My favorite form of brainwashing is the fire alarm.<p>I had a friend in the first year of grad school, we were living in the same building, the fire alarm would go off almost every night. We would stay up late every Sunday doing our electromagnetism homework listening to the first two Black Sabbath albums.<p>One day he cracked and decided he'd lay in bed during the fire alarm and the RA asked where he was and I said he was still in bed and they punished him.<p>He started thinking independently and started getting arrested. He got arrested at the supermarket, and then he got arrested cause he was sleeping under the pool table.<p>Now Scientology mind training is really something. If you pull the fire alarm at a Scientology org they know you're going to dress up like a firefighter and empty out the till and steal the case folders and the e-meters, so Scientologists do intense training so that they do not leave the building when the fire alarm goes off. They spend hours just staring at each other in TR-0 to prepare for that kind of ruse.<p>You see, if your learned from your experience, you'd learn that when the fire alarm goes off there is never a fire. The things are so unreliable that you know they wouldn't go off in a fire anyway.<p>In fact actually, leaving the building when the fire alarm goes off and there really is a fire can get you killed:<p><a href="http://www.newstalk1010.com/news/2015/02/16/should-you-leave-your-high-rise-unit-when-fire-alarm-goes-off-probably-not" rel="nofollow">http://www.newstalk1010.com/news/2015/02/16/should-you-leave...</a>