From Mind Hacks:

“The programme is actually from his 1995 series The Living Dead which tackles the relationship between memory and the political manipulation of history.

The first part is about how the ‘official’ memory of the Second World War was created - a process psychologists call ’social remembering’. Essentially, the social psychology of how we construct history, either on the scale of cultures, subcultures or families.

However, the second part focuses specifically on the rise of cognitive science and how theories of memory during the 50s and 60s were key to some of the Cold War efforts to research and create ‘brain washing’ and other mind manipulation techniques.

Curtis is probably best known to psychologists for his remarkably 2002 series Century of the Self where he tracked the Freudian idea of the self as one of the major social influences of the 20th century.”

Here’s a fun little paper from the 1970’s using the famous detective as a case study for the obsessive-compulsive results of long-term amphetamine abuse (see internet). It’s a fun read if for no other reason than the Holmes quotes and the flagrantly forced use of post-woodstock hep druggy terms.

Indulge yourself in the full helping…