Technology's role in delusional thinking.

Pete Tar

Senior Member.
Of relevance to subjects we deal with here is an article exploring the role cutting-edge technology has played in persecution fantasies.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/altered-states/how-reality-caught-up-with-paranoid-delusions/
The first person to examine the curiously symbiotic relationship between new technologies and the symptoms of psychosis was Victor Tausk, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud. In 1919, he published a paper on a phenomenon he called ‘the influencing machine’. Tausk had noticed that it was common for patients with the recently coined diagnosis of schizophrenia to be convinced that their minds and bodies were being controlled by advanced technologies invisible to everyone but them. These ‘influencing machines’ were often elaborately conceived and predicated on the new devices that were transforming modern life. Patients reported that they were receiving messages transmitted by hidden batteries, coils and electrical apparatus; voices in their heads were relayed by advanced forms of telephone or phonograph, and visual hallucinations by the covert operation of ‘a magic lantern or cinematograph’.
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But all this novelty was not, in Tausk’s view, creating new forms of mental illness. Rather, modern developments were providing his patients with a new language to describe their condition.
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In their instinctive grasp of technology’s implicit powers and threats, influencing machines can be convincingly futuristic and even astonishingly prescient. The very first recorded case, from 1810, was a Bedlam inmate named James Tilly Matthews who drew exquisite technical drawings of the machine that was controlling his mind. The ‘Air Loom’, as he called it, used the advanced science of his day — artificial gases and mesmeric rays — to direct invisible currents into his brain, where a magnet had been implanted to receive them. Matthews’s world of electrically charged beams and currents, sheer lunacy to his contemporaries, is now part of our cultural furniture.
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For an illness that is often characterised as a break with reality,’ they observe, ‘psychosis keeps remarkably up to date.’ Rather than being estranged from the culture around them, psychotic subjects can be seen as consumed by it: unable to establish the boundaries of the self, they are at the mercy of their often heightened sensitivity to social threats.
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In the 21st century, the influencing machine has escaped from the shuttered wards of the mental hospital to become a distinctive myth for our times. It is compelling not because we all have schizophrenia, but because reality has become a grey scale between the external world and our imaginations. The world is now mediated in part by technologies that fabricate it and partly by our own minds, whose pattern-recognition routines work ceaselessly to stitch digital illusions into the private cinema of our consciousness. The classical myths of metamorphosis explored the boundaries between humanity and nature and our relationship to the animals and the gods. Likewise, the fantastical technologies that were once the hallmarks of insanity enable us to articulate the possibilities, threats and limits of the tools that are extending our minds into unfamiliar dimensions, both seductive and terrifying.
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That's slightly different I think, though related. That's a way for technology to have the effects of a crowd on isolated individuals, so you could almost have crowd-based hysteria spread by communications technology.

In the context of co-opting technology to flesh out depersonalisation delusions, you might think you-tube is programming you or communicating to you by their playlist suggestions, and you would feel each video was destined for you and had a personal secret message meant for you. Or that by watching anything on a computer screen the signal coming from the screen (the frame rate HZ) was controlling your brain waves.
 
It certainly has a parallel in the Targeted Individuals group, who believe their landlady is beaming magnetic mind control waves into their apartment.
 
Off topic but the article mentions James Tilly Matthews, who as an inmate was extremely important in the history of psychiatry. He was one of the first to have concise clinical notes written about them as well as one of the earliest diagnoses of schizophrenia. His "air loom" seems to have been a to express his paranoia about the staff. There is a good copy and description at this site.
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/179/3/0.1.full

I think today it would still be a little out there ;-) It really is an interesting story with a neat twist. A Dr Haslam was writing down everything Matthews did, which he later published. However Matthews was reciprocating and writing down everything that Haslam did which was later produced to an inquiry and was used to get Haslam the sack.
 
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