Spending 30 years in a psychological study by Jack and Jeanne Block warped journalist Susannah Breslin's life

As a baby, her parents enrolled her in a University of California, Berkeley laboratory preschool, a place that was "essentially designed for spying on children", Breslin tells ABC RN's All in the Mind.

All in the Mind is an exploration of the mental: the mind, brain and behaviour — everything from addiction to artificial intelligence.

"My parents were intellectuals. They were cool in temperament. They were not touchy-feely. And they, I think, had high expectations for their children," Breslin says.

The preschool was exclusive, with a long waitlist, and her parents "thought it would be cool to have me enrolled [and] involved in something important", she says.

"My principal investigators were benevolent; they wanted to enlighten humanity. They were sort of working in service of the greater good. That's why they were collecting our data. That's why they were studying us," Breslin says.

In the 1960s, American psychologists Jack and Jeanne Block developed a longitudinal study to observe how personality traits and cognition develop over the course of a lifetime.

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