Think about It
Michael Nehls’ The Indoctrinated Brain,
Part 1

2,824 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Dr. Michael Nehls
Das Indokrinierte Gehirn
Vörstetten, Germany: Mental Enterprises Verlag

Das Indokrinierte Gehirn, which has recently been published in English translation as The Indoctrinated Brain, is difficult to read in both senses of the term. Its subject is the decline of human cognitive ability as a result of an unnatural — the writer claims intentionally induced — weakening of the hippocampal faculties. This book contains a good deal of biological detail and medical jargon which is difficult to grasp for the layman, besides which the subject matter is evidently depressing. As if that were not enough, Dr. Nehls’ style of writing in the original German struck this reviewer as colorless and turgid. (It may be that the English translation reads better.)

The book also follows the fashionable custom of dispensing with an index of names, and irritatingly, footnote numbers recommence from number one for each chapter, forcing the reader to note the chapter number before checking a footnote. The footnote references themselves, of which there are very many, are listed in exceedingly small print, mostly to web links. This may have made Nehls’ work and that of his editors easier, but it creates more work for reviewer and reader alike and may deter the reader from following up the references and notes at all. The lack of a names index is especially regrettable in a work in which many scientists are referred to and cited. However, readers should allow any of this to stop them from grasping Nehls’ arguments, for what he has to say is extremely important, and his case on the whole is persuasive.

Some Counter-Currents readers may be familiar with the name Henry Molaison, although this reviewer had not heard of him before he read this book. Molaison, often referred to as HM (presumably to protect his identity, which if so is ironical), was an American who suffered as a teenager from extreme epileptic fits. In 1953, when he was 27, he underwent an operation intended to stop or at least reduce them. The novel operation, which was largely successful in terms of the epilepsy, involved removing the greater part of Molaison’s hippocampus. Unsurprisingly, given the role of the hippocampus in consolidating short- and long-term memory, Molaison subsequently suffered from anteretrograde and partial retrograde amnesia, conditions that were more debilitating than the epilepsy itself. Anteretrograde amnesia refers to the inability to recall events following the neurological insult (short-term memory loss); in the case of retrograde amnesia, there is a failure to recall events prior to it. Molaison’s debilitating post-operational amnesia fascinated neurologists, and he was subject to many cognitive tests during his life. He died in care at the age of 82.

Michael Nehls draws on this story at the beginning of his book to introduce its principle thesis: Steps have been taken and are being taken to induce amnesia, including what he calls “cultural amnesia,” in human populations. He frequently draws parallels between the human brain and a computer, and he discusses social developments which he believes are aimed at “resetting” cognition, and specifically erasing the “hard drive” of human memory.

How will the manipulators of human cognition achieve such an end? Cultural identity, an awareness of belonging to a distinct cultural group, is a crucial part of human self-awareness. Its removal is essential for the induction of cultural amnesia. However, Nehls believes that a loss of cultural identity, albeit a devastating event so far as human individuality and culture is concerned, is not in itself sufficient to make the human masses entirely acquiescent to what he believes is planned global subservience: the “stabilized” homogeneous and artificial intelligence-directed human being in a system “will make it possible to control every individual, and ultimately the entire world community and direct everyone at will” (p. 77). Individuals would still be capable of reaching an awareness of alternative systems of social organization, and such awareness could potentially “destabilize” such a world order. Safety and stability are what the global system offers to those living in fear. Thus, Nehls points to a second requirement for the successful comprehensive indoctrination of the human brain:

The deletion of cultural identity would not in itself be sufficient to destroy individuality; in addition, the deletion of individual experiences would be necessary to reduce the danger of the creative destabilizing influence upon an AI system striving towards stabilization, stabilization which can only be reached after every individual’s personal biography and personal memories are erased in the course of the great Mental Reset. (pp. 84-85)

This is resonant of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a work to which Nehls indeed refers several times in Das Indoktrinierte Gehirn.

What does Nehls mean by cultural amnesia? He does not define it in so many words, but by his description of the role of fear, especially the fear of death, and narratives passed on from generation to generation that make sense of death and life, he seems to mean the abandonment or loss of collective memory and traditions of peoples — in other words of the extinction of cultural awareness and cultural memory. What we are witnessing, according to Nehls, is a “dramatic process of depersonalization”:

The earliest narratives which formed the background of this faith in a human soul and its continued existence after death concerned themselves with human history . . . probably go back beyond historical narrative and are as old as humanity itself, or to be more exact, as old as the beginning of self-reflection and conscious thought. . . . Narratives which accompany us during our childhood and adolescent years are not only a crucial part of personality, they determine how we experience what and in what manner we interpret experience . . . Indoctrination consists of steering people toward accepting a serviceable narrative and making it theirs. A well-tried way of doing so is by utilizing the fear of death, a fear which is mightier than any other. (pp. 139-140)

You can buy Tito Perdue’s Materials for All Future Historians here.

Nehls completed his book in 2023 and states at the beginning that the recent COVID-19 pandemic was an eye-opener for him. Up until that time he had been concentrating his energies on his specialist field of study, one in which he had made a name for himself — namely, neurobiology. Nehls was awarded the Hanse prize for molecular psychiatry in 2015 by the University of Rostock. His research into Alzheimer’s Disease and subsequent published findings relating to its causes, detection, prevention, and therapy caused lively controversy.

Nehls challenged accepted thinking on Alzheimer’s Disease by insisting that it was not, as widely assumed up till then, an inevitable curse of old age. The orthodox explanation for the undisputed rapid rise in cases of Alzheimer’s and other neurogenerative diseases over the last 50 years had been that the rise corresponded to a rise in median longevity. The disease was regarded as inevitable: the longer the average human lifespan, the higher the recorded number of cases of Alzheimer’s Disease. This would explain the disease’s inexorable rise. Alzheimer’s was and often still is portrayed as a Damocles sword hanging over everyone. Not only Alzheimer’s itself, but the thought of the possibility of falling victim to Alzheimer’s raises one’s levels of stress and anxiety. Only new medical wonder cures will save increasing numbers of people from a distressing fate as they age.

Medical orthodoxy held — and holds — that extraneous factors which contribute to the rapidity or timing of the onset of age-associated neurogenerative diseases resulting from the atrophy of the brain are contributory factors. Nehls argues forcibly that extraneous insults are, on the contrary, primary factors. In times past he notes that old age was not inevitably or even usually accompanied by significant mental decline. He believes that human beings have a “natural” lifespan, one not requiring new inventions to extend life, of about 120 years. Shorter median lifespans, which have characterized most societies over many hundreds of years, are caused either by outside catastrophe or by insults, mostly of toxicity and neuroinflammation. Today, most such insults could be avoided if people were aware of what causes toxicity and neuroinflammation and were provided with the natural wherewithal to prevent them.

Nehls believes that it is neither natural nor inevitable that old folk should become senile, however normal it may seem to be. From the evolutionary point of view, capable grandparents played an important role in the survival of the tribe. Owing to the high numbers of catastrophes in the past, notably war, famine, and pestilence, the number of people surviving into old age was much smaller than it is today, yet among those who did survive there is little evidence of the cognitive decline we should expect were senility the inevitable and natural result of the ravages of time. Nehls points out that in primitive tribes in which many members of the tribe live long, Alzheimer’s Disease is unknown:

The lifelong production of new index neurons[1] enables our store of remembered experience to continue to grow in old age. The wisdom of age has played a crucial role in the course of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, culminating in the emergence of Homo sapiens — or at least it did until Google, Wikipedia, and the all-day kindergarten replaced grandparents. The acquired wisdom of the eldest family members played a crucial role in successful propagation right up to the beginning of the twentieth century. This phenomenon explains why, in contrast to other primates, man will live decades beyond the capacity to reproduce. . . . Experience and longevity as a criterion of evolutionary selection is only of practical evolutionary value in cases where the elderly person is still capable of certain achievements. . . . Human beings who still live a natural way of life, one appropriate to our species, are protected by the genome, which provides for a productive hippocampus. (pp. 119-120)

In the second chapter, Nehls explains at some length those aspects of human mental activity which are central to his argument. The storage tank of human memory is the hippocampus. The hippocampus is that component of the brain which is crucial to the use through memory of short- and long-term experience, and which makes memory possible at all. The argument of this book is that humankind is facing a campaign to halt and shrink it. The hundreds of billions of nerve cells and the manner in which they interact create the identifiable individual, and it is the slight differences in one individual, originating in experience, which shapes him. Nehls tells the reader that, following in the footsteps of Daniel Kahneman and others, he sought to understand the “neuronal nature of mental energy” (p. 117). He describes exhaustion as mental depletion. The relationship of energy to intelligence is a very interesting one, and perhaps understandably, Nehls does not explore this in depth, as it would greatly exceed the scope of his book.

You can buy Christopher Pankhurst’s essay collection Numinous Machines here.

Humans are losing a sense of their own identity through a reduced functionality and capacity of their autobiographic memory (p. 27). This in turn strengthens the quest for safety in numbers, the wish to “lay low” and not stand out from the crowd, to avoid controversial subjects, to avoid discourse, and to avoid challenges to patterns of social behavior. “The weak ego seeks the strong community,” he writes (p. 28).

People are equipped with two kinds of thought processes called for convenience simply System 1 and System 2 of the hippocampus (not to be confused with Substratum 1 and Substratum 2 of a viral protein!). The distinction was first made by William James in his Principles of Psychology and was subsequently refined over the years, notably by Daniel Kahneman, who first coined the simple terms to describe two parts of memory storage in the hippocampus. System 1 refers to actions which are acquired either in personal life or inherited, and that are practiced almost unthinkingly and require little intellectual capacity. Nehls explains that System 1 action requires “as a rule little or no concentration, and thus as good as no mental energy” (p. 115). System 2 refers to conscious decisions arrived at by rational consideration. System 2 decision-making, which is rational and not instinctive, is a characteristic of Homo sapiens and is crucial to the evolution of the species and development of human intelligence, both in evolutionary terms and at the level of the human individual.

In the case of System 1 thinking, the human individual does not contemplate or consider what he is doing, but acts according to a set pattern which has been created in the course of evolution to ensure maximum chances of survival. There is a price to pay, however. The brain is not stimulated, and fear and stress are known to “freeze” that part of the brain which contemplates, analyzes, and remembers. System 1 should not become the default state of mind. Permanent fear or stress weakens System 2, which is what Nehls believes is taking place today: people’s lives drawing for ever-longer periods on a System 1 level of action. Christof Koch called it “zombie mode” (p. 26). Nehls writes:

The conditions for a smooth operation of that part of our body responsible for the recall of our thoughts is on the decline. Nowadays the autobiographic memory of many people no longer continues to grow throughout their lives, as it should and would do in a natural state, and thus (memory) loses storage capacity. (p. 26)

Our society is increasingly characterized by social isolation. More and more business is conducted virtually. The traditional meeting places of public house, bar, and café have been closing at a swift rate over the last 20 years. Lockdowns during the pandemic dealt a death blow to many small businesses, precisely those businesses where physical social interaction played a highly significant role.

Nehls also writes of another development related to this: “the destruction of a culture of debate” (p. 258). Debate tends to disappear when people do not meet personally. Where life becomes increasingly monotonous and risk-free, that part of the hippocampus belonging to System 2 is unchallenged and unstimulated and so begins to shrink, just as any part of the body atrophies when underused. This is all the more the case when the individual is preoccupied with him or herself, and has little interest in public affairs. Expert rulers and administrators of every kind seem uninterested in this, if not discouraging so far as engagement at any level in decision-making processes by individual members of the public is concerned. Health, politics, and any kind of public decision-making is represented as a matter for the professionals and experts alone. Referenda are regarded by the rulers with increasing skepticism and even contempt. Public engagement is reduced to expressions of solidarity and compassion, the purpose and nature of which is laid down by “experts.”

It is clear that Nehls sees a parallel between, on the one hand, the individual in care, increasingly obsessed with his or her immediate personal needs and petty tribulations while being uninterested in public affairs and consumed by a terror of impending death. On the other, citizens of the state are discouraged from public service and are increasingly made to feel that they are in need of protection from the risks of life and the danger of death. In both cases, the hippocampus and thus the individual’s cognitive awareness atrophies, and the personality loses its defining characteristics. A vicious circle then ensues: The more the individual allows himself to be protected and directed, the lower his mental capacity to resist more protection and direction.

Nehls provides a graph which was first published, he tells the reader, in a work significantly entitled Die Methusalem-Strategie (The Methuselah Strategy). It consists in overlapping circles which demonstrate what for Nehls are the essential ingredients of a healthy, and indeed growing (p. 130), hippocampus. At the center of the graph is the “meaning of life” (a “meaning of life” being the crucial motor of human hippocampal health, according to Nehls) overlapping with movement, sleep, social life, diet, and time. He calls these interconnective elements “the formula against Alzheimer’s” and the “hippocampus anti-indoctrination formula” (p. 122), showing that he thinks the greatest part of cognitive decline is related to attacks on culture, comportment, and physical well-being, not to the wear and tear of time. A decline in growth or even shrinking of the individual hippocampus is brought about by stress, isolation, fear, and a sense of purposelessness in life, as well as physical insults, not by aging per se. The use of the formula, so Nehls, “allows us to build up a strong self-awareness, to maintain natural curiosity, and to make efficient use of System 2 thought processes, and not least to be strongly resilient to psychical stress” (p. 122):

A lifelong production of index neurons is essential for the autobiographical memory, and thus the integrity of our personality and the ability to further develop it. The strength of our psychical resilience is both dependent on, and a condition for, our readiness to dare new things and extend our horizons when this appears called for or is even just promising. (p. 130)

Note

[1] “Index neurons” is the term Nehls adopts to describe neurons which record both time and place. The importance of either is signaled by the intensity of emotion which memory releases.