This is where the feely scenarios, emotional slogans and hypnopedic rhymes are written. In his book, the college is an important academic institution found in the same building as the Bureaux of Propaganda, with a unique focus on emotional suggestibility. The College of Emotional EngineeringĬomparisons can also be made between Huxley’s College of Emotional Engineering and contemporary social media. The ADHD child’s mental state is a kind of paradoxical docile attentiveness. But equally alarming is the rise in prescriptions for ADHD treatments, like Ritalin, which control attention while simultaneously subduing difficult behaviour. To begin with, the rise of neuro-pharmaceuticals, like Prozac, have drawn attention to a growing societal need for self-medicated happiness. Today’s neurocultures correspond to these technologies in conspicuous ways. First, the widespread use of the joy-inducing pharmaceutical, Soma, and second, a hypnotic media propaganda machine that works less on reason than it does through “feely” encounters. He noted the clear advantages of sidestepping intellectual engagement and instead appealing to emotional suggestibility to guide intentions and subdue nonconformity.Īs such, to achieve its goal, the society of Brave New World combines two central modes of control. It is Huxley’s appeal to emotional conditioning that most significantly resonates with today’s dystopian neurocultures. Brain researchers went on to discover more about brain functionality and subsequently started to intervene in underlying chemical processes.
Initially, scientists assumed these gaps were connected by electrical charges, but later revealed the existence of neurochemical transmissions. This was the first time that the brain was understood as a discontinuous network of cells connected by what became known as synaptic gaps.
The origins of neuroculture begin in early anatomical drawings and subsequent neuron doctrine in the late 1800s. To grasp the Huxleyesque nature of current events we need see them as part of a culture increasingly pervaded by the ideas of neuroscience – what I have termed neuroculture. But alternative facts are just the tip of a dystopian iceberg that owes more to the soft brainwashing technologies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than it does to 1984’s harsh Stalinist oppressions and propagandist trickery. The Orwellian dystopia of Doublespeak is very much in vogue right now thanks to concerns over Trump’s use of “alternative facts”.
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