Kathleen Taylor, "Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control"

Something more serious now - yet despite the dry title, this book is relevant to everyone.

The word "Brainwashing" was coined during the Korean War to describe the forcible indoctrination of Allied prisoners of war by the North Koreans.  Kathleen Taylor begins her book by considering what the word means and what sort of activities it covers, from the forcible methods of the Koreans, through the more subtle uses by cult leaders and terrorists groups, up to the almost unseen techniques of marketing departments.  Then she presents what we know of how the brain works; how memories and associations are formed in the brain and how the various attempts to manipulate us affect the physical embodiment of our minds.  She finishes with a discussion of how we can resist attempts to influence us, both as individuals and in how we organise our societies.

This is a huge range of topics to press into one book.  Taylor covers psychology, sociology, brain science, and even some philosophy (a discussion on determinism and free will) and politics (some discussion of multiculturalism).  Mostly she succeeds, which is a massive achievement.  I would expect most people to learn a lot from reading this.

I found the middle section, which she calls "The traitor in your skull", to be the toughest going.  This is where she explains the way the brain encodes images, memories and ideas.  The key point she makes here is that the pure rationalist (or Cartesian) way of looking at the mind as independent of the brain is simply false.  We may like to think that we are capable of making sound judgements and responses to proposals and new situations, but in fact we are all conditioned by our previous experiences and expectations.  I am oversimplifying this drastically - my previous sentence probably seems obvious - but what Taylor does is to show the depth and extent that this is physically true.  It's worth ploughing through this section in order to understand Taylor's arguments in the final section.

Taylor's conclusions are perhaps to be expected: to prevent people persuading us unduly, we should value Freedom, individual Agency, the sheer Complexity of human nature, people as valuable in themselves (Ends not means), and the value of learning to Think effectively.  As all good ideas need an acronym, she calls this the FACET approach.

My only major criticism would be that while she describes the techniques of forced indoctrination as one type of brainwashing, her approach to resisting influence does not really apply to this extreme scenario.  I'm not sure whether this is because she thinks it (fortunately) irrelevant to most readers, or because it is pretty much impossible to resist a sufficiently determined psychological torturer.  The latter is not a pleasant thought.  Perhaps the only way to avoid brainwashing of that type is to build free societies in the first place.

Taylor does not seem to be tied to any particular political viewpoint, beyond the basic values of individual freedom.  She writes well and is generally easy to read given the subject; the difficulty of the central section comes inherently from the science rather than her presentation.  I could pick minor nits at some of the more throwaway remarks in this book but it makes more sense to ignore them and concentrate on the main argument.  This is well thought out and convincing.  I would encourage people to read this book and see what you think.