Manipulating the mind to alter the shape of the body

THIS past week, Atkins Nutritionals filed for bankruptcy protection, partly in response to the chronic fickleness of fat people. The overweight will try anything to get thin, but never stick at any one regimen for very long.

There’s always a better fad coming up the line, directly behind the current one.

Atkins caught on in the wealthy ’90s, when dieters could afford to eat beef, prawns, bacon, eggs and cream. It had an unprecedented impact on economies and on patterns of agriculture. Grain farmers and bakers hated it and paid publicists to emphasise the fact that Atkins reputedly gave bad breath and traumatised the liver and kidneys with dense proteins and fats.

They needn’t have worried. Dieters who started with wild enthusiasm soon began the inevitable slide away from Atkins into softer variations of low-carb. Then Dr Atkins himself slipped and whacked his head on an icy pavement. The Mayor of New York promptly pointed out that when Atkins died of the fall, he’d weighed eighteen stone. Water retention, yelled his family; water retention consequent on a heart ailment unrelated to fatness. Maybe so. But eighteen stone, even for a tall guy, is an awful lot of water retention. The diet began to look less than perfect and the foods bearing the Atkins name took a major hit. Which can’t have surprised anybody who ever tasted them.

They were vile.

The milk-shakes coated the inside of the drinker’s mouth with a slimy cement. The imitation potato crisps had the relentless durability of toasted ceramic tiles. The snack bars had the consistency of chopped chicken feet. The pasta provided an eating experience akin to a spoonful of boiled pencil erasers. The muffin mix produced bright yellow breakfast items about the size, toughness and taste of a golf ball. The sweets had what the label described as ‘a mild laxative effect’. Meaning that a dieter eating a handful of them got the runs.

Like the low-fat imitation products of a couple of years earlier, the Atkins food substitutes were doomed because, no matter what they offered in the fight against obesity, they tasted so gaggingly awful.

Inevitably, at almost precisely the moment when the Atkins diet began to lose its grip on the public mind and the Atkins products began to lose shelf-space and market share, the alternative fixation, the new replacement diet fad, the latest ‘solution’ for obesity surfaced.

It’s a new form of brainwashing.

Psychologists at the University of California have turned people off specific high calorie foods by implanting false memories about those foods. The end result is that individuals who once adored strawberry ice-cream end up believing that the ice-cream had played some nasty role in their childhood and, as a result, now nauseates them.

Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who led the research team, believes the memory-implantation approach has a great future. It would allow people to “go off” some foods that don’t do them any good, while at the same time convince them (inaccurately) that they had truly loved a healthy food like asparagus when they’d been children, and so turn them back on to eating that more healthy food.

It would be like the anti-alcohol drug Antabuse, only better and cheaper.

Instead of having to take a pill in the early morning to prevent gorging on some high-calorie trash food, the overweight person would carry within them a kind of brain-cell thermostat that, when tripped, would remind them of some childhood trauma associated with the food for which they yearned.

Except that the childhood trauma would never have happened. The memory would be fabricated. The dieter would recall a non-event that would stop them eating rubbish.

Anybody who has studied regression therapy and retrieved memory, where individuals suddenly, with help from a therapist, recall in great detail how their father molested them for years although he denies it and everybody else in the family says it wasn’t logistically possible, knows about Professor Elizabeth Loftus. Prof Loftus has done some of the most interesting work on retrieved memory, proving that most of it is complete piffle, helping to free some of the many convicted in the United States on the basis of such artificially stimulated recollections, and educating a generation on how dangerously malleable our memory is.

To find her putting that expertise to work to serve peculiar, if not perverse ends, is astonishing. Implanted memories of any kind - whether of malign parents or benign asparagus - are living lies which stick around.

WHILE it’s not that hard to implant a fictional memory in suggestible and emotionally needy people, it’s amazingly hard to remove it from their consciousness after it has taken root. Even when people know that what they recall so vividly cannot have happened, its subjective reality to them is overwhelming.

Most of the head-banger therapists who implanted memories of child-molestation over the past twenty years did so innocently. They expected to find such memories and so - unconsciously but forcefully - suggested them to their patients. The new memory-implantation is conscious and deliberate. Elizabeth Loftus was one of the voices of sanity who established how easy it was to create false memory which could form the basis of a devastating accusation against a friend or relative. Today, she says she’s exploring “a positive, practical application of memory manipulation” with a view to helping parents to get their kids to eat properly.

Now, hold that thought. Here is a professor of psychology, an expert in social behaviour and criminology, positing as a legitimate aid to good parenting the implantation of false memories in the heads of children. She acknowledges that some parents, while eager to get their kids eating more broccoli and less pizza, might have moral qualms about sticking lies using psychological sticking plaster into their offsprings’ brains.

“People kind of cringe at the idea that anyone would suggest they should lie to their children,” she admits. “But they do it all the time when they tell them Santa Claus exists and so does the tooth fairy.”

Fortunately, Loftus’s breezy moral relativism is not matched by one director of the American Psychological Association, who says implanting memories raises “profound ethical questions”.

Dead right, it does. Starting with how such a manipulative study was authorised in the first place. Experiments perceived to be abusive of participants are now banned, so that Milgram’s famous test, where participants believed they were giving electric shocks to a victim behind a glass panel probably couldn’t happen, today. The thing to remember, though, is that Milgram’s study didn’t actually involve real electric shocks. The participants pushing the button in the laboratory believed they were delivering jolts, but they weren’t. No long-term change was wrought in the lives of participants. Or of their ‘victim’. The Loftus study, on the other hand, blithely set out to permanently create false memories in the minds of real people, and has succeeded.

Lasting lies have been injected into brain cells to induce better behaviour.

One must hope the complaisance of the initial response to diet brainwashing does not last, and that the implanting of memory to render the overweight averse to ice-cream is eventually seen as a more subtle version of lobotomy; God-playing with good intent.