{"product_id":"homo-sovieticus-isbn-9780262035699","title":"Homo Sovieticus","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow Soviet scientists and pseudoscientists pursued telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and mass hyptonism over television to control the minds of citizens.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn October 1989, as the Cold War was ending and the Berlin Wall about to crumble, television viewers in the Soviet Union tuned in to the first of a series of unusual broadcasts. “Relax, let your thoughts wander free...” intoned the host, the physician and clinical psychotherapist Anatoly Mikhailovich Kashpirovsky. Moscow's Channel One was attempting mass hypnosis over television, a therapeutic session aimed at reassuring citizens panicked over the ongoing political upheaval—and aimed at taking control of their responses to it. Incredibly enough, this last-ditch effort to rally the citizenry was the culmination of decades of official telepathic research, cybernetic simulations, and coded messages undertaken to reinforce ideological conformity. In \u003ci\u003eHomo Sovieticus\u003c\/i\u003e, the art and media scholar Wladimir Velminski explores these scientific and pseudoscientific efforts at mind control.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn a fascinating series of anecdotes, Velminski describes such phenomena as the conflation of mental energy and electromagnetism; the investigation of aura fields through the “Aurathron”; a laboratory that practiced mind control methods on dogs; and attempts to calibrate the thought processes of laborers. “Scientific” diagrams from the period accompany the text. In all of the experimental methods for implanting thoughts into a brain, Velminski finds political and metaphorical contaminations. These apparently technological experiments in telepathy and telekinesis were deployed for purely political purposes.\u003c\/p\u003eWladimir Velminski is a Head of the Project History and Theory of Media Regimes in Eastern Europe in the Department of Media Studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Previously, Velminski worked at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, at the Universität Zürich, and at ETH Zürich.","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300572090597,"sku":"NP9780262035699","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262035699_796f2048-2e17-4d52-9dd7-8b0956602efb.jpg?v=1767729182","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/homo-sovieticus-isbn-9780262035699","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}