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Consciousness: Lecture #3 Video (Mind Control)

- Psilocybin

o active ingredient in magic mushrooms (psychedelic drug)

o Psilocybin is believed to improve disorders such as depression

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Ivan Pavlovstudied the saliva produced by dogs when they consumed certain foods; he

discovered that the dogs salivated when they saw the men in white coats bringing food

- The Pavlovian response:

o Intitially interested in saliva- noticed than dogs first salivated at the sight of food,

then began to salivate when they saw others, etc. Dealt with change in reflexes.

o Then began to work with childrenno sense of ethical regulation

o take a metronome associated with an electric shock on dogsgiven enough time

the dogs would jump merely at the sound of the metronome. Pavlov discovered

that human responses can be conditioned.

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Operon conditioning: teaching of new behaviours- Skinner box

o used in E.B Skinners experiments. Pigeon follows instructions and are rewarded

if they peck or turn when a sign appears. This idea enhances the ability to

modify behaviour.

o Controlled and constant environment in boxyou could be sure you were doing

the only manipulating

o Free will was viewed as unscientific nonsense by Skinner; he tried to remove

individualism

o Wrote Walden 2 and Beyond Freedom- lays out his vision of the world, believed

that we were compositions of reinforcement behaviours

o many thought his techniques were evil and controlled, however, much of his work

makes sense

o ex; there would be no prisons, no punishments, only POSITIVE reinforcement,

like getting a quarter for parking, instead of being charged parking fees

- Applied Behaviour Analysis:reinforcing good behaviour by allowing for reward based

motivation

- William Sargant

o sought to interpret how North Korean communist brainwashing worked: sargant

thought he could break down then re-construct the brain to establish brainwashing

- Electron Shock Therapy:

- experiment performed by Sargant where 110 volts were sent into the frontal lobes of the

brain while the patient was sedated in order to wipe the brain clean. In the case of a

patient, Mary, she had huge holes in her memory. ECT disrupts and destroys memories,

but ECT failed to break strong memory bonds.

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- there were flaws in Sargants brainwashing theory

- LSD couldnt effectively alter an individual: they were unpredictable in effects and they

didnt last long.MKULTRA was run by CIA, some experiments done at McGill

- On a scanner, large blue blobs indicate parts of the brain that are inhibited during

psilocybin activity

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Hallucinogenic drugs may play a positive role in therapeutic ways; psilocybin may cure

depression

- Milgram showed through shock experiments that in the right conditions, individuals obey

authority and abandon moral (actors pretended to be severely shocked when the test

subject shocked them for receiving the wrong answer to a question. The experimenter

demanded the test subject to continue the voltage until the lethal shock, which again,

was not real, was sent through the actor; most of the test subjects ended up delivering the

lethal shock even though it voided their moral. People who delivered this lethal shock

were supposedly psychopaths, but this was not truly the case)2/3 went all the way

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According to Milgrim, societys rules must be obeyed by its participants- Robert Heath

o used experiments to map out brain activity; he used electrical stimulation

(planting electrodes into the supposed stimulating areas of the brain to change

behaviour)

o Heaths most extreme experiment was on a gay men where he showed him

softcore porn and implanted electrodes into his brain to attempt to make him

straight. Heath later hired a prostitute and the man, formerly gay, enjoyed the sex.

o Risks of implanting electrodes is high and difficult

- Misenebock

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a neuroscientist, used light to manipulate the choices flies makeo 12 cells in the central brain of a fly out of 200,000 determine if behaviour should

be changed

- Optogeniticsis the monitoring and controlling of neurons through the use of both light

and genetics