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Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)
00:53:20
An interview with Andreas Killen
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Andreas Killen
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Paul Lerner
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books in Science, Technology and Society, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm your host Paul Lerner from the University of Southern California, and I'm glad to be back after a bit of a hiatus. Today it's my great pleasure to introduce Andreas Killen, who's Professor of History at City College, New York, where he was last year. Stuart Z. Katz, professor in the Humanities and Arts. Professor Killen teaches a range of courses on modern European history, in the history of science, medicine and psychiatry, and he's a prolific author whose books include Berlin Electropolis, Shock, Nerves and German Modernity, 1973, nervous breakdown, homo Cinematica, Science Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany, as well as the book we'll be discussing today, Nervous Systems Brain Science in the Early Cold War, which was published earlier this year by HarperCollins. Welcome Andreas. It's a great pleasure to talk to you today.
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Andreas Killen
Thank you so much, Paul. It's great to be here. I'm honored to be able to talk about my book with you.
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Paul Lerner
It's a real pleasure. I enjoyed it so Much and I've read a lot of your work and obviously we go back a few years, so it's been a special pleasure to kind of see how things have developed and see where your thinking is now about a lot of issues and especially as you kind of broke into new topics here. So I want to just start by giving you an opportunity to tell listeners about yourself, to tell about how you have kind of developed over the years as a scholar, as a historian, and how this project in particular came about. So please share any autobiographical details about your intellectual journey that you'd like to share with us today.
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Andreas Killen
Sure, happy to. So yes, I mean, in some ways this book is an outgrowth of earlier work that I have done. As you mentioned, we go back a long ways. We're both German historians who focused a lot on German psychiatry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And much of my work has been in that vein. So in some ways this new book project, which does not deal with Germany, it deals with basically developments in the United States and England after the Second World War, is a sort of departure for me, but one that continues my interests, broadly speaking, in the field of medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, biomedicine and so forth. I had also written, quite a long time ago I had written a book, a book of sort of popular history about the United states in the 1970s. And some of the themes that I explored in that book too have resurfaced in the context of this project. So in some ways the book that we're talking about now, Nervous Systems, Brain Science in the Early Cold War, represents a kind of convergence of these, these somewhat separate projects that I have worked on over, over a period of many years. I, at one point, also, in the not too distant past, I co organized and co edited a special volume of a journal devoted to the history of brainwashing. I'm going to put that in scare quotes, brainwashing. And that sparked a real interest in me because again that was, that theme marks a real convergence of numerous long term interests that I've had. But then I decided that I didn't really want to write simply about brainwashing, but I really wanted to learn more about and write about the scientific kind of landscape within which it became possible to imagine something like brainwashing, which, you know, I'll just say here at the outset is a kind of mythic notion, but one that doesn't just come out of nowhere. It's, you know, it's, it's, it can, you know, there are many points of, of, of origin for this construct in, in the, in the politics of that period, but also in the science of that period. So yeah, I mean, the real kind of moment of inspiration occurred when I walked into my local bookstore. I'll give it a shout out Unnamable Books, which is a few minutes away from where I live here in Brooklyn. And I saw on the science section of the bookstore a used copy of a book called the Living Brain by a figure named Gray Walter. This book was published in 1953.
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And.
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Andreas Killen
It is a kind of. It's a work of scientific popularization which introduces its readership to many of the important developments that take place in that period in the field of brain science. And I totally fell under the spell of this book and decided that that was going to be my sort of starting point. And then I just used that as a way to open up different, different avenues in which to tell my story.
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Paul Lerner
That's great. And he's such an intriguing figure. But many of the figures you discuss in this book, some I think familiar to the readers who come to the book and others probably completely unknown and obscure. They're all eclectic and creative and a bit mad and really fascinating, I think. And in a way, I think one of the things that really brings the book alive is both the scientists or the cultural figures you talk about, but also the patients. And I wanted to kind of. One thing that's really striking is that you give a lot of attention to some patients and you include their stories kind of like between chapters, as these excurses. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that choice that you made, kind of the editorial, authorial choice about including the patients in that way and kind of how you really saw that aspect of the work you were doing.
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Andreas Killen
Yeah, sure. I mean, in certain ways this is a somewhat idiosyncratic book because as you note, there are chapters and it's conventional in that way. But these chapters are interspersed with what I choose to call clinical tales in which I do focus on the stories of certain key patients. So the chapters themselves are largely devoted to the work of different scientists and other figures who were picked up aspects of mid century research in medicine and science. But then there are a handful, I think, half a dozen or so of these tales, each of which is devoted to a certain patient. And I decided to. So to give you one example, one of the patients is the very famous patient HM or Henry Moliset. He was known as HM to preserve his confidentiality. He is, as some people claim, he's the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience. He was the subject of a kind of, of a kind of catastrophic surgical procedure that took place in the early 1950s that completely destroyed long term memory and work on him. He continued to live up until, I think he died like 15 years ago. And his case became the subject of a great deal of study that contributed to the founding of modern memory science. I really wanted to. I really wanted to include the story of a number of other patients and I simply could not figure out how to do it within the structure of my chapter. So I decided that because I wanted to include them and because I wanted to include as much as I could about the actual experiences and the complexities of those experience, the somewhat fraught ethical dimensions of the experiences of these patients, I decided it made sense to separate them out and treat them, treat them as their own subjects, as it were. So that, that's, that's, you know, that's how the book wound up being organized the way it is. I mean, I have to say I'm really, you know, I had, I had to struggle a little bit with the publisher. I mean, I think it was. They were. They found that a little bit counterintuitive. But in the end they agreed and I think they were very happy and I, my. And very happy that they agreed.
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Paul Lerner
Yes. I was wondering because it does. It's an unconventional structure and I could see, I was wondering if you had to fight for it in a way, because I could see it rankling editors and publishers. But on the other hand, it. Since the focus of most of the analysis is really on the, on the, on the scientists. It, I think it counteracts it really nicely and balances it and reminds the reader that actually these are. This is about human beings ultimately, right? Not just kind of disembodied brains, which sort of in some ways gets at some, Some of the concerns of some of the characters you talk about.
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Andreas Killen
Yeah, it would be very easy to tell this as a kind of heroic story of the remarkable breakthroughs that, you know, key figures in the history of science achieve and the way in which they, you know, kind of revolutionize our understanding of the brain and of consciousness and so forth. But that leaves out a lot. It leaves out, ultimately, it leaves out far too much.
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Paul Lerner
But since you mentioned that, that's actually a great segue because I was hoping we could kind of dive in a little bit and talk about some of those breakthroughs, many of which are still kind of part of the neuroscientific arsenal and some of which have completely Disappeared. More about that later, I think. But we can't be comprehensive. We can't go through the whole book. But if you wanted to maybe pick out a couple of interventions or developments from the 1950s, because I guess for those who haven't had a chance to read the book yet, in my reading, one of the central arguments is that the 1950s, it kind of ushers in this new era of in some ways where the brain kind of replaces the atom as the sort of. Right. The signal of scientific modernity and advancement and one with, with a kind of parallel set of political and cultural ramifications and this kind of the life sciences then sort of edge out the physical sciences in some ways as the queen of sciences or something like that. And in some ways this is pioneer powered by kind of new perspectives, new approaches, new techniques and technologies of studying the brain that allow new kinds of insights and investigations. If there are a couple or one that you'd love to share with us, I think that might be really interesting.
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Andreas Killen
Okay, yeah, happy to. Just by way of preamble, I mean, I think it's important to convey the fact that prior to this period, scientists had not really been able to study brain function and dysfunction prior to postmortem, post, post mortem investigation. I mean, the brain that was largely studied by scientists in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the brain of patients who had died. But in the, I mean, this was already beginning to develop in the decades before the 1950s, of course. But, but, but in the 1950s, several parallel lines of inquiry converged to make it possible to really kind of open up and probe what Gray Walter in his book called the Living Brain. And so in my book there are three major kind of approaches that are important to the story. One of them is something that Gray Walter himself was very closely associated with, and that is electroencephalography. So eeg, which made it possible for scientists to study brainwave, brainwave activity and to gain insight in so doing, to gain insight in an entirely new way, gain insight into the functioning and again dysfunctioning of the brain as measurable by fluctuations in brainwave activity that could be captured and recorded on the eeg. So that was quite a revolutionary development. And that in many ways the EG is probably the key technology of this moment. And I devote a lot of attention to that. If you want me to, I can briefly discuss two other.
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Paul Lerner
Sure, go ahead.
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Andreas Killen
Developments. One of them is. So one of the surprises to me in this story was the importance of epilepsy. I had gone into the book Thinking that I would be writing a lot about mental illness, and mental illness does it is a theme in the book. But I wound up, to my surprise, paying far more attention to research into epilepsy and which became, in many ways foundational for subsequent developments that led to the emergence of modern neuroscience. One of the key developments in the field of epilepsy was the work of a Montreal neurosurgeon named Walter Penfield, who was based at McGill University, who pioneered a technique that allowed him to operate on patients with epilepsy while they remain conscious. And he was able to bring relief to many of his patients. I mean, this too, was a truly revolutionary phenomenon. But in doing so, he also made some quite remarkable discoveries about the phenomena of epilepsy and the way in which it seems to be connected with, or it seemed to him to be connected with, certain kinds of experiences, hallucinations, or, as he came to believe, memories that were triggered when he lightly brushed his electrode across the surface of a patient's exposed cortex. So that is a whole fascinating story unto itself, and I basically devote a whole chapter to that. And then the last of these that I'll mention very briefly is the study of sensory deprivation, which was pioneered by Penfield's colleague Donald Hebb, a neuropsychologist. In part, this field of inquiry emerged out of Hebb's research into neurophysiology, but in part it related also to the political context of the time. This is the first decade of the Cold War. The nascent American national security state is beginning to recruit scientists, figures in the fields of brain and behavioral science, to help understand the kinds of mysterious new afflictions associated with the Cold War. Brainwashing, mind control, and so on. And sensory deprivation became very important in that it too contributed quite significantly to. Opening up the mind or opening up consciousness to science. Scientific study it became, for Hebb, in particular, it became very important as a way of kind of breaking the strangle of behaviorism over his field. Behaviorism had, through much of the preceding decades, been the kind of hegemonic discourse of psychology. And for behaviorists, human beings are known through their actions, through their behavior. Everything else was a black box. The brain, the mind, these are all black boxed. And it was Hebb, along with a group of other people, who began to pry open that black box and in so doing, to help bridge the gap between psychology and neurophysiology in ways that, again, were hugely important for subsequent developments.
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Paul Lerner
It's interesting to hear you characterize it that way, because the sort of looking for models that are more sophisticated than what the behaviorists present kind of opens up all of these new, new possibilities which then tap into some of the technologies and innovations you talked about and kind of. I think another theme that runs through the book is the status of, let's say, kind of two distinct but occasionally intertwined discourses about mind and consciousness, namely, kind of Freudian psychoanalysis on one side and Pavlov and reflexology on the other side. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how, where do Freud and Pavlov fit into this story and kind of in what ways do the changes of the 50s kind of create more space for Freudian psychoanalysis? And in what ways do they displace psychoanalysis, which had a kind of, as you point out, a kind of American heyday right after World War II?
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Andreas Killen
Yeah. So the 1950s were. They're commonly referred to in histories of psychoanalysis as a sort of golden age for that field. It's almost kind of hard to comprehend now, but over half of practicing psychiatrists in the country, I mean, these are people at leading institutions across the country, were people who had at least one foot squarely in the psychoanalytic camp. Many of them were outnote psychoanalysts. So anyways, I mean, psychoanalysis had an enormous presence in the landscape of mental health treatment during this period. But psychoanalysis really skirted the question of the relationship between its theories about the function, for instance, its theories about the ego, the superego, the unconscious. How those relate or related to, you know, the brain to neurophysiological processes was something that most psychologists, I'm sorry, most psychoanalysts preferred not to, you know, preferred not to address. For them, too, the brain was, in a certain sense, a black box. There were exceptions to that. There definitely were quite important exceptions to that. There were. There were, you know, interesting figures who during this period sought to. Sought to bridge the divide between. Between Freudianism and neurophysiology. And, you know, so some very fascinating results came out of those efforts to find a rapprochement. But in advance, in general, those efforts did not really enjoy much success. And although this was in many ways sort of the heyday of psychoanalysis is also the decade that marked the beginnings of the emergence of a whole new approach that ultimately totally displaced psychoanalysis within the landscape of mental health care. Because this is a decade in which new forms of psychopharmacology, drugs like Thorazine and other drugs, began to appear on the marketplace. And these completely transformed approaches to mental health care. So Much so that by the time we get to only a few decades later, on 1980, in the third edition of the DSM, that approach, the psychopharmacological approach, has completely vanquished psychoanalytic categories, language theories. So this is a. You know, in many ways, this is a kind of pivotal moment, a hinge moment with respect to that larger history of psychoanalysis, at least in the United States. And you would like me to say something about Pavlov?
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Paul Lerner
Sure.
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Andreas Killen
Pavlov is a really, really fascinating figure. Again, this is. I wasn't quite prepared to discover just how fascinating he is or how fascinated the scientists of this period were by his work. But he was hugely important. His work was hugely important. The historian Jack Pressman has argued that it was the Pavlovian school of experimental physiology that really became sort of the master discipline of medical science because it lent support to a whole array of technologies, techniques of kind of creating experiment, sort of experimentally creating various kinds of various forms of mental illness, neurosis, epilepsy, and so forth that could be produced and studied in the lab as a way of gaining new knowledge of these conditions. So that was. His work has a very large presence in the developments that I write about in the book. At the same time, however, it should be noted that there's a whole kind of layer of paranoia surrounding Pavlovian science because. As the Cold War got underway and as the west became increasingly alarmed by accounts of what was being done, say, to dissidents in Eastern Europe or to American prisoners of war in Korea, the notion that invasive techniques of deconditioning or reconditioning or programming or brainwashing these people was believed to have a distinctly kind of Pavlovian characteristic to it. And so there's. Pavlov is a. You know, he emerges as a. As a very ambivalent figure in this period. Even somebody like Hannah Arendt in the Origins of Totalitarianism seems to buy into a certain view that it is Pavlovian science that the totalitarian regimes are using to break down concentration camp inmates and render them docile and malle. So that's just one instance of the way in which Pavlov's undeniable influence gets sort of taken up in political discourse and in some ways woven into a very powerful, yet at the same time very problematic kind of discourse about the ways in which science is being perverted in the Soviet bloc.
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Paul Lerner
I was going to say, I guess this fact that Pavlov was Russian and the Soviets interest in Pavlov seems to have colored this at a moment of extreme Cold War paranoia, this fear of what the Soviets might be capable of and what kind of nefarious methods they might be using to brainwash populations and so forth. Yeah, even though Pavlov, I think himself, well, I guess he was long gone by then, and those applications were very far from what was what he was thinking about in his research program. Yeah.
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Paul Lerner
Yeah, so we're starting to get into politics and I think one of the in a way, one thing that makes this book similar to your earlier work is that you I think always in ways that are very suggestive and very well executed. You talk about scientific and medical ideas in political and cultural context, whether it's Weimar, German telephone operators or cinema goer discussions about the Effects of cinema on mental health and mood and so forth. These are political questions too, in addition to being scientific and medical questions and also cultural questions. So I think this book really kind of brings all of these elements into dialogue with each other in ways that are really fascinating. And I think to me, one thing that was really surprising is the way that fiction and science are kind of intertwined and that. Right. That science, of course, is the basis for fiction and science fiction in particular, and all kinds of utopian and dystopian scenarios. But it works the other way too. And so there's a lot of film and a lot of fiction among the material that you discuss here. And I thought that was. That really struck me. And it made the book. I think it makes the book probably interesting to different audiences, which is a great thing in a book. And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about this relationship between science and fiction and how it plays out through your chapters.
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Andreas Killen
Yeah. So again, maybe a little by way of clarification, my book is divided into three parts. The first part deals primarily with the scientific story of the brain in the 1950s. The second part deals with the way in which the brain enters into the politics of that moment, the politics of the Cold War. And then the third part deals with the way in which the brain finds its way into mid century culture, including mass culture. And so, yeah, I think that. How should I go about this? I mean, so maybe I'll say this. I mean, one of the kind of aha moments of my research came when I was looking at the papers of a man named Edward Hunter. So Edward Hunter was a fascinating figure in his own right. He worked for the oss, which was the predecessor to the CIA. I think he continued to have ongoing relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency after the war. But he also was a journalist. And it is Hunter who introduced the term brainwashing into Cold War discourse and played a key role in imprinting this notion of etching this notion deeply into, you know, into Western consciousness of what was at stake in the Cold War, namely the belief that the Soviets and their allies were using. Were using scientific methods of manipulation and indoctrination and programming and so forth. So one of the, as I said, one of the aha moments for me came when I was reading Hunter's papers and. And I came across a reference in a letter that he wrote to a friend of his, to this book that I mentioned already, Gray Walters, the Living Brain. So that was like a moment where these two, you know, these two quite different strands of discourse converged in a kind of beautiful moment. I have to say, I was really like that. Just lit up my face. I was very excited about that. So, you know, it turns out that people like Hunter, and not only Hunter, but others as well, were reading the works of contemporary neuroscientists and specialists in the sciences of the brain and the behavior as a way of both trying to understand what they imagined was going on behind the Iron curtain in terms of a kind of campaign of mind control and also then, you know, providing empirical evidence for a construct that always remained highly uncertain. And this also goes to your question about fiction. Because of the high degree of uncertainty and a sort of empirical, you know, shakiness of the notion of brainwashing, people found people often drew on works of fiction, say, for instance, Orwell's 1984 or Arthur Kessler's Darkness at Noon or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, to again, help them imagine and sort of make predictive claims about the true nature of totalitarian reality. Even somebody like the Soviet specialists in the American government, George Kennan, sort of one of the most important figures in the early Cold War, George Kennan, openly admitted that when he tr. He tried to imagine totalitarianism as a reality, he relied upon the fictions of Orwell and Kessler and Huxley. So fiction actually has enormously played an enormously important role in helping the west gain knowledge of the enemy and what it was prepared to do in its supposed quest for worldwide domination.
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Paul Lerner
It reminded me of White noise, the Don DeLillo book.
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Andreas Killen
Right.
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Paul Lerner
Where his ex wife, Jack's ex wife, is reading spy fiction for the CIA or something. Right. So, you know, I think he's drawing on tapping into the same vein here that you are.
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Andreas Killen
Yeah.
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Paul Lerner
And.
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Andreas Killen
But.
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Paul Lerner
But I guess there. I mean, there is a lot of fantasy. And what I'm kind of intrigued by is where fantasy and science are. You know, it's hard to know where one starts and the other continue. One stops and the other starts in some ways. Right. Because these ideas of brainwashing, as you said already, are fairly fantastical, although they are based on. They're not based on nothing, but they're also very far from being realistic.
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Andreas Killen
Yeah, I mean, I think that's. Brainwashing is such a fascinating notion, and it is. So despite the fact that. That it's a myth, I mean, I think despite the very best efforts of people like Edward Hunter, who I was just talking about, it remained a myth. And most of the sort of more sober kind of scientific or social. Scientific Experts who weighed in on this debate recognized it clearly as such. Many people in the American government recognized it clearly as such. And yet the myth produced these enormously powerful reality effects. It was this notion that authorized a massive campaign of classified research into mind control under the auspices of something called MK Ultra. The historian Alfred McCoy, in reference to the Manhattan Project, which we've all been recently reminded of now by the appearance of the film, Oppenheimer referred to this classified program, which was comparable in scope, in secrecy, and in its transgressiveness to the Manhattan Project as a Manhattan Project of the mind. So brainwashing remained throughout its history and continues to remain so up until the present day. A problematic construct, and yet one with staying power. Yeah, people took it very literally, very seriously. Yeah. And carried out all kinds of unspeakable acts in the belief that something had to be done.
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Paul Lerner
I mean, and it reminds me also of the kind of panic about hypnosis back in the 19th century, late 19th century, that people were right, which you see in Caligari in the early, you know, in the Weimar period and on through something like Manchurian Candidate, which you devote some attention to in this book.
- [38:41]
Andreas Killen
Yeah, it maps completely onto that whole discourse of hypnosis, which, as you say, goes back to the 19th century and which was both a scientific research tool and a therapeutic instrument, and also the source of tremendous anxiety and panic. And yet one finds that similar kind of complex dynamic surrounding the possibility of gaining control of subjects at a deep neural level, which. And this culminates. I mean, I've referred to MK Ultra. This was the code name given to this classified mind control research program. That program lasted for about a decade. It culminates in the year 1963 when the CIA finalized a document, a secret document called Kubark. Some of your listeners may be familiar with that name because it resurfaced in the aftermath of the torture scandal. Gubar was the manual that the CIA finalized at the end of MKUltra on interrogation. And it remains, as far as I understand, in service up until today. And it was being used by the people carrying out enhanced interrogation in the early stages of the war on terrorists. Kubark, interestingly enough, Kubark came out at more or less the exact same time that the Manchurian Candidate was released. There's an interesting chronological kind of parallel there. But what's also interesting, and this takes us back to the relationship between fiction and reality, is the way in which both Kubark and the film echo each other in key respects. They echo each other in the way that both at certain moments have to deal with the problematic reality of brainwashing. Kubark states very plainly on its first page that there is no such thing as brainwashing. There's no, you know, scientific, there's no science of mind control. And yet it goes on to act as though there is and to explore the possibility that you might be able to use certain techniques to believe, to force, you know, the person under interrogation to believe that you are exercising mind control. And in doing so, it cites certain findings, certain scientific papers and certain scientific experts, which themselves then come up in the film. There's a fascinating leakage between the classified, the COVID sphere, as the scholar Timothy Melley calls it, the COVID sphere of classified operation, and the public sphere. Much of this research is carried out under the auspices of the secrecy doctrine that was created by the National Security State. But that secrecy was never perfect. There was always leakage. Manchurian Candidate, I think, represents a very interesting form of exactly that phenomenon, that leakage.
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Paul Lerner
So interesting.
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Andreas Killen
Yeah.
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Paul Lerner
And I mean, I think film and mass culture are so important in your discussion, not only in the kind of cultural section of the book, but also kind of film as a metaphor for how the brain works and mass culture and if of discourses about the effect of mass culture on the brain. So I wondered if you could, I have just a very general question about that, if you could kind of talk about that a little bit. I know listeners will also be really fascinated in those questions and kind of the ways that you treat both film and television in this analysis.
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Andreas Killen
Right. So specialists in brain science, as they were, you know, carrying out research in whatever field they happen to occupy, turned to various kinds of metaphors to help illustrate the claims that they made about their findings. I think the best example of this is, is again to invoke Wilder Penfield, the McGill neurosurgeon. Penfield, as I mentioned earlier, claimed that by brushing an electrode over the surface of his patient's exposed brains, he could elicit certain kinds of aura like, or seizure like phenomenon, amongst which were hallucinations of various kinds. And Penfield became convinced that those hallucinations were actually records of memories. And the analogy that he used to explain this, to illustrate it for his readers was that of film. So according to Penfield, memories are, you know, memories are stored, permanently archived, inaccessible for the most for. Are often inaccessible, but permanently archived and available for replay in exactly the same way that a film is available for. For replay. Like that. So that metaphor, that metaphor became one of the dominant metaphors for, for new findings about memory. That, that became very important at that time. I mean, obviously, you know, that, that, that, that metaphor, that metaphor is no longer really given much credence nowadays because memory, it's understood that memory is not permanently archived. There's no such thing as a kind of permanent trace of memory in the way that Penfield thought he had shown. But it had an enormous influence in the same way that another prevailing metaphor of the time was the brain as a computer. That too had a long and important life in the history of neuroscience. Again, it is, I think, now recognized as a very inadequate way of kind of representing the functions of the brain. But these metaphors, I think, did and continue to play a very important kind of structuring role in, in scientific discourse.
- [45:52]
Paul Lerner
Yeah, that's great. And you started to talk about it, and I can't let you go without getting into this question of the more recent political consequences or dimensions of this topic and thinking about continuities between this kind of early Cold War brainwashing scare and the war on terror and sort of acts of torture carried out in Guantanamo as part of the U.S. counterintelligence program. So I wondered if you could, I mean, because of course, on one level, this book, I think, does have a political message. It's not always hitting the reader over the head with it. But I wondered if you could reflect on that a little bit.
- [46:32]
Andreas Killen
Yeah, I mean, I guess in some ways kind of the deep backstory to this book is, you know, the torture scandal. I mean, I, you know, I, you know, I followed that very, very closely from the moment it broke on the pages of the New Yorker and the New York Times and, and, you know, throughout the second half of the zero zeros, I, you know, I started. People like Jane meyer and Alfred McCoy and Rebecca Lamoth and others began to write about both the torture scandal and then the way in which it could be traced back to these developments that I write a little bit about in my book. And again, in this context, the sort of go to manual for enhanced interrogators in the war on terror was this document, Kubar, which was finally finalized in the early 60s. So, yeah, and one of the things that I became interested in also was the way in which. Mid century research into memory, but also into the possibility of erasing memories, Has in some ways contributed, even if only indirectly, to a kind of. I mean, the point I'm trying to make is that even while memory science became established as one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive neuroscience, memory as such, public memory, to use that term memory as such has become an extraordinarily fragile and imperiled entity. And so we are constantly. We as Americans are constantly forgetting the history of the Cold War, the history of torture conducted under American auspices. The political scientist Darius Rahali has, I think, done the best job of showing how we continually confuse the story of torture with that of the totalitarians. We like to reassure ourselves that we in the west democracies don't carry out torture. It is only the Soviets and before them the Nazis that engage in torture. But this story that begins in the 1950s and continues right up until the early part of our century suggests strongly otherwise. And that story has been told repeatedly, been told. In the 1970s, for instance, a book that I am a big fan of by the investigative journalist John Marks called In Search of the Manchurian Candidate laid out this whole sordid tale. He got access to CIA documents about MK Ultra and laid it out. The story was then completely forgotten until it then resurfaced in the aftermath or in the early years of the war on terror. And so that's, I think, you know, and again, I think the Manchurian Candidate serves as an interesting sort of parabol of this because the story is that the movie is about an amnesic patient, after all. And the key figure of Raymond Shaw's amnesia is in some sense, I think, a, you know, a metaphor for a larger. A larger case of amnesia that afflicts. Afflicts Americans in their relationship to their own history, even.
- [50:32]
Paul Lerner
Even in the study of memory itself.
- [50:34]
Andreas Killen
Exactly.
- [50:36]
Paul Lerner
Which is pretty ironic. Yeah, yeah.
- [50:38]
Andreas Killen
I mean, it's. It's just. It's. Very few people know that there were experiments in experiment. There was a form of experimental amnesia was actively researched during this period that resulted in, I mean, that inflicted enormous damage on the lives of the patients that these experiments were conducted on.
- [50:59]
Paul Lerner
Wow, that's disturbing. Well, you've been really generous with your time and this has been, I think, a really thorough discussion of the book. I won't keep you much longer, but I do want to give you a chance to tell listeners about any new projects that, that you're working on right now and what future research directions you have in mind.
- [51:21]
Andreas Killen
Yeah, I can say a few words. I mean, so one thing that I've been occupying myself with this summer is going through the papers of a man named Norbert Wiener, who is the founder of Cybernetics and is a fairly key figure in some of the developments that I write about in the 19th century cybernetics. Was this new kind of meta discipline that emerged out of the Second World War and introduced a kind of new language, a language of feedback and information and homeostasis into a number of different fields, one of them being brain science. So I had always intended to go there in part because Norbert Wiener and Gray Walter, who was one of the key figures in my book, were close friends. I'd always wanted to go there and look at the correspondence between the two men, but couldn't because of COVID So I've been able to do that this summer. I'm combing through his archives and they're quite fascinating. I'm trying to figure out what direction to go in with that. And then the other thing, and I'm not going to say too much about this, the other thing I will mention, however, is that I'm doing a documentary about, you know, about one aspect of my book. I mean, I. I suppose I can say that it's about. About the Manchurian Candidate. It's very much about the Manchurian Candidate in the history of that film, so. Wow. Yeah.
- [52:50]
Paul Lerner
Well, that's something I'm very excited about. And hold your breath.
- [52:54]
Andreas Killen
Remember what's happening in Hollywood right now, but.
- [52:58]
Paul Lerner
Okay. Not the best time, but.
- [53:00]
Andreas Killen
But I'm very excited about that, so. And hopefully. We'll see. We'll see.
- [53:05]
Paul Lerner
That's great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I've really enjoyed discussing the book and I just. Great to be talk to you again and great to hear what's going on and what's. What's been going through your mind lately. So thank you.
- [53:18]
Andreas Killen
Absolutely. It was a total pleasure, Paul.
- [53:21]
Paul Lerner
Pleasure was Min.
- [53:28]
Andreas Killen
Sam.