The War of Nerves by Martin Sixsmith

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The War of Nerves by Martin Sixsmith: Confirmation Bias

Confirmation Bias

BBC Radio 4 - The War of Nerves by Martin Sixsmith, Confirmation Bias

The Cold War, and its legacy, through the minds of the people who lived it.

The Cold War was fought on the battlefield of the human mind. Martin Sixsmith examines its legacy, in today’s uncertain world and in our thoughts and fears.

Martin Sixsmith witnessed the end of the Cold War first hand, reporting for the BBC from Moscow during the presidencies of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. In The War of Nerves he draws on a vast array of sources as well as his own experiences to take us into the minds of those affected by the simmering tensions and paranoia on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

From the end of the Second World War to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the psychodrama played out between the Soviet and American superpowers held the world in thrall. The Cold War, both sides declared, was a contest of competing social, economic, political and ethical systems, each of them professing a monopoly on wisdom and the keys to humankind’s future. It was a conflict in which the battleground was, to an unprecedented extent, the human mind - the aim was to control not just territory, resources and power, but loyalties, belief and the nature of reality.

Both sides in the Cold War had the means to destroy the planet. And decades of rumbling international hostility affected individual mental well-being, manifesting in social paranoia, catastrophising, and surges of collective hysteria.

Until earlier this year, we thought all that was over. But now, in Ukraine, we are forced to reconsider the comforting assumptions of the past 30 years. History, in the sense of a settled global preference for liberal democracy, has evidently not ended. 

Martin Sixsmith studied Russian at Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne and in St Petersburg, and psychology at Birkbeck and London Metropolitan University. He is the author of two novels and several works of non-fiction, including Philomena and Russia: A 1,000 Year Chronicle of the Wild East.

In this second episode, Martin explores the dangers of confirmation bias - the tendency to select only that information which confirms our own beliefs - and how the mutual incomprehension of the Cold War is once again fuelling dangerous international tensions. 

Abridged and produced by Jane Greenwood
Read by Jonathan Keeble
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4

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