Re: All you need to run the world is...a bell!

Its good to see some educational efforts regarding
the such important freedom related concepts. I don't
agree with the gloom and doom outlook on dieoff.org,
but to give credit where credit is due, there is some
well researched, illuminating articles about the current
human condition.

excerpt

The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. . .
. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to
know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other
activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned
loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life
that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were
born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married
at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at
sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels
with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up
the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
-George Orwell, 1984



BRAINWASHING
"The fact that TV is a source not actively or critically attended to was
made dramatically evident in the late 1960s by an experiment that rocked the
world of political and product advertising and forever changed the ways in
which the television medium would be used. The results of the experiment
still reverberate through the industry long after its somewhat primitive
methods have been perfected.

"In November 1969, a researcher named Herbert Krugman, who later became
manager of public-opinion research at General Electric headquarters in
Connecticut, decided to try to discover what goes on physiologically in the
brain of a person watching TV. He elicited the co-operation of a
twenty-two-year-old secretary and taped a single electrode to the back of
her head. The wire from this electrode connected to a Grass Model 7
Polygraph, which in turn interfaced with a Honeywell 7600 computer and a CAT
400B computer.

"Flicking on the TV, Krugman began monitoring the brain-waves of the subject
What he found through repeated trials was that within about thirty seconds,
the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and
conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused,
receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming
below the threshold of consciousness. When Krugman's subject turned to
reading through a magazine, beta waves reappeared, indicating that conscious
and alert attentiveness had replaced the daydreaming state.
"What surprised Krugman, who had set out to test some McLuhanesque
hypotheses about the nature of TV-viewing, was how rapidly the alpha-state
emerged. Further research revealed that the brain's left hemisphere, which
processes information logically and analytically, tunes out while the person
is watching TV. This tuning-out allows the right hemisphere of the brain,
which processes information emotionally and noncritically, to function
unimpeded. 'It appears,' wrote Krugman in a report of his findings, 'that
the mode of response to television is more or less constant and very
different from the response to print. That is, the basic electrical response
of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to content difference....
[Television is] a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge
quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure.'

"Soon, dozens of agencies were engaged in their own research into the
television-brain phenomenon and its implications. The findings led to a
complete overhaul in the theories, techniques, and practices that had
structured the advertising industry and, to an extent, the entire television
industry. The key phrase in Krugman's findings was that TV transmits
'information not thought about at the time of exposure.'" [p.p. 69-70]

"As Herbert Krugman noted in the research that transformed the industry, we
do not consciously or rationally attend to the material resonating with our
unconscious depths at the time of transmission. Later, however, when we
encounter a store display, or a real-life situation like one in an ad, or a
name on a ballot that conjures up our television experience of the
candidate, a wealth of associations is triggered. Schwartz explains: 'The
function of a display in the store is to recall the consumer's experience of
the product in the commercial.... You don't ask for a product: The product
asks for you! That is, a person's recall of a commercial is evoked by the
product itself, visible on a shelf or island display, interacting with the
stored data in his brain.' Just as in Julian Jaynes's ancient cultures,
where the internally heard speech of the gods was prompted by props like the
corpse of a chieftain or a statue, so, too, our internalized media echoes
are triggered by products, props, or situations in the environment.

"As real-life experience is increasingly replaced by the mediated
'experience' of television-viewing, it becomes easy for politicians and
market-researchers of all sorts to rely on a base of mediated mass
experience that can be evoked by appropriate triggers. The TV 'world'
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mass mind takes shape, its
participants acting according to media-derived impulses and believing them
to be their own personal volition arising out of their own desires and
needs. In such a situation, whoever controls the screen controls the future,
the past, and the present." [p. 82, Joyce Nelson, THE PERFICT MACHINE; New
Society Pub., 1992, 800-253-3605; ISBN 0-86571-235-2 ]



"Women are carefully trained by media to view themselves as inadequate. They
are taught that other women-through the purchases of clothes, cosmetics,
food, vocations, avocations, education, etc.-are more desirable and feminine
than themselves. Her need to constantly reverify her sexual adequacy though
the purchase of merchandise becomes an overwhelming preoccupation,
profitable for the merchandisers, but potentially disastrous for the
individual.
"North American society has a vested interest in reinforcing an individual's
failure to achieve sexual maturity. By exploiting unconscious fears, forcing
them to repress sexual taboos, the media guarantees blind repressed seeking
for value substitutes through commercial products and consumption. Sexual
repression, as reinforced by the media, is a most viable marketing
technology.
"
Repressed sexual fear, much like all types of repression, makes humans
highly vulnerable to subliminal management and control technology. Through
subliminal appeals and reinforcements of these fears, some consumers can be
induced into buying almost anything." [MEDIA SEXPLOITATION, Key, 1976]



Dan Parker

"Don Quijote" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Debate taking place at...
>
> http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php3?s=&postid=407188#post407188
>
> //Where Capitalism has been most successful--and where Communim failed
> by causing millions of deaths by collectivization or simply
> inproductivity--is at keeping the worker salivating over material
> stuff, just like the Pavlov's experiment with the dogs when they
> responded to the bell--advertising. It's like America sells you a
> "dream," never a reality, which may turn out to be a nightmare. The
> other day I went by one of those shelters for the homeless--which are
> run by "charities"--and it was a scene fitting of Dante's, with the
> homeless overflowing the facilities. However the sign outside ran:
> '"Hope" for all'...//
>
> This is what I said before, and here's what going on with mind
> conditioning.
>
> It may turn out that all you need to run the world is...a bell!
>
> 'Does your mouth water when you hear the sound of the ice cream man
> coming down your street? If so, then you have been conditioned to
> salivate at the sound. In the early 1900s, Ivan Pavlov studied this
> conditioned response when he trained dogs to salivate at the sound of
> a bell. Pavlov knew that dogs naturally salivated when meat was fed to
> them. To condition this salivation, Pavlov rang a bell each time he
> presented the food to the dogs. After the ringing bell was paired many
> times with the presentation of the meat, the dogs salivated when they
> heard the bell, but BEFORE they saw the food. In other words, the dogs
> had become conditioned because they expected that the meat reward
> would follow the sound of the bell.
>
> Humans can become conditioned in much the same way as Pavlov's dogs.
> In a recent two-part experiment, scientists, using brain imaging
> methods, have learned which parts of the brain are active when people
> associate visual images with food smells. *This research also suggests
> that if Pavlov's dogs had been allowed to eat all the meat they
> wanted, then the conditioned response would have disappeared*.' [Could
> it be the reason why the lion keeps the little animals always thirsty
> while controlling the water well?]
>
> more...
>
> http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/train.html
>
> http://webspawner.com/users/donquijote
>
>
> __________________
> "My struggle is not against the puppet, but against the puppeteer"