Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖

I asked, “If you could get rid of it, though, or even have it all activated so you’d remember it all, would you want to?”

She thought for a moment. “Get rid of it, like, have it all wiped from my memory, so it would be like it was never there?”

“Right.”

“Or have it activated, so everything I was taught under hypnosis, I’d remember and be able to use?”

“Yeah. In a few minutes, know everything you’d know after a few months worth of boot camp.”

She was quiet for a bit longer. “I suppose either would be better than this,” she said. “Just having that stuff in my brain, but not being able to use it and not knowing what it is. Getting rid of it would be fine, I guess. Though if it’s just boot camp stuff like, what, cleaning a rifle and the difference between a sergeant and a staff sergeant? I suppose that wouldn’t be too bad, unless it’d change who I am.”

“Your personality, you mean?”

“Right. Aren’t people who finish boot camp supposed to have this kind of somber, subservient attitude from all the brow-beating? If that’s part of the package, I don’t know if I’d want that. I could learn how to clean a rifle from a book if I wanted to.”

“But if you could know the answer to that, and even if not, you’d definitely rather have it activated or have it removed than just having it sit there?” I asked.

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“All right then,” I said.

“So just where are we going?” Amy asked.

“You’ll see.”

The drive north was becoming rather familiar for me. Interstate 95 went through Stafford than right through Quantico, then through Woodbridge, then Lorton and Fort Belvoir, and then turned into 395 and straight through to Washington DC. Northwest of the city center was Georgetown University, right on the edge of the western branch of the Potomac. Around the university were blocks of tightly packed, ages-old townhouses. I parked on one particular street in front of one particular house, which I explained to Amy was the home of William Secomb, professor and head of the psychology department at Georgetown.

I’d found his name in some of the earliest of Schumer’s files and from online archives of the university’s website found that he’d taught a few classes on hypnosis theory back in the 1980s but now stuck mostly to abnormal psychology. From his personal page on the psych department’s site I found his work and class schedule and determined that he would most likely be home at this exact hour.

Amy and I went up the short sidewalk and handful of stairs to the front door, and I knocked. In a few moments a taller gentleman of about sixty opened the door. He was balding, thin, and dressed in a white shirt and gray pants that looked to have been through the wash a few too many times. He wore wide-framed, thick-lensed glasses.

“Professor Secomb?” I asked when the door was opened.

“Yes?” he said, squinting as if trying to recognize me, then trying the same with Amy.

“Did you ever know, or work with, a Charles Schumer over in Quantico?” I asked.

Professor Secomb squinted again, but looking past my head, as if trying to remember the name. “Are you students of mine?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “This would have been a while ago. Eighteen years or so.”

“Oh, right,” he said, scratching his head. “I think I remember. Just some contract work. He tried to hire me, as I recall.”

“I don’t suppose you worked with him on some kind of platform for training a child from birth to teen years using hypnosis so as for him not to remember the training?”

“Him or her,” Amy said.

Secomb looked between the two of us for a moment. I smiled awkwardly.

“Oh dear,” Secomb said, mostly to himself, after letting both of us in and we’d sat down on a small, old couch over which a brown and white afghan was tossed. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he repeated, taking a seat in an old recliner opposite the couch.

“I never thought it was a practical exercise,” he said. “Mr. Schumer just brought me in and asked me to determine whether it would be possible, and if so, to design a system to do it. To train or educate somebody without them remembering it. I thought it was hypothetical. I even told him that…that it may be possible but it was clearly an ethical and practical quagmire.”

“But you developed the platform for him?” I asked. “One that should have worked.”

“Well, yes. In the same way that in the 1940s somebody could have developed a platform for sending a man to the moon, but it wouldn’t be possible or practical for another twenty years.”

“Apparently it was both practical and possible,” Amy said.

“Oh dear,” Secomb said once more.

“Understand,” he began after a moment, “that hypnosis has been around in one form or another since the eighteenth century, but advancements in understanding it come slowly and after long gaps. In the 1980s it, along with most conventional forms of psychology, had become en vogue again. The CIA, FBI, and military started to bring in experts to see if it was possible to use it for interrogation, memory restoration, contacting the spirits of dead people, anything. Most of my colleagues in psychological study were contracted for one program or another, developing the means to do any number of purely hypothetical feats.

“I remember a fellow in Army intelligence that was convinced a person could be trained to kill another man just with his mind. They poured money at anybody who said it could be done, paid people to sit in a room and stare at a goat, trying to kill it through telepathy. A bunch of new-age nonsense, of course, but this was the climate after Vietnam. Any ridiculous, unconventional idea was fair game.

“Compared to some of the other nonsense I’d read about, Schumer’s job didn’t seem too far from the ordinary. Hypnosis has been shown to be a useful tool for education for decades, but using it long-term and for children was the hard part.”

“So you had no idea that he was going to actually do it?” I asked.

“Heavens, no,” he said.

“But for him to pull it off, then,” I said, “would your… report have been enough?”

He thought for a moment. “I suppose so,” he said. “In the hands of a trained psychologist or hypnotist, at least. What I outlined was just the mechanics for training a person. What was actually to be taught was left open-ended. The platform could be used to teach somebody foreign languages or how to take apart and rebuild a car’s engine.”

“But it could easily be used to teach somebody military strategies?” I asked.

“Sure, given the pace was slow enough.”

“How does it all work?” I asked.

“I should have my notes and documents from the project here in my filing cabinet, so I could look up exactly what the process was, but the essence of it all is that, while in a hypnotic state, a person’s subconscious is fully exposed and open to suggestion. The subconscious is the part of the mind that actually does the heavy lifting, coordinating the flow of information between the senses, the memory, and the conscious. Your five senses are consistently giving an extreme amount of information to the subconscious, and the subconscious actively decides how much of it to forward to your conscious.”

“What does that mean?” Amy asked.

Secomb took in a breath, and then began explaining. “Have you ever been in a crowded room where many groups of people are having their own conversations, like a restaurant or a party, and you’re having a conversation with your own group but you overhear someone in another group mentioning your name or a word that holds some significance to you, and your attention suddenly snaps over to that other conversation? Not only that, but you can somehow remember the last few words before your name or word was said, even though you weren’t listening.”

Amy furrowed her brow for a moment. “I think so.”

“That happens,” Secomb said, “because your ears are actually picking up every conversation within earshot, but your subconscious is only picking out the voices from the conversation you’re having. It would be too much work for your mind to have to process every voice heard in a crowded room, so it picks out the important thing and sends the rest into your brain’s version of the trash bin. But as your subconscious is filtering this out, if it hears a word that’s important to you, it decides to send it to your conscious along with anything it can pick from that trash bin to go along with it.”

“The Cocktail Party Phenomenon,” I said.

Secomb looked over to me, a bit surprised. “Exactly,” he said.

“That’s also why you sometimes get a headache if people around you are speaking to each other in a foreign language,” I said, “Your mind is trying to process the words to decide if it’s important, but gets stuck on every word.”

“Right,” Secomb said. “The subconscious acts as the messenger between your memory, your senses, and your conscious. When you’re being taught something in class, or you’re reading a book, there are a million other processes going on inside your mind that have to compete with each other. If a teacher tells you a new mathematical formula, for instance, that new information has to overcome the fact that you’re also thinking about history class and the fact that your shirt is uncomfortable, and that your desk is tan and your pencil is yellow and the person next to you is chewing gum.

“When you’re in a hypnotic state, however, all those other inputs can be dismissed or set aside, and you can send information straight to the subconscious, so that when you’re told that math formula it’s sent straight to the part of your brain that stores information to your memory while you sleep that night. The main problem with this is that most people learn by doing, not just hearing. To deal with that, I made a script where the subject could be instructed to actually perform whatever action and, if the instructor determines it was done correctly, the process is learned that way.”

“How is the person kept from remembering all of this once he wakes up, and how does the process of ‘unlocking’ all that knowledge handled at the end?” I asked.

Secomb scratched his cheek and thought for a bit. “I’ll have to check my notes to see the specifics for how I dealt with that,” he said, standing up and heading down a hall and turning into another room.

“This is weird,” Amy said quietly.

“Yes it is,” I replied.

A few minutes later, Secomb came back with a paper accordion file in his hands. He sat back down and started pulling pages and notebooks out. He spent a few minutes sorting documents reading a few things to himself, before looking up at us and asking, “What was the question again?”

“How does a person not remember being trained under hypnosis daily, and how does activation work?” I said.

“Ah, yes, right,” Secomb said. “Well, the memory is a tricky thing. It isn’t like a big bucket where everything is dumped and can be poured out and reviewed. The best analogy I’ve heard is that memories are like tennis balls floating around in a vacuum. The tennis balls are all connected by strings, each one connected to different ones a number of different ways. A memory of the first time you tied your own shoes might be tied to a ball of ‘accomplishments’ and another called ‘shoes’