I love Layton Brothers: Mystery Room but I've always felt the post climax reveal (spoilers) that Justin brainwashed Alfendi while he was in a coma to be completely ridiculous. Brainwashing and comas are things that happen in soap operas. Combine them together, and you get double soap opera concentrate, as far removed from reality as possible. Right?
Well, I did a little digging (that is to say, I did some Google searches and read Wikipedia) and it doesn't seem as crazy anymore.
First off: the brainwashing. Brainwashing is pretty hard to pull off in the best of conditions. It involves completely breaking down a person's sense of identity (through isolation, control, sometimes physical threats and torture) and rebuilding them to have the values, beliefs, behavior, and identity that you want. It takes a long time and a lot of work. To top it off not all experts agree that it really exists. When American soldiers captured by Maoist China during the Korean war defected to the other side, many Americans cried brainwashing. It's almost certain these soldiers were being coerced and convinced, but that doesn't necessarily constitute brainwashing (breaking down and replacing identity altogether). Cults often use brainwashing elements in recruitment: isolation from previous friends and ideas, control of environment and actions, and intense peer pressure. It's messed up and scarily effective, but even this isn't genuine brainwashing.
Justin, who had maybe a few weeks to talk to an unconscious man, could have never pulled off real brainwashing.
Implanting false memories is another story.
Memory is fallible. Very open to suggestion and kinda wishy washy to begin with. It's comparatively easy to alter memories, so much so that it's done by accident. This is why cops have to be very careful of the questions they ask. If they say, "What color coat was the man wearing?" You're likely to remember the criminal wearing a jacket and say "blue" even though the criminal was not, in fact, wearing a coat at all.
Researchers have done an experiment where they've successfully implanted and removed false childhood memories in people, just by taking to them. If someone you trust tells you something happened, you're more likely to remember it, even if it's not true. This is why gaslighting works.
So Justin couldn't have brainwashed Alfendi, but he definitely could've altered his memories of Forbodium. We actually see this in game - the Prof's "placid" side tells us he clearly remembers shooting Makepeace, even though it's later proved that he wasn't even conscious when Makepeace was shot.
The last piece of the puzzle is whether this could've worked when Alfendi was in a coma. The answer is yes. People in comas are unresponsive but they can still hear what's going on. CAT scans/MRI scans (I don't know the difference) have shown that people in very deep vegetitave states have brain activity in response to spoken messages that mirrors the brain activity of fully conscious people given the same messages. In fact, it's probable that Justin could only have pulled off Alfendi's memory alteration when he was in a coma and unable to resist.
So, to recap: Alfendi is shot at Forbodium and falls into a coma, Justin implants false memories of shooting Makepeace while he's out of it, and when he wakes up with a different personality everyone assumes it was because of the coma or the trauma. Justin is convinced he created that new identity in Al. In reality, it's likely Alfendi had DID (dissociative identity disorder, the closest thing to a real world split personality) for a while and hid it really well, as @yoshi-g-teh-first has theorized, and the incident caused a new personality to emerge. A personality who had implanted memories of murder and who happily confessed as soon as he woke up.
Now the question is, can you get your previous murder confession overturned by pleading to the court that you had false memories of the event? Someone get this man a lawyer.
Wow you made it to the end I'm impressed! Here are some of my sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/brainwashing.htm
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/amp/researchers-implant-and-then-remove-false-childhood-memories-347054
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/how-to-reverse-false-memories-study/amp
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation
https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/can-loved-ones-in-a-coma-hear-us/
