# Ravenscrag

Kory W. Mathewson · 2026-10-27 · https://korymathewson.com/ravenscrag/ · An audio art piece on Ewen Cameron, Donald Hebb, Psychic Driving, and the CIA- and Canadian-funded MKUltra experiments inside Montreal's Ravenscrag mansion.

In *1984*, Orwell wrote that power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Hate, he wrote a few pages later, is more tiring than love.

How can I make a robot out of you? How can I control your mind?

Sidney Gottlieb asked that question at the CIA. Charles Manson chased it in California. In Montreal, Ewen Cameron tried to answer it inside Ravenscrag, a Victorian mansion on the mountain that once belonged to a shipping magnate.

Cameron was Scottish. He became an American citizen in 1942, sat on the tribunal at Nuremberg, and was once head of the World Psychiatric Association. He dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize.

What happened to him? He was a good doctor, and then his experiments got more and more bizarre.

He called it beneficial brainwashing. After American prisoners came back from Korea, he thought psychiatry could wipe out detrimental patterns of thought and behavior.

Down the hill at McGill, Donald Hebb, the psychologist behind Hebbian learning, was studying how soldiers could train to resist torture. He paid students good wages to sit in solitary confinement.

Cameron saw an ad for learning Spanish in your sleep with audio playing under your pillow.

*"Learn Spanish while you sleep. Repita conmigo: Estoy bien. Todo está bien."*

He built an experiment around it and called it Psychic Driving. He gave patients LSD and kept them asleep for weeks while a speaker under the pillow played loops of their own voices.

*"Why are you so angry? You are an angry person."*

A contrarian paper he wrote on it flagged him to the CIA. Did he still think he was doing the best he could?

Years later, a woman from Winnipeg sued the CIA. Brian Mulroney's government didn't help. They suppressed the evidence that Washington had apologized to Canada, because an apology is proof of wrongdoing.

Why was Canada ambiguous? Because the Canadian government was involved in funding the research.

The CIA settled out of court with nine Canadians for $750,000. In 1992, Canada paid victims $100,000 each so they wouldn't sue the government.

Patients consented and entered voluntarily. But the treatment was not described.