Rebecca Lemov

Areas of Research: Science & Technology Studies, Technology & Society, Media Studies, Human Sciences

Rebecca Lemov's research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human and behavioral sciences. Her forthcoming book, The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion uncovers the history of brainwashing—and its troubling implications for today. Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often cannot recognize it while it is happening—unless we know where to look. In The Instability of Truth, Lemov exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, exploring the history of brainwashing techniques from those employed against North Korean POWs, to unwanted brain implants at a U.S. military hospital, to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behavior-shaping. The new work reveals that anyone can fall under the spell of mind control, especially in our increasingly data-driven world. Identifying invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction, creating coercion and persuasion in everyday life, Lemov offers lessons learned from past mind-control episodes to equip us for the increasing challenges we face from social media, AI, and an unprecedented, global form of surveillance capitalism.

Her other books include Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (how scientists between 1942 and 1963 attempted to map the elusive and subjective parts of the human psyche via once-futuristic data-storage techniques), and World As Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (about the scientific dream of behavioral engineering). She is a co-author of How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality.

Rebecca teaches courses on the history and future of big data; animal studies; human experiments; and technologies of mind control, as well as the history of the social and human sciences more broadly. A Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 2010-11, and again in 2013-14, she took part in two working groups there, on the Sciences of the Archive and Historicizing Big Data. Her doctoral work was at U.C. Berkeley in Anthropology and she graduated from Yale University where she studied English literature.

Books

1. The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-persuasion (W. W. Norton, 2025).
2. Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015).
3. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Rationality in the Cold War (University of Chicago, Fall 2013) Lorraine Daston, Paul Erickson, Michael Gordin, Judy Klein and Thomas Sturm, co-authors.
4. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men. (New York, Hill & Wang, 2005)
    

Selected Articles

• “Hopi Dreams and Anthropologists’ Dream Collection Strategies: Notes on the Research of Dorothy Eggan and Don Talayesva,” Special Issue on Dreams, eds. Aude Fauvel, Remy Amoureux, and Michael Roelli, Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines 44 (2024), 33-47.
• “Toward a History of Behavioral Objects and the Behavioral Sciences,” in Behavioral Objects, Behavioral Matter: Rethinking Robotics Through Contemporary Art, eds. Samuel Bianchini and Emanuele Quinz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).
• “Liberate Yourself by Examining and Analyzing,” HAU: Journal of Ethnography, 11, 2 (2021).
• “Into the Whirlpool: How Predictive Data Put Brainwashing on Spin Cycle,” special issue on “Questioning the Quantified Life,” The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2020.
• “Feedback/Cybernetics” in Information: A Historical Companion, eds. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2020).
• “The Past and Future of Collaboration in Fieldwork,” a conversation with George Marcus and Dominic Boyer, Afterword to Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2020).
• “Archiving Endangerment, Endangered Archives: Journeys through the Sound Archives of Americanist Anthropology and Linguistics, 1911-2016,” co-authored with Judith Kaplan for a special issue by eds. Viktoria Tzaczyk, Carolyn Birdsall on Listening to the Archive, Technology and Culture, 60, 2, 2019: S161-S187.
• “On Being Psychotic in the South Seas c. 1947,” History of the Human Sciences, 31, 5, 2018.
• “An Episode in the History of PreCrime,” Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences, 48, 5, 2018: 637-647.
• “Anthropology’s Most-Documented Man, c. 1947: Prefiguring Big Data in the Big Social Science Era,” Eds. Elena Aranova, David Sepkoski, Christina Von Oertzen, “Histories of Data,” Osiris 32, 2017.
• “What Escapes the Total Archive,” LIMN 6, March 2016.
• “On Not Being There: The Data-Driven Body at Work and at Play,” The Hedgehog Review 17, 2 (Summer 2015).
• “Archives-of-Self: The Vicissitudes of Time and Self in a Technologically Determinist Future,” in Ed. Lorraine Daston, The Sciences of the Archive: Pasts, Presents, Futures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)
• “Guantánamo’s Catch-22: The Uncertain Interrogation Subject,” in Eds. Limor Samamian-Darash and Paul Rabinow, Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
• “Anthropological Data in Danger, c. 1941-1965,” in Eds. Fernando Vidal and Nélia Das, Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture (London: Routledge, 2015), 87-112.
• “Everywhere and Nowhere: Focus Groups as All-Purpose Devices,” Special Issue on “Crowds and Clouds,” LIMN 2, Spring 2012.
• “X-Rays of Inner Worlds: The Mid-Twentieth-Century Projective Test Movement,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47, 3, 2011.
• “Brainwashing’s Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,” Grey Room 45 (Fall 2011).
• "’Hypothetical Machines’: The Science-Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science,” Focus section on Reassessing Cold War Science, eds. David Kaiser and Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Isis 101, 2010, 401-411.
• "Filing the Total Human Experience: Anthropological Archives at Mid-Twentieth Century,” in eds. Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michelle Lamont, Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• "Toward a Database of Dreams:  Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, 1947-1961,” History Workshop Journal 67, 1, 2009, 44-68.
• "The Birth of Soft Torture: CIA interrogation techniques—a history,” Slate, November 16, 2005.
• "The American Science of Interrogation,” Op-Ed, Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2005.

In the Media

• Dreams as the Stuff of Data: A Turning Point in Mid-Twentieth-Century Big Social Science, Swiss STS meeting, University of Lausanne, 2/22/2014