Diane Benscoter: How cults rewire the brain

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David McCarthy
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Diane Benscoter: How cults rewire the brain

Unread post by David McCarthy »

RSE is one massive 'viral memetic infection' in other words... a hijacking of the mind!
Diane Benscoter is working hard to develop an effective inoculation.
Subject: Diane Benscoter: How cults rewire the brain | Talk Video | TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/ex_moonie_dian ... ults_think

Diane Benscoter, an ex-Moonie, is now invested in finding ways to battle extremist mentalities and their potentially deadly consequences.
Why you should listen
At 17, Diane Benscoter joined The Unification Church -- the religious cult whose members are commonly known as “Moonies.” After five long years, her distressed family arranged to have her deprogrammed. Benscoter then left The Unification Church, and was so affected by her experience that she became a deprogrammer herself. She devoted her time to extracting others from cults, until she was arrested for kidnapping. The shock of her arrest caused her to abandon her efforts for almost 20 years.

Now, after decades of research and study, Diane has begun to speak about her experiences. She recently completed a memoir describing her years as a member of The Unification Church and as a deprogrammer.

Furthermore, she has embarked on a new project to define “extremist viral memetic infections”. She believes that defining extremism as a memetic infection, from a cognitive neurological perspective, might allow us to develop better memes that would inoculate against the memes of extremist thought. These inoculating memes could prevent the spread of extremist viral memetic infections and their inherent dangers.

Diane Benscoter: How cults rewire the brain | Talk Video | TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/ex_moonie_dian ... ults_think
Diane Benscoter | Building Memes for Peace
http://www.dianebenscoter.com/
But he has nothing on at all, cried at last the whole people....
joe sz
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Re: Diane Benscoter: How cults rewire the brain

Unread post by joe sz »

meme me up, scottie!

This meme thing has become a kind of meme since R Dawkins proposed it in the 1970s.
I watched the Benscoter TED. It was short so she can not be faulted for leaving a lot out.
I hate neologisms sometimes. A Meme "virus" in this negative case is another way to fancy what Conway and Siegelman in 1978 coined as "information disease."
http://www.dialogueireland.org/diconten ... sease.html

http://conwayandsiegelman.stillpointpress.net/

C&S created a minor industry surrounding their groundbreaking if flawed study on cults in 1978 .

Their idea that cult indoctrination rewires the brain to cause "sudden personality change" was very popular among anti-cult folk throughout the 1980s, but social science and later research shows that this process is far more complex and does not apply to every cult victim.
I wish Benscoter luck with her project but I am not buying into it.
There are no easy ways to box this up and tie a ribbon around it.
Recovery from a cult experience depends on reorganizing the self to improve in knowledge, conduct, and governance [education, behavior, and social responses]. If Benscoter wants to call that a remedy for getting rid of a "viral meme", she is welcome to it. I call it the ongoing struggle for self-correction.
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Re: Diane Benscoter: How cults rewire the brain

Unread post by David McCarthy »

Thank you Joe.

The 'mechanisms' of how Cults such as RSE 'rewire' the mind and how best to heal and recover our hearts and minds from the insanity of the RSE indoctrinated mindset is an important and fascinating subject to explore on EMF...
So more on the subject that bridges the topic discussion to how 'infections' rewire the brain :idea:

The Infection Connection - how infections might be partly responsible for mental illnesses
Bacteria, viruses and parasites may cause mental illnesses like depression
Harriet Washington
PSYCHOLOGY HAS LONG HELD THAT MENTAL ILLNESS IS BORN OF ADVERSE EXPERIENCES. MORE RECENTLY, RESEARCH HAS POINTED THE FINGER AT FLAWED GENES. NOW A THIRD CULPRIT MAY BE EMERGING: INVASION BY BACTERIA AND VIRUSES.
http://www.vaccinetruth.org/virus_and_m ... lness_.htm

The Insanity Virus
Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person's DNA.
The Insanity Virus | DiscoverMagazine.com
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03 ... nity-virus

Viral infection leading to brain dysfunction: more prevalent than appreciated?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2782954/

Molecular characteristics of Human Endogen... [Transl Psychiatry. 2012] - PubMed - NCBI
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23212585
Familiar to most of us, of course, is the rabies virus. On the verge of killing a dog, bat, or other warm-blooded host, it stirs the animal into a rage while simultaneously migrating from the nervous system to the creature’s saliva, ensuring that when the host bites, the virus will live on in a new carrier. But aside from rabies, stories of parasites commandeering the behavior of large-brained mammals are rare. The far more common victims of parasitic mind control—at least the ones we know about—are fish, crustaceans, and legions of insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State University. “Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it—there are truckloads of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,” she says.

Consider Polysphincta gutfreundi, a parasitic wasp that grabs hold of an orb spider and attaches a tiny egg to its belly. A wormlike larva emerges from the egg, and then releases chemicals that prompt the spider to abandon weaving its familiar spiral web and instead spin its silk thread into a special pattern that will hold the cocoon in which the larva matures. The “possessed” spider even crochets a specific geometric design in the net, camouflaging the cocoon from the wasp’s predators.


How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy - Kathleen McAuliffe - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... zy/308873/
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joe sz
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Re: Diane Benscoter: How cults rewire the brain

Unread post by joe sz »

I'm aware of the virus hypothesis for mental illnesses like bipolar or schizophrenia. Although inconclusive, I do not doubt that a virus may be one of the causes. What I do know is that most people who develop those disorders have them in the family among grandparents, parents or other close blood relatives, so this points to the genetic factor. It is also observed that anyone prone to these disorders seem to be attracted to the very drugs [psychedelics, weed, 'shrooms, ecstasy, alcohol] that unmask and trigger the onset of the disease in the brain. Also, keep in mind that schizophreniform disorders cover a wide spectrum and can have cultural traits. Eg, it is far more common to find auditory hallucinations among Western folks with schizophrenia than in the Middle East where the tendency is for paranoid delusions to dominate, according to a Pakistani doctor I work with.

Cult mind control problems are also complex. In a book I am reading, 'The Folly of Fools: The logic of deceit and self-deceit' by Robert Trivers, the case is made that through millions of years of evolution, our brains are wired to self-deceive because we have to believe in people that we love or the relationship would be intolerable. This is the key to why a cult leader succeeds. By making grandiose claims that sound wonderful and attractive, the naive recruit falls into a charismatic spell...like falling in love...and the recruit's brain does the rest, blocking out enough negative noise like logic with positive rationalizations. Or, the recruit has a massive ecstasy that "proves" it is all real. again, the brain wants to accept the euphoria as good and will block out all possibility that it is a toxic experience.
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