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The term 'brainwashing' was first recorded in 1950, but it is an expression of a much older concept: the forcible and full-scale alteration of a person's beliefs. Over the past 50 years the term has crept into popular culture, served as a topic for jokes, frightened the public in media headlines, and slandered innumerable people and institutions. It has also been the subject of learned discussion from many angles: history, sociology, psychology, psychotherapy, and marketing. Despite this variety, to date there has been one angle missing: any serious reference to real brains. Descriptions of how opinions can be changed, whether by persuasion, deceit, or force, have been almost entirely psychological.
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for the MIND Book or the Year Award
KA THLEEN T AY LOR
Brainwashing
Kathleen Taylor is a research scientist in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford. Brainwashing, her first book, was short-listed for the 2005 MIND Book of the Year Award and long-listed for the 2005 Aventis Science Book Prize. In the same year she was also highly commended in the Times Higher Education Supplement Young Academic Author of the Year Award. In 2003 she won first prize in both the THES/OUP Science Essay competition and the THES Humanities and Social Sciences Writing Prize.
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Brainwashing THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT CONTROL
Kathleen Taylor
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