This is a creepy, scary topic. That would be the one where guys in white lab coats spend their careers figuring out ways to alter somebody's mental prowess.

 I had heard for years about something called MK Ultra and never understood what it was. But apparently during the heights and depths of the Cold War, the CIA was working on every possible way to manipulate the mind. Those ways would include brainwashing, torture, drugs, and others. 

 Meanwhile, my research on reading tells me that if you make a child memorize lots of sight-words, that child's brain is going to be scrambled. He will  rarely be a fluent reader. That's why we have 50 million functional illiterates and only 44% of people in colleges are male. The war against boys has been a tremendous success. The war against literacy has been a tremendous success.

 The point of this little article is to note that these two seemingly separate worlds converge. Ultimately, the goal is power. The power to make people  into what you want them to be. The basic technique is to force the mind away from its preferred modes of operation, force it to do things in awkward, inefficient ways, until some degree of impairment is achieved.

http://www.examiner.com/article/cia-mind-control-and-incoherent-rea...

Title: CIA Mind Control and Incoherent Reading Instruction

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 if you look at the videos with this article, you'll see  they deal with the CIA's LSD experiment in a small French village. The narrator mentions that the CIA conducted a lot of  experiments at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Military personnel were urged to volunteer. I can vouch for that. I was stationed near Boston. The pitch was we got to go down to Maryland, take some drugs, get a few days off. I can remember some guys thought this was a great deal. This is in the 60s and who knew much of anything. But I intended to be a writer and I knew enough about LSD to be suspicious. I didn't want my brain changed in any way. I passed up the little vacation.