About the Event:

From its beginnings in torture and religious conversion into the age of neuroscience and social media, brainwashing has been a breakthrough tool for social, political, and religious control. Tracing these developments through many of the past century’s major conflagrations, Dr. Dimsdale narrates during the talk how when World War II erupted, governments secretly raced to develop drugs for interrogation. Brainwashing returned to the spotlight during the Cold War in the hands of the North Koreans and Chinese. In response, a huge Manhattan Project of the Mind was established to study memory obliteration, indoctrination during sleep, and hallucinogens. Cults used the techniques as well. Nobel laureates, university academics, intelligence operatives, criminals, and clerics all populate this shattering and dark story—one that hasn’t yet ended.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Dimsdale attended Carleton College and then Stanford University, where he obtained a MA in Sociology and an MD degree. He obtained psychiatric training at MGH and was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976-1985 when he moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he is now Regent Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus. His clinical subspecialty is consultation psychiatry. He is a former career awardee of the American Heart Association and is past president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He is editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychosomatic Medicine and is a previous guest editor of Circulation and former editor-at-large of Journal Psychosomatic Research. He has been a consultant to the President’s Commission on Mental Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academies of Science, the Department of Justice, NASA, and NIH and was Advisor to the UC Regents Health Sciences Committee. He was a member of the DSM 5 task force and chaired the workgroup studying somatic symptom disorders. His research interests include stress physiology, ethnicity, and sleep. He is the author of over 500 publications, including Anatomy of Malice: the enigma of the Nazi War Criminals, Yale University Press, 2016, and Dark Persuasion: the History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media, Yale University Press, 2021.