You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained, Season seven, episode six, look Me in the Eye. By early nineteen seventy six, an Alisa Mchel and her family remain convinced she is in the grip of a horrifying demonic possession. She has her good and bad days, or, as she sees it, the days when Lucifer leaves her
alone and the days when he doesn't. In spite of that, Anna Lisa somehow manages to continue her studies at the University of Wurtzburg, but she is terrified at the thought of anyone there other than Peter and her best friend Anna finding out the truth about what has been going on with her. And though she continues to visit physicians on the order of Father Alt, she never once mentions the voices that speak to her or the hideous faces that reveal themselves at night, and she never wants mentions
the exorcisms. What scares her most is the thought that the doctors will simply judge her to be clinically insane, that they will cart her away and strip her of any right to speak for herself, that she will be poked and prodded by clueless medics intent on denying her the only thing that will bring her salvation her faith. And perhaps there is something else that haunts an Elisa, something lingering in the psyche of a nation still struggling to come to terms with its past, that her fears
derived from. In September nineteen thirty nine, Adolf Hitler signed the National Euthanasia Decree, effectively ordering the death of any
German citizen not deemed able enough. It was members of the Church, such as Catholic Bishop August von Galen, although less concerned when it came to the persecution of Jews, it should be said, who most vehemently opposed it, while notable medical professionals like Verner Hyde, professor of psychiatry and neurology at Analisa's own University of Wurzburg, were some of
its most ardent supporters. Between nineteen thirty nine and nineteen forty five, in an operation dubbed Action T four, as many as one hundred thousand German citizens considered physically or psychiatrically deficient, many of whom had already been sterilized by the state in a mass eugenics program, were murdered by their own government Much of the technology and techniques developed in the implementation of Action T four would later become
instrumental in the perpetration of the Holocaust. In March, while at university, Annalisa attempts to board a train home when her body becomes oddly stiff and she is unable to move. She eventually makes a way to the local church and prays for an end to her suffering. But as she speaks, she is apparently gripped by an invisible force, and as horrified churchgoers look on, is seemingly thrown repeatedly onto her
knees in an act of strange supplication. On hearing about this latest event, Annalisa's sister Roswea travels to Wurtzberg to look after her. When she arrives, she finds that Analisa is now refusing to eat. One morning, her doormate Ursula walks into Analisa's room and gasps in horror at the sight of the stricken young woman. Rosswether quickly ushes her out, but her sla can't shake the image from her mind of Annelisa staring blankly into space with skeletal arms contorted
in front of her in a strange inhuman pose. As news of her shocking condition spreads quickly among her friends, they beg Anealisa to see a doctor, but Rosswether reassures them that everything is under control. After a brief stay with Father Ault that fails to rectify the situation, a weak and terribly emaciated Anna Lisa is collected from his residence by her parents and her boyfriend Peter, who carries
her out to his car and drives her home. Once there, Annalisa's behavior only becomes more erratic as the apparent voices in her head continue their unremitting torment. Some days she has found furiously rubbing her fa or banging her head against the wall until it bleeds. She asks her family to tie her up at night and sometimes even during the day, for fear of what the demons might make
her do. Despite the deterioration in her condition, and Elisa attempts to reassure them are that everything will be fine because the Mother of God has also spoken to her, telling her that it will all finally be over in July. In the meantime, Father Arnold Rents continues the exorcisms, but struggles to make contact with any apparent entities. And the sessions only seem to send ann Elisa into violent fits of rage. While Peter and her father Joseph do their
best to restrain her. During one particularly brutal session, just like in the church weeks before, and Elisa falls to her knees, stands there, and throws herself to the floor again until the skin splits and her knees bleed. She will repeat this six hundred times before collapsing from exhaustion at each fall. Her mother Anna tries tearfully to comfort her daughter by throwing pillows and blankets under her bloodied legs, but she seems to miss them deliberately every time she
hits the floor. After hearing about this troubling session, Father Olt is haunted by the descriptions of Anna Lisa's vicious genuflections and her continued refusal to eat. Knowing the family's reluctance to involve the medical profession, he secretly invites a
physician friend, doctor Richard Roth, to her next exorcism. One night, with the session already underway, Doctor Roth and father Alt arrive at the Michael family home as the sound of inhuman shrieking can be heard coming from inside a single lamp illuminates the hall as Alt leads Roth to the second floor, where he is then shown into Analisa's room. He is horrified by what he sees. Annalissa's face is swollen and beaten, and her eyes are sunken into discolored flesh.
He watches as Father Rents stands, holding his crucifix out toward her as he recites the rich uale Romanum. Moments later, a shaking Doctor Roth bolts from the room and rushes down to the kitchen. When Father Alt asks him if he will help them, a trembling doctor Roth replies simply, there are no injections against the devil, before gathering his
things and hurrying out of the house. When Father Alt returns a few days later, Annalisa tells him, with fading light in her eyes, that she fears it is still to get worse before it will get better. She reminds him that he mustn't be afraid, though all will be well in July, just as the Mother of God has deemed it so. Father Olt notices that one of Annalisa's
teeth has been chipped. When he leaves the house later that night, he sees a peculiar mouth shaped dent in the wall, and a glass panel appears to be missing from one of the doors. It was Anna Lisa. Joseph tells him she had run through it head first. Another five exorcisms take place before thirtieth of June, when in a thick summer heat, Father Rents arrives at the Michael household for what will be the sixty seventh exorcism since
they started. As she has done in all sixty six so far, ann Elisa waits patiently and eagerly for her deliverance, surrounded by her family, her parents Anna and Joseph, sisters Barbara and Rosweether, and Peter, and there is reason to be cheerful, despite her temperature running at thirty nine degrees celsius. Tomorrow is the first of July, the moment, as Annelisa claims, has been foretold by the Mother of God that she
will finally be released. An Elisa is placed on the sofa with barely the strength to lift her own body, and once again Father Rents begins the ritual. Within seconds, as the sacred words fall from his mouth, Analisa begins to slither and moan, her teeth and withered gums, gnashing at the sound of the prayers. On the bridge of her nose, a large open sore weeps from a wound
sustained the previous week. As rerns continues, a voice cries out, but it is not the growl of a demon or a hiss of rage, but rather the gentle, sweet, and exhausted voice of a young woman. Absolution, says Analisa. Father Rents stops and asks is she sure? Yes, she replies, it seems the last of the demons have finally left her body. But Rence knows all too well it could be a trap. After all, how do they know it
is Annalisa who is speaking. Rents gives a nod to Peter, who then stares long and hard into Anna Lisa's eyes, just as she had asked him to do, so that he'll know if it is really her in her mind or not. Peter turns to Rents and confirms it really is Anna Lisa who is speaking. Rents turns back to the young woman. Finding a momentary reserve of strength, she drops from the couch and kneels on the floor. Father Rents makes the sign of the Cross and places his
hand on her head. God, the father of mercies. Through the death and resurrection of his son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. When it's finished, An Elisa is taken to her bed and left asleep. Her hopeful mother, Anna follows Father Rent to the door. What happens now, she asks. Father Rents pats her arm and smiles. We pray. Later that night, as Anna makes her way to bed, a
quiet voice comes out from Anna Lisa's room. Mama, I'm afraid, says Anne Alissa. An image flashes through Anna's mind. It's Anna Lisa, not as a young woman, but a young child who wanted nothing but to make her mother happy. Anna goes to her daughter and sits with her until she falls asleep. Sometime later, a scream coming from Annalissa's room rips the silence of the night. Joseph rushes in to find Anna Lisa being seemingly thrown about her bed
by an invisible force. He commands the demons to leave his daughter alone, and the violence eventually subsides, but it will be well into the following morning of July first, before Anna Lisa is finally calmed enough to fall asleep once more. A few hours later outside Venus, the morning star, having hung so bright and prominent in the sky, slowly fades before vanishing altogether into the warm light of the
rising sun. At seven am. Before heading off to work, Joseph makes sure to check in on his daughter and finds her sleeping peacefully. An hour later, he receives a phone call from Anna to inform him that Anna Lisa is dead. An autopsy on her body finds all her inner organs are healthy, including the brain, with no damage noted that might have caused any epileptic seizures. Her death is recorded as having been caused by starvation and possibly
over exertion. The report also notes that her pupils were unusually dilated and that she had none of the bed saws or ulcerations of the skin associated with starvation, despite weighing only sixty eight pounds at the time of her death. She is buried a few days later on the fringes of Klingenberg Cemetery, next to her sister Martha. In the aftermath of Anne Elsa's death, the West German state charged her parents, Joseph and Anna, along with Fathers, Arnold Rents,
and Ernest Alt with negligent homicide. Two years later, in a heavily publicized case, all four defendants were found guilty of manslaughter due to negligence and sentenced to a term of six months in prison later suspended and three years probation. All four defendants maintained to the end that Analiza had
been the victim of a demonic possession. Much later, when Father Rentz's taped recordings of Analis's exorcisms are made public, an analysis of her pained and anguished responses apparently revealed some of them to be hitting two registers at the same time, as if two people had been speaking simultaneously. Then whatever way we look at the terrifying and tragic case of Ana Lisa Michel, it is impossible to escape
the horror of it. If you believe in the existence of demonic spirits that can possess your mind intent on condemning your soul to an eternity of damnation, then such a horror is self explanatory. If you don't, we can still find a number of equally unsettling ideas lurking during the exorcisms. When Analisa yelled and fought with father rents. She claimed it was as if somebody had taken over her mind, leaving herself stranded on the edges of her
psyche while someone else pulled her strings. If, like me, you find this notion terrifying, then perhaps it's best not to think too deeply on just what that self is exactly. We often talk of how our actions define us, that the choices we make from our moral standpoints, to the clothes we wear, to even the partners we supposedly choose
all combine to form an impression of who we are. Yet, if we live in a deterministic universe, as many leading scientists and philosophers think, which if any of our decisions, could we reasonably declare to have been made entirely of our own volition? To paraphrase Arthur Schopenhauer, you may have a thought and then act on that thought, But what
thought to have that thought in the first place? Free will, in the purest sense, a will that is completely free from any influence, does not exist through a combination of nature and nurture. Even before we are born, we are in a sense programmed to behave in this at a very basic level, our behavior is controlled by the biological demands of our bodies. We eat because we're hungry, drink
because we're thirsty, rest because we are tired. We could choose not to eat, drink, or rest, but for the most part, the consequences of doing so prevent us from making such decisions. The neural networks in our brains that influence our behavior how quick we might be to get angry, or why we prefer oranges to apples, for example, are partly determined by genetic events, many of which take place
before we are born, that constantly affect our behavior. Epigenetic imprinting, the way our biology processes how exactly our genes will influence our behavior, also takes place before we are born and can even continue during our lifetime, all without our control. Often, when we feel we are being freely assertive, our actions
are in fact simply reactions to stimuli. Some believe the process known as priming is a profound case in point, demonstrating the way in which our behavior can be manipulated by something as simple as word association. One striking example was revealed in a two thousand and six study conducted by a psychologist, Professor Kathlyn votes of the University of Minnesota.
The study demonstrated that people who carry out tasks while being exposed to reminders of money, either through images placed near them on screens or the use of fake money left out in plain sight, were likely to be more self sufficient. They were also less will to help others in a series of later tasks they were asked to perform.
And all this before we even take into consideration how our general outlook on life or our moral and religious beliefs are shaped by the environment we're brought up in and the social groups we predominantly interact with. We could argue that through education and raised awareness, we learn to recognize the ways in which our choices are being influenced by things we can't control, and in turn learn to make better, more thoughtful choices. And as thinkers such as
Daniel Dennett have proposed, maybe that's enough. As Dennett argues, even if we reject the purest's idea of free will, there are parameters within which we can retain a satisfactory degree of freedom that at least leaves us with, as he says, the varieties of free will worth wanting. In this sense, free will is possible if we understand it
essentially as nothing but a useful fiction. In other words, although we should accept that we can't have full authority over our decisions, be it the biological impulses we can't control, like who we fall in love with, or the myriad ways in which our environments influence us, we might find we have enough choices to meaningfully affect outcomes, thereby providing
a gratifying feeling of autonomy. But if we say that free will amounts to the number of options available to us within any given situation, how should we account for the way in which, for each of us, due to the influence of our individualistic, predetermined genetic makeup and the varied subjective experiences of our lives, those choices at our
disposal will be different. Is it fair that one person can be penalized for a criminal act, for example, and be stigmatized for it when so many of the things that lead them to commit the act are completely out of their control. The simple answer is that we can't. The best we can do is agree collectively on what we deem to be acceptable behavior. Then we can negotiate the parameters of acceptability, either explicitly through the enforcement of
laws or implicitly through tacitly agreed social moraids. But what happens then when those parameters shift? The terror of becoming the victim of demonic possession is about much more than control. For the devout, the ultimate fear is that something fundamentally evil has taken over their soul, threatening to commit evil acts in their name, or the sin of suicide, condemning
them to hell in the process. Yet, if we are never truly in control of our actions, what might any of us be capable of given the right set of circumstances. In July nineteen sixty one, twenty three year old Bill Menolt came across an advert in the New Haven Register, a Connecticut based local paper, requesting persons needed for a study of memory, with the offer of four dollars for
just one hour of your time. Having just recently left the Army, Bill figured he could use the money, and, since he would be in New Haven that day anyway, decided to put himself forward. A few days later, he arrived at Yale University's Interaction Laboratory, where he was introduced to another volunteer, an accountant named Missus Wallace, and the experimenter, an officious sounding man dressed in a gray lab coat
who would be supervising the experiment. It was explained to Bill and mister Wallace that they were taking part in a study to examine the effects of punishment on learning ability. Then they drew straws to determine which roles they would take. Mister Wallace was assigned the position of learner and taken into a room where, watched by Bill, he was strapped
into an electric chair. Now in the role of teacher, Bill was taken to an adjacent room containing an electric shock generator that he was led to believe was hooked up to the electric chair under the watchful eye of the experimenter. Bill and mister Wallace, who were no longer able to see each other, proceeded to carry out a
series of simple word based memory tests. All Bill then had to do was administer an electric shock whenever the learner mister Wallace, got the answer wrong, with one additional instruction. Each time this occurred, he was to increase the strength of the electric shocks in his room. On the electric shock generator that Bill was controlling, there were thirty switches clearly marked with different levels of power, ranging from fifteen vaults described as slight shock to four hundred and fifty
vaults described as danger severe shock. With the experiment under way, Bill dutifully increased the shocks by fifteen vaults with each wrong answer, even when mister Wallace could be heard screaming in agony and demanding to be let out from the other side of the wall. At every scream, Bill would turn to the experimenter for guidance, each time being told calmly but forcefully to please continue. Two hundred and ten vaults, two hundred and fifty five vaults, three hundred and thirty volts.
Up it went until something occurred that Bill had not been prepared for. Mister Wallace stopped responding. The young former soldier had been instructed earlier to treat a non response as an incorrect answer, but was understandably concerned that something terrible had happened. He looked to the experimenter, who again asked him calmly to continue. Bill flicked the next switch four hundred and thirty five vaults. There was no response.
Now utterly convinced that he'd killed mister Wallace, a horrified Bill looked again to the experimenter. The experiment requires we continue, he commanded flatly, against all his better judgment, Bill flicked the highest and final switch on the generator four hundred and fifty vaults. Thankfully, for Bill, none of it was real.
There were no electric shocks transmitted to mister Wallace, who, it turned out, wasn't an accountant at all, but a stooge who was part of the experiment named Bob mac donnough. Bill had unwittingly taken part in a hugely controversial experiment designed by psychologist Stanley Milgram to test our obedience to
authority figures. When the truth of the Holocaust was exposed in the aftermath of the Second World War, Stanley Milgram, like many others, was left completely stunned as to how so many ordinary people could be convinced to perpetrate such acts. The Milgram Experiment, as it came to be known, was conducted in the wake of the trial of Adolph Eichmann, who, as a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party, played a leading role in the organization of the Holocaust.
Aikman famously stated he should not be considered culpable for his actions, since he had merely been following orders Aikman's defense uncomfortably inferred that anyone in his situation could very well have made the same choices. Milgram set out to discover if there was any truth to this. Bill was one of forty male subjects with varying occupations and levels
of education, who were tested. Prior to the study. Milgram asked for teen psychology majors to predict how many test subjects could be coerced into administering the highest level of shock, to which they gave the mean answer of one point two percent. The eventual answer was, in fact sixty five percent, more than half of all participants. And for me, it
is here that we find the true horror. Often the only thing standing between us and the perpetrating of what we might consider evil acts is the tenacity of our fictitious social conventions, and whether we are lucky enough, either through a genetic predisposition or through developing the requisite attitude to wilfully adhere to them, which in turn leaves us with the even more uncomfortable truth that, far from so called evil acts being an aberration of human behavior, they
are in fact, in d entirely normative. The search for the truth of things has invigorated thinkers throughout the history of humankind, and has become an especially fraught issue in our era of uncertainty, characterized by fears over the impact of fake news and the increasing reliance on dispassionate algorithms to aggregate information. What rarely gets acknowledged is that the truth is not necessarily important to the function of humanity.
In fact, we could reasonably say that in terms of how we model societies and come together to collectively operate, it might be irrelevant and in some ways even detrimental. In two thousand and eight, professor Kathleen Vows, this time in collaboration with psychologist Jonathan Schoola of the University of California, carried out a fascinating study to test how belief in
free will effects moral responsibility. Vose and Schooler gave two sets of participants a different passage to read from the Astonishing Hypothesis, a nineteen ninety four book about the study of consciousness written by Nobel laureate and co discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick. One passage asserted that although we appear to have free will, in fact our choices have already been predetermined for us. While the other passage gave no mention
of the concept. After completing a quick survey about their respective thoughts on the idea of free will, participants were then asked to take a quick maths test with one caveat. Whenever a question appeared, they were asked to press the space bar to prevent the answer appearing on the screen shortly after. Incredibly, those who read the passage dismissing free will cheated more often, with the level of cheating being
higher the more skeptical the participant was about having it. Perhaps, then, with this in mind, provided you think cheating is an undesirable behavior, there is reason to maintain the idea of
free will, regardless of whether it is true or not. Ultimately, we may find that the extent to which we cling to the notions of free will and ownership of the self has far more to do with what we consider the purpose of life to be, rather than any real truth as to who or what we are, something that is itself driven by pre programmed genetic data and unconscious responses.
Should we choose to see ourselves as all valid occupiers of a minutely small shared space in a vast universe, that should do what we can to ensure as many of us as possible can experience a life that is
worth living. Or should we choose to act selfishly to survive and thrive at any cost, Or are we merely, in the words of true detectives rusty call, just things that labor under the illusion of having a self, an accretion of sensory experience and feelings programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. This episode was written by Richard McLean Smith Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show,
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