GSSN09EP11: "Paul David's Blowing America's Mind, in The Sky With Diamonds!"

The Graveyard Shift

Hey there, groovy hepcats! In this episode, Emi airs the hip interview he had with Author and very experienced Hollywood Production Coordinator, Paul Davids! Together, they discuss Paul's brand new book, "Blowing America's Mind: A True Story of Princeton, CIA Mind Control, LSD and Zen"! In this book, "...Two well-known Princeton alumni at last reveal the true inside story of how they got caught up in and nearly done in by the CIA's LSD-laced deep hypnosis research while they were Princeton students in the late 1960's. Reminiscent in some respects of A Beautiful Mind, the Princeton setting and the artificial, hypnotically induced schizophrenic states for experimental psychological research are the basis for exploring the actual psychiatrists and psychologists involved as well as their student 'guinea pigs.' Princeton and the now-defunct New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute (NJNPI) were just two of 86 American institutions (incuding universities and hospitals) engaged in almost 150 top secret mind-control research projects funded by the CIA. The authors worked at NJNPI in deep hypnosis research while attending the waning days of Princeton as an all-male university before Princeton went coed. This is also an intense love story reawakening the rebellious wild spirit of those early days of the Psychedelic Revolution. The true story, which vivifies the beginning of the 'psychedelic era,' unfolds as to how the authors' naive and well-intentioned participation warped their intimate lives at a formative stage of their development and nearly cost them their personal identities.