld, R.. (2006). Wahrnehmung: Geschichte und Ansätze. In Handbuch der Allgemeinen Psychologie – Kognition
“The interpretation of the role of hla-dpb1 in unrelated haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (hsct) is subject to discussion. we have investigated the role of hla-dpb1 allele matching in hsct outcomes in 161 recipients who were hla-a, -b, -c, -drb1 and -dqb1-matched with their unrelated donors at the allelic level (10/10). in addition, we analysed the association of polymorphic amino acid mismatches of dpb1 molecule with hsct end-points, and a previously published permissiveness concept. hla-dpb1 allele mismatches were significantly associated with an increased incidence of acute graft-versus-host disease (agvhd) and worse overall survival (os). the mismatch at amino acid position 69 significantly increased the risk for transplant-related mortality (trm). risk factors for agvhd also included mismatches at positions 8, 9, 35, 76 and 84. this is to our knowledge, the first report of an in vivo effect of single amino acid mismatches on hsct outcomes. in this study, grouping of allelic mismatches into permissive and non-permissive categories and their association with transplantation end-points was relevant for trm but not for other clinical end-points.”
Mausfeld, R.. (2010). Intrinsic multiperspectivity: On the architectural foundations of a distinctive mental capacity. In Cognition and Neuropsychology: International Perspectives on Psychological Science
“Sensory systems serve to link the organism to functionally relevant aspects of the physical environment. a mobile organism requires diverse information from the biologi-cal and physical environment and about its internal state for orientation and movement in space and in order to regulate and control its body and behavior. in the course of evolution, with the increased complexity of tasks serv-ing towards orientation and behavioral control there was a growing need to interrelate the diverse sensory chan-nels and also to integrate information about the internal state of the body. this sensory integration required a regulation of awareness to develop which would be able to fi lter the external signals according to internal motiva-tional and emotional states. as sensory systems are cen-tral for behavioral control, the neuronal architecture of sensory systems is intricately interwoven with the motor system. furthermore, evolutionary considerations sug-gest that fundamental features of perception formed the basis for more abstract cognitive achievements and that the underlying general principles are thus also re fl ected in the organization of cognitive processes. for humans, the sensory integratory achievements pertain not only to haptic, visual, auditive, olfactory, and gustatory perception, but also to the perception of the body and its parts [ 6, 27 ] and the relative position of these parts in relation to each other (proprioception) and to their environment, the perception of the viscera (entero-or visceroception), the perception of pain, the perception of physiognomy and body movements and the thus communicated affective expressions and sig-nals, as well as the perception of speech, events, or time. biological species may differently exploit and utilize the physical energies impinging on the organism and organize these energies in the form of sensory modali-ties . by far the largest part of the impinging spatiotempo-ral energy pattern is not processed for biological purposes. only a highly restricted range of this energy pattern is used for the biological function of coupling the organism to its environment (e.g., humans neither can perceive the plain of polarized light nor the direction of the magnetic fi eld). the physical energy is transduced into neural codes in such a way that the particular physical origin of the resulting code is unidenti fi able (e.g., light perception at the eye may originate from optical, mechanical, or electrical stimuli). t…”
Andres, J., & Mausfeld, R.. (2008). Structural description and qualitative content in perception theory. Consciousness and Cognition
Mausfeld, R., Wendt, G., & Golz, J.. (2014). Lustrous material Appearances: Internal and external constraints on triggering conditions for binocular lustre. I-Perception
“Lustrous surface appearances can be elicited by simple image configurations with no texture or specular highlights, as most prominently illustrated by helmholtz’ demonstration of stereoscopic lustre. three types of explanatory framework have been proposed for stereoscopic lustre, which attribute the phenomenon to a binocular luminance conflict, an internalised physical regularity (helmholtz), or to a disentangling of ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’ attributes in surface representations (hering). in order to investigate these frameworks, we used haploscopically fused half-images of centre-surround configurations in which the luminances of the test patch were dynamically modulated. experiment 1 shows that stereoscopic lustre is not specifically tied to situations of a luminance conflict between the eyes. experiment 2 identifies a novel aspect in the binocular temporal dynamics that provides a physical basis for lustrous appearances, namely the occurrence of a temporal luminance counter-modulation between the eyes. this feature sheds some light on the internal principles underlying a disentangling of ‘accidental’ and ‘essential’ surface attributes. experiment 3 reveals an asymmetry between a light and a dark reference level for the counter-modulations. this finding again suggests an interpretation in terms of an internalised physical regularity with respect to the dynamics of perceiving illuminated surfaces.”
“Erich seligmann[1] fromm (march 23, 1900 – march 18, 1980) was a german social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. he was associated with what became known as the frankfurt school of critical theory.”
McLaughlin, N.. (1998). How to become a forgotten intellectual: Intellectual movements and the rise and fall of Erich Fromm. Sociological Forum
“The ideas and reputational history of german psychoanalyst and sociologist erich fromm are examined as a case study in the sociology of knowledge that explores how intellectual boundaries are constructed within and between disciplines in the modem academy, psychoanalytic institutes, and the journal and book reading publics and among the intellectual elite. the ‘rise and fall’ of erich fromm is narrated using the foil of michèle lamont’s analysis of how derrida became a dominant philosopher and influence on literary criticism. the example of how fromm became a forgotten intellectual is used to examine various models of how reputations are constructed. my analysis highlights the importance of the sectlike culture of psychoanalysis and marxism as well as the boundary-maintaining processes of academic disciplines, schools of thought, and intellectual traditions, and suggests a research agenda on orthodoxies and revisionism within intellectual movements more generally. [abstract from author]”
Fromm, E.. (2004). 1929a-e Erich Fromm Psychoanalysis and Sociology. English
“Erich fromm (1900-1980) was once a world-famous psychoanalyst and sociologist. his writings, spanning six decades, placed him among the most prolific and well-known analysts of his generation. in this paper, we outline fromm’s major themes and theoretical contributions. his unique attempts to synthesize depth psychology and a critical perspective on modern social forces make his work central to social work’s mission of alleviating oppression, fostering social justice, and facilitating emotional healing and personal growth. in resurrecting fromm, we hope to stimulate thought about some of the complex theoretical problems that inform practice.”
Brookfield, S.. (2002). Overcoming alienation as the practice of adult education: The contribution of Erich Fromm to a critical theory of adult learning and education. Adult Education Quarterly
“Erich fromm’s analysis of the commodification of contemporary life, his description of automation conformity, and his call for the overcoming of alienation represent important, though ignored. elements of the critical tradition that have great resonance for the practice of adult education. drawing particularly on the early marx of the economic and philosophical manuscripts. fromm conducted a radical, yet highly accessible, analysis of adult life and learning. he argued that learning to penetrate ideological obfuscation, and thereby overcome the alienation this obfuscation induced, was the learning task of adulthood. adult education as a force for resistance would make people aware of ideological manipulation and educate them for participatory democracy. by calling his ideas humanist, fromm ensured that his work beckoned enticingly to many educators. but his normative humanism was a militant, marxist humanism, entailing the abolition of capitalist alienation and the creation of democratic socialism. 10.1177/0741713602052002002”
Davis, H. B.. (2003). Erich Fromm and postmodernism.. Psychoanalytic Review
“While there has been some renewed interest in fromm, he has largely been neglected in the past years. i believe this is in part due to the conservative nature of political and intellectual ideas in recent years, but also because postmodernist thinking may be essentially-but not totally- inconsistent with fromm. there may be an inherent difficulty in comparing fromm’s ideas to postmodernism and its use in psychoanalysis since the two are of different time periods. i am primarily concerned with exploring selected concepts from fromm which, if not a forerunner of postmodernism in psychoanalysis, may at least have sown the seeds for the contemporary view. in discussing several postmodern ideas such as contextualization, the self, universalism, and meta-narratives, among others, i will relate fromm’s position on these issues. in his day fromm was an exponent of some of the ideas currently viewed as affirmative postmodernism. his ideas were opposed to the established orthodoxy of his day, as many of the affirmative postmodernists are today. by saying that fromm dealt with some of these issues i do not mean that the current viewpoint is simply an extension of fromm’s writings. (psycinfo database record (c) 2012 apa, all rights reserved)”
