Some_Llama's Journal: Human conditioning

I'm sure many people have heard of Pavlov's experiment, and last year i remember reading (on /.) about how they were able to reproduce the "feeling of some presence" often attributed to supernatural feelings by directly stimulating the brain...

I have thought about this a lot.. what if you were able to find and stimulate the pleasure or more important the desire sections of the brain, let's say for practical stakes you had implanted wireless receivers for input in a baby's brain.

What could you accomplish if you were able to follow this person from birth and activate those centers whenever you pleased?

If you made the person feel desire whenever an image of the opposite sex was apparent could you condition them to be heterosexual?

What if every time (for example) the person stole something you gave them pleasure? Would you raise a career thief?

What, if in conjuction with this control, you also had the ability to determine what the person was thinking, say for practical purposes, they had a helmet that could decode neural pathways or chemical signature changes.. this would allow even finer grained control over the person because now would you not just be able to influence the brain's response to actions but thoughts as well....

If the person was debating whether or not to steal something you would have a direct influence, via positive feedback, on that person's final decision regarding the act.

If something was influencing you, giving you pleasure for specific thoughts or acts.. would it be easy to withstand that kind of influence?

What if this had been going on since you were born.. would you even "know" there was any influencing going on, as this is how it had always been?

Maybe this seems scary to you, i don't know.. but i do know the concept is pretty much proven already, take addiction.

We know that a reward of feeling good is enough to produce a psychological addiction to certain drugs, even though there is no actual physiological addiction.