The Indoctrinated Brain
The Indoctrinated Brain
Michael Nehls brings the science + strategies to protect your mental freedom
This is the 1st post on the March 11, 2024 session of the IPAK-EDU Director’s Science Webinar featuring the work of Dr. Michael Nehls.
Part 2 is here.
The March 11, 2024 session of the IPAK-EDU Director’s Science Webinar featured Dr. Michael Nehls. It was a superb talk—one of the best to date.
The talk he gave was, in a word, excellent. Organized and clear, tying together science and thought in a concise presentation that brought image and word together to clearly capture the lessons in his book. Nehls has a wonderful gift for making complex scientific topics accessible.
Dystopian was first coined in 1868 in a speech to British Parliament by John Stewart Mill. The implied meaning was couched as a reframing of ‘Utopians’:
It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dystopians, or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favor is too bad to be practicable.
Ironically, utopia literally means, ‘nowhere’. It is a combination of the Greek ou ‘not’ + topos ‘place’. Thomas More’s 1516 satire, entitled Utopia, imagined an island which represented a pinnacle of social, political, and legal perfection. The implication is that this perfect place is nowhere: a figment of the imagination. The juxtaposition of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ counterposes ‘no-place’ with ‘bad-place’. Ironically, the more common interpretation of utopia as ‘good-place’ stems from a misapplication of the Greek eu ‘good’ instead of ou ‘not’.
Utopia may be elusive, perhaps, but dystopia has a clearer footprint.
If one searches the internet for the terms ‘dystopia and now,’ you will find no shortage of hits, asking questions such as ‘Are We Living in a Dystopia?’, ‘Dystopia Is Upon Us. Are you ready?,’ and ‘Dystopia? How Close Are We?’.
Many recognize that the crises of now clearly resonate with the themes of dystopia in the larger human culture. It may not always be honestly acknowledged, but it is clearly widely felt.
From the first chapter of The Indoctrinated Brain, we are drawn into considering that we are indeed living in a time where dystopias have a shocking amount in common with current global events and machinations of the recent past. Nehls draws upon two seminal works of dystopian literature—Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World—as interpretive frameworks to make comparisons with what we have all lived through.
Well, more accurately: still living through.
Nehls writes:
Here’s a clip from the introduction to his talk where he speaks to this.
Meet Dr. Michael Nehls.
The tagline to Nehls’ book, is: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom.
Where the main title and cover art bear a darker, dystopian flavor, the subtitle beams with a decidedly brighter outlook. Powerful and hopeful.
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Here are the first two shorts from the beginning of the lecture where Dr. Nehls lays down a framework for considering indoctrination and key aspects of decision-making, thought, and brain function.
Individuality, System 1: Zombie Mode, and System 2: Slow Thinking
Nehls observes that while both System 1 + System 2 are natural and desirable, if there is a desire to take over society, then System 2 cannot be allowed to function. He goes on to elaborate on the Autobiographical Memory Center and the connections between individuality, System 2 thinking, the frontal brain, and the vitally important hippocampus.
The Hippocampus: the Autobiographical Memory Center
To be continued!
Watch this space for more clips from the full talk. Stay tuned.
Update: Click here to go to Part 2 of this series.
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Follow Dr. Michael Nehls on Substack and at michael-nehls.com
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