John Lisle

Okay, Ewan Cameron.

He is a psychiatrist up in Montreal in Canada working at what's called the Allen Memorial Institute.

And Gottlieb wanted to expand MKUltra besides drugs because he already had a lot of people doing drug experiments.

So he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques that could be used to manipulate a person.

So not just in an interrogation, but can we actually control a person's personality?

Can we make them behave in certain ways, make them do something?

So the idea that Ewan Cameron had come up with before the CIA is involved, I should mention Ewan Cameron is a behaviorist.

So he thinks that all...

Behavior is a result of nurture, not nature.

So it's the environmental input that causes a person to behave a certain way.

And he thought that if you could bring a person back down to a blank slate, remove all the environmental inputs that have been put into them, and then you can build them back up in your image into whatever you want them to be.

So his idea to bring someone down to the blank slate was to induce enough stress that they forgot who they formerly were.

And so you reduce them to the blank slate, and then the CIA is really interested in if you could do that, then you could form them into whatever.

So Ewan Cameron, his main goal is to try to figure out what can induce enough stress in a person to bring them down to that blank slate.

And so he performs a lot of experiments.

His most famous one is called Psychic Driving, where he was doing a therapy session, quote unquote therapy, with one of his patients.

And he was recording the session, and she said something about how, you know, my mother, when I was young, used to tell me blah, blah, blah.

You know, she said something negative to her.

And so you and Cameron rewinded that on the tape that he was recording and made her listen back to it and said, hey, I want you to listen back to what you say your mother used to say to you.

When he rewinded the tape and played it forward, as soon as the woman was kind of quoting her mother and she listened to that herself on the tape, she recoiled.