The end of the world is nigh; 21 May, to be precise. That's the date when Harold Camping, a preacher from Oakland, California, is confidently predicting the Second Coming of the Lord. At about 6pm, he reckons 2 per cent of the world's population will be immediately "raptured" to Heaven; the rest of us will get sent straight to the Other Place.
If Mr Camping were speaking from any normal pulpit, it would be easy to dismiss him as just another religious eccentric wrongly calling the apocalypse. But thanks to this elderly man's ubiquity, on America's airwaves and billboards, his unlikely Doomsday message is almost impossible to ignore.
Every day Mr Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, speaks to his followers via the Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded entirely by donations from listeners. Such is their generosity (assets total $120m) that his network now owns 66 stations in the US alone.
Those deep pockets were raided to allow Family Radio to launch a high-profile advertising campaign, proclaiming the approaching Day of Judgement. More than 2,000 billboards across the US are adorned with its slogans, which include "Blow the trumpet, warn the people!". A fleet of logoed camper vans is touring every state in the nation. "It's getting real close. It's really getting pretty awesome, when you think about it," Mr Camping told The Independent on Sunday. "We're not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We're talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it's all coming to a head right now."
Mr Camping, who makes programmes in 48 languages, boasts tens of thousands of followers across the globe, with radio stations in South Africa, Russia and Turkey. After 70 years of studying the Bible, he claims to have developed a system that uses mathematics to interpret prophesies hidden in it. He says the world will end on 21 May, because that will be 722,500 days from 1 April AD33, which he believes was the day of the Crucifixion. The figure of 722,500 is important because you get it by multiplying three holy numbers (five, 10 and 17) together twice. "When I found this out, I tell you, it blew my mind," he said.
Recent events, such as earthquakes in Japan, New Zealand and Haiti, are harbingers of impending doom, he says, as are changing social values. "All the stealing, and the lying, and the wickedness and the sexual perversion that is going on in society is telling us something," he says. "So too is the gay pride movement. It was sent by God as a sign of the end."
Mr Camping, who founded Family Radio in the 1950s, grew up a Baptist. Many of his strongly held views – he does not believe in evolution and thinks all abortion should be banned – are relatively commonplace among America's religious right.
Critics point out that this isn't the first time Mr Camping has predicted the second coming. On 6 September 1994, hundreds of his listeners gathered at an auditorium in Alameda looking forward to Christ's return.
"At that time there was a lot of the Bible I had not really researched very carefully," he said last week. "But now, we've had the chance to do just an enormous amount of additional study and God has given us outstanding proofs that it really is going to happen."
Mr Camping's argument has convinced Adam Larsen, 32, from Kansas. He is among scores of "ambassadors" who have quit their jobs to drive around America in Family Radio vehicles warning of the impending apocalypse. "My favourite pastime is raccoon hunting," Mr Larsen told CNN. "I've had to give that up. But this task is far more important."
I was watching a video on what is called positive psychology and something occurred to me about being a hypnotist.
BTW, here is the video
The insight I got was about why I love doing hypnosis. Part of it is fun and, yes I do get paid for it, but the most enduring pleasure I get from being a hypnotist are those moments when I know I've helped people change their lives.
There is nothing like it.
There is a part of the hypnosis practice I teach called "The Magic Mirror" during which, and more often than I ever thought, people show the emotion of joy. Often it's a tear of joy or relief or simple satisfaction that their problem is gone. It is so obvious on their faces that you've done a great job!
When I think about all the people I've worked with it is that brief moment of joy that reminds me why I love being a hypnotist.
I want to teach you to do that too.
On June 11th and 12 Jeff Stephens and I will be teaching the Magic Mirror and all the other tools that make being a hypnotist both fun and profitable.
www.ted.com Martin Seligman talks about psychology — as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner. As it moves beyond a focus on disease, what can modern psychology help us to become?
When you glimpse across the earth right now its virtually shocking that a Zombie Apocalypse, or another equally devastating worldwide celebration has not happened nevertheless. The Earth Quake, Tsunami in Japan which caused a large number of men and women to die, combined together with the Nuclear Crisis could have effortlessly been a believable trigger to a Zombie outbreak in any motion picture. You can find wars in lots of countries round the earth which leave many dead or dying. In many of these countries the dead aren't effectively buried which could depart them prone to any new bacteria or virus that could trigger Zombie like final results. I do not even know the place to start with each of the medical practitioners and researchers performing experiments in stem cells and nano-bots. They may possess the ideal of intentions however the success can be devastating.
I really do not deliver these factors up to scare any person needlessly, but just to seek to prompt people today to have all set for the unfamiliar. Positive, many people assume Zombies are merely a product of fiction and for that most element they might be correct. Arranging for survival inside of a zombie dominated entire world just isn't compared with preparing for survival in any other circumstances. Including the Zombie aspect forces survivalists to have a look at even essentially the most unlikely situation and method for it. This is certainly widely understood to become a very good strategy by survivalists along with other groups in any circumstance. Let's go around a handful of products to see how preparing for the zombie invasion can gain you.
The number one factor anyone needs to do to program for any zombie apocalypse is know how they may survive the first few hours or days of a zombie assault. The main element aspects on this are recognizing where by you will attempt to visit meet up with close family and friends and just how you'll get there. Ideally you may have a very "safe house" that is far from any big cities but nonetheless close ample that you simply can get their reasonably promptly. Frequently a holiday cottage or hunting lodge can serve this function perfectly. In case you make sure people closest to you personally realize that with the event of a huge scale emergency they should meet you there it might save the lives of several. In case your closest friends and family are skeptical of the zombie attack you do not must mention it to them exclusively.
Making sure that your safe and sound home is effectively stocked with non-perishable food, h2o and also other materials in the least occasions is very important. In many instances a secure household will have a nearby lake or even a well for water. Preserve in mind that most wells require electrical energy so you also needs to possess a gas powered generator up there. It does not have to be big enough to energy a standard home, just sufficient to keep the necessities working. With this particular you are going to also want ample fuel to obtain you by a number of weeks at a minimum. When you have these couple of things all prepared for you personally, you are going to possess a big benefit on just about most people else! In the event you do not have a very cottage or hunting lodge you could possibly just stash a pleasant tent or other short-term shelter somewhere that you just can obtain but is not likely to acquire stumbled upon by individuals strolling with the woods. Any shelter is greater than nothing at all within a zombie apocalypse predicament.
Maintaining weapons in both your secure household as well as your normal residing house is quite crucial. Weapons will most certainly be necessary to help you escape in your risk-free residence and after that some great hunting guns and knives will likely be critical for survival. Never skimp about the ammo considering that even the very best guns are virtually pointless if you run from ammo. Hopefully you really don't need to use your guns to fend off any zombies but you'll be satisfied in case you have them offered when the time arrives. Staying able to hunt will even extend your ability to survive indefinitely since you will no lengthier must fear nearly as much about operating out of meals.
These very simple suggestions must be ample to survive the preliminary zombie attack and allow you to put in place your new everyday life. Preparation for surviving while in the zombie infested community previous the initial number of weeks can take place when you've built it in your safe and sound property because your techniques will likely be very condition dependant. Items change based upon what variety of zombies are roaming the world. In the event the emergency predicament that prompted you to drop by your risk-free house is not zombie relevant you'll need to make programs for that too. Recall, never ever fall short to plan otherwise you are setting up to fall short.
Anybody who needs to remember anything can take advantage of how mnemonics works. There are several ways you can use mnemonics to your advantage. The main idea is for you to understand how these techniques work. Remember that it isn't a trick. It's just a simple step-by-step procedure you can follow to overcome the barriers of memorizing an item or set of items. We all have common problems with memorization but with mnemonics, memorization can hardly be considered a task.
Mnemonics are meant for you to utilize your brain to its full potential. What you need is to exercise your innate creativity skill. You don't need to be an artist, per se, to do this. All you have to do is activate your mind to visual images. The reason is simply that you'd need to associate words you need to memorize to something that could stimulate your brain to function using your imagination.
The art is simple. When you come across an important word, name, picture or information, immediately take something out of your stored memory. Something that you're already familiar with is essential for associating a new item to the old because this way, whenever you think of the old item, you'd immediately remember the new one and vice versa.
Let's say you need to buy several things for your family members. Since this task requires you to remember several different things at the same time, which are also entirely not related with one another, you need strong memorization skill to accomplish this.
Pretend you need to purchase a bar of soap, bottle of wine, a pair of socks, a box of tissues and a bag of dog food. Since association is the main tool you have in order to remember all these things, start linking these words to each other. Try to imagine yourself driving a 4x4 bar of soap which happened to float well on a lake of wine that you needed to cross. Then, at the toll gate, you hand over a pair of socks so you can pass through. Next, a box of tissues signals a green light and right before you find a parking space; a walking bag of dog food shows you a vacant space. By the time you got out of your car, the items are already stuck to your head and remembering them all wouldn't be too difficult anymore.
Click below to learn more about memorizing using the Link method and other memory improvement techniques:
Many, perhaps most, Pagan religions in the Mediterranean area had a major seasonal day of religious celebration at or following the Spring Equinox. Cybele, the Phrygian fertility goddess, had a consort, Attis, who was believed to have been born via a virgin birth. Attis was believed to have died and been resurrected each year during the period MAR-22 to MAR-25.
Gerald L. Berry, author of "Religions of the World," wrote:
"About 200 B.C. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill ...Associated with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, Attis (the older Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection." 3
Wherever Christian worship of Jesus and Pagan worship of Attis were active in the same geographical area in ancient times, Christians:
"... used to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus on the same date; and pagans and Christians used to quarrel bitterly about which of their gods was the true prototype and which the imitation."
Many religious historians and liberal theologians believe that the death and resurrection legends were first associated with Attis, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. They were simply grafted onto stories of Jesus' life in order to make Christian theology more acceptable to Pagans. Others suggest that many of the events in Jesus' life that were recorded in the gospels were lifted from the life of Krishna, the second person of the Hindu Trinity. Ancient Christians had an alternative explanation; they claimed that Satan had created counterfeit deities in advance of the coming of Christ in order to confuse humanity. 4 Modern-day Christians generally regard the Attis legend as being a Pagan myth of little value with no connection to Jesus. They regard Jesus' death and resurrection account as being true, and unrelated to the earlier tradition.
Wiccans and other modern-day Neopagans continue to celebrate the Spring Equinox as one of their 8 yearly Sabbats (holy days of celebration). Near the Mediterranean, this is a time of sprouting of the summer's crop; farther north, it is the time for seeding. Their rituals at the Spring Equinox are related primarily to the fertility of the crops and to the balance of the day and night times. In those places where Wiccans can safely celebrate the Sabbat out of doors without threat of religious persecution, they often incorporate a bonfire into their rituals, jumping over the dying embers is believed to assure fertility of people and crops.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner‘s dead-tree forebear) opens with Deckard arguing with his wife about whether or not to alter her crummy attitude with the “mood organ.” She could, if she so desired, dial her mood so that she was happy and content. Philip K. Dick worried that the ability to alter our mood would remove the authenticity and immediacy of our emotions. Annalee Newitz at io9 seems to be worried mood manipulations will enable a form of social control.
The worry comes from recent developments in neuro-pharmaceuticals. Drugs are already on the market that allow for mood manipulation. The Guardian‘s Amelia Hill notes that drugs like Prozac and chemicals like oxytocin have the ability to make some people calmer, more empathetic, and more altruistic. Calm, empathetic, and altruistic people are far more likely to act morally than anxious, callous, and selfish people. But does that mean mood manipulation going to let us force people to be moral? And if it does, is that a good thing? Is it moral to force people to be moral?
The question is a strange one. Force people to be moral – what does that even mean? Let’s cast some clarity onto the issue of moral enhancement:
The field is in its infancy, but “it’s very far from being science fiction”, said Dr Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner.
“Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate,” he said. “There is already a growing body of research you can describe in these terms. Studies show that certain drugs affect the ways people respond to moral dilemmas by increasing their sense of empathy, group affiliation and by reducing aggression.”
That last sentence is a critical one, so I’m going to disassemble it. Some drugs affect, that is, influence or temper a person’s response to a moral dilemma. Your initial response might be, “I don’t want my decisions being influenced by a drug!” We see ourselves as rational beings in control of our emotions. But our mood is often critical to our decision making, particularly in regard to how we react to others.
We intuitively recognize that mood is often related to morality. When a person is upset or depressed, they can “snap” at a friend, being unjustifiably cruel, violent, or neglectful. Often a person who snaps at a friend will immediately apologize, offering “I don’t know why I did that. I’m in a bad mood, but not at you in particular. I’m sorry.” In these cases, mood creates poor conditions for moral behavior towards friends, let alone acquaintances or general strangers.
The important point is that mood creates conditions conducive to moral behavior. Mood does not determine moral behavior. Like many discussions around human enhancement, it is impossible to overemphasize the difference between determining and enabling a behavior or trait. Think of it like buying a pair of running shoes. Just because you own the shoes, or even if you choose to wear your running shoes every day, doesn’t mean you’ll go running. But you’re more likely to go running in running shoes than if you are wearing flip-flops or snow boots.
Mood enhancers work the same way. I might take a pill that makes me more more likely to be empathetic and altruistic, but it doesn’t guarantee that I will be any more than me having a crummy day will make me a jerk to others. Humans are able to exercise reason and willpower over our emotions and moods to control our actions.
The great thing about mood enhancers is that they make it so that our reason and willpower don’t have to overcome anger, fear, and angst to enable us to do the moral thing. A person in the right mood has an easier time making good choices when faced with moral dilemmas. There is, of course, a caveat:
Ruud ter Meulen, chair in ethics in medicine and director of the centre for ethics in medicine at the University of Bristol, warned that while some drugs can improve moral behaviour, other drugs – and sometimes the same ones – can have the opposite effect.
“While Oxytocin makes you more likely to trust and co-operate with others in your social group, it reduces empathy for those outside the group,” Meulen said.
As with every other technology in existence, mood manipulation and moral enhancement is a double-edged sword. Again, mood manipulation creates the conditions conducive to moral or immoral behavior, as the case may be. But, no matter how you look at it, mood manipulation is not mind control.
It may sound like something out of a science fiction plot, but Oxford researchers say that modern conventional medicine is gradually developing ways to change the moral states of humans through pharmaceutical drugs, and thus control the way people think and act in various life situations. These new drugs will literally have the ability to disrupt an individual’s personal morality, and instead reprogram that person to believe and do whatever the drug designer has created that drug to do.
“Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate,” said Dr. Guy Kahane from the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics in the UK. “There is already a growing body of research you can describe in these terms. Studies show that certaindrugs affect the ways people respond to moral dilemmas by increasing their sense of empathy, group affiliation and by reducing aggression.”
While this may sound good in theory, mind control is already a very dangerous side effect of existing drugs. Take the antidepressant drug Prozac, for instance, which has been known to cause those taking it to lash out in violent rages. One young boy murdered his father by beating him and stabbing him in the head, and hit his mother with a crowbar and stabbed her in the face, shortly after starting to take Prozac (http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000…).
But the kinds of drugs Kahane and his colleagues are referring to imply designer drugs specifically designed to not only alter one’s mental state, but also to change the way that person thinks about situations from a moral perspective. The end result is literally a type of drug-induced mind control where human subjects will be controlled by someone else, and unable to make conscious decisions for themselves.
Research on the subject, of course, tries to paint the idea of mind-control drugs in a positive light, suggesting that they could be used to help make the world a better place. Just imagine less violence, more trust, and more love, they say. This rhetoric, though, is really just a ploy to further numb the already mind-numbed masses into accepting the idea as a good thing.
The United States' interest in developing and using mind controlling methodologies and techniques was a major goal back in WWII for the CIA.
After the US came in from the West and the Russians from the East, Germany was split. Hitler's top scientists were covertly brought back to the States under an operation known as Paperclip. The US government wanted abstract knowledge from Hitler's scientists for the benefit of the US military and the security of the nation. Another major concern was to capture the Germans from the Soviets who would definitely make use of the German scientists. Many of these scientists studied brainwashing and torture and several were prosecuted as war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials.
The US government started a program called MK-ULTRA which originated with the Nazis in Germany during Hitler's reign. MK-ULTRA would be the continuation of the Nazi's work along with the Americans. This program was used for experiments on hundreds of American and Canadian citizens without approval.
The program began as early as the 1950s and continued through the late 1960s. Some of the goals of project MK-ULTRA were to utilize methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemicals, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse. This was an illegal and inhumane CIA human research program in its essence.
Now with the torture cases turning up in Guantanamo Bay and other stories from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, people may ask how the US could do such inhumane experiments of physical and psychological torture to human beings. Many would not know that more extreme types of torture were already being practiced back home in the States on US citizens in the 1950s and on. Many US government projects began from Operation Paperclip. As Paperclip was to recruit Nazi scientists and have them work for the US government.
In those days it was the time of the Cold War, and the US wanted to be able to respond to the Soviet, Chinese and North Korean use of mind control as a weapon. The CIA was particularly interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques. Furthermore, the CIA later invented several schemes to drug Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Many historians claim one of the main goals was to create a Manchurian Candidate who is one that is brainwashed into unknowingly becoming an assassin. At the time, much of the experiments were at a more primitive level without the modern implantable chips, which can now be used inside bodies.
Drugs played a large role in tinkering with the patients. Chemical, biological and radiological means were also investigated for mind control. LSD experiments began with a host of others in April, 1953. LSD was given without consent to CIA workers, military personnel, government agents, doctors, mentally ill patients and prostitutes. One experiment was to connect a barbiturate IV into one arm and an amphetamine IV into the other.
The barbiturates were injected first, and as soon as the person appeared sedated or almost asleep, the amphetamines were injected. The person would babble incoherently and it was at times possible to ask questions and get useful answers.
Other drugs used during experiments included heroin, morphine, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol, sodium pentothal, and ergine. Some of the Canadian MK-ULTRA experiments left people with permanent damage. Psychiatrist Donald E. Cameron worked every week at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University.
Many of the patients suffered from mild depression excluding some schizophrenic patients he had been interested in correcting by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. His techniques included using LSD, experimenting with paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power.
Cameron was the inventor of the “psychic driving” psychiatric procedure, which was believed by Cameron to be able to break down the subject's personality and create a new one. He would put patients into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing sampled loops of noise or simple statements in repetition.
The result of Cameron experiments for MK-ULTRA left patients who suffered from mild treatable depression with amnesia, incontinence, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and also believing that their interrogators were their parents.
MK-ULTRA also used many American children, children from Mexico and South America over a period of about forty years starting in 1948. Doctors and agents who administered it wanted to obtain control over the minds of these children to create super-agents; thereafter, not even remembering the missions they were programmed to carry out because of hypnotically induced amnesia. This was somehow removed by their controllers and installed back at will.
The children were trained as sex agents with the purpose of blackmailing prominent politicians, businessmen and educators. A lot of films were made and some of the centers where children were used as sex agents got out of control and turned into CIA-operated sex rings. Some children were considered expendable and simply murdered.
A number of people who were abused by these experiments and made it out went to therapy and other professionals to share their stories. It was reported that the CIA controllers sometimes dressed up in satanic costumes to further traumatize the children, also providing a cover so the children would not be believed if they talked.
It appeared that some of the main objective of all the different projects that bloomed out of Paperclip was to completely annihilate a child or adult's memory and self-identity in order to reprogram the patient to do the bidding of the CIA whether this meant creating a sex slave, an assassin or whatever. Many were exposed to physical and psychological torture, others went insane, and several even died.
Now moving into the 21st century, the CIA is still involved in mind control but they have technology to help them. Drugs, psychological and physical torture is not as necessary as it was in the past to mentally destroy an innocent person.
The Washington Post on 24 November 2010 reported, “If military veterans have their way in a California lawsuit, the spy agency's quest to turn humans into robot-like assassins via electrodes planted in their brains will get far more exposure than the drugs the CIA tested on the subjects ranging from soldiers to unwitting bar patrons and the clients of prostitutes.”
It's not just science fiction or the imaginings of the mentally ill. In 1961, a top CIA scientist reported in an internal memo that the feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals has been demonstrated, the article said.
The Signals Intelligence mission of the NSA (National Security Agency) has evolved into a program of decoding EMF waves in the environment for wirelessly tapping into computers and tracking persons with the electrical currents in their bodies. Signals Intelligence is based on the fact that everything in the environment with an electric current in it has a magnetic field around it which gives off EMF waves.
Digital Angel and VeriChip (verification) are two companies that sell implantable RFID (radio frequency identification) microchips which can be implanted in the body with a syringe.
This technology is primarily used for tracking children who are kidnapped or locating a person that is mentally ill. Many US soldiers in Iraq had RFID chips implanted in case they were taken hostage. Technology is a double-edged sword and can be used for good or bad.
With the increase of gunmen taking out civilians in malls and schools, we have to consider the possibility of mind control. The government is also toying with ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) transmissions. ELF development for military purposes has shown to cause at close range aberrations in the thought processes of human beings, such as hallucinations, disordered thought, confusion, aggression, depression, anger, and hopelessness.
As technology accelerates at exponential speeds, the mass public is being left in the dark regarding what type of capabilities the military and government have. Some of this technology is referred to as exotic technologies. It is technologies that we do not know exist. The most modern technologies being used for mind control by the CIA are of course classified. Years later, after people take out lawsuits for family members or friends' deaths and psychological illnesses, we may have more information. In addition, if they were doing those experiments back in the 50's, we can only imagine what monstrosities the CIA and their mad scientists are inflicting on humans now.
New York Times columnist David Brooks said that scientists who study the mind, rather than theologians or philosophers, are yielding the most interesting answers to questions of what constitutes character, ethics, and virtue. He delivered this year's Science and Democracy Lecture.
In his seven years as a New York Times op-ed columnist, David Brooks has witnessed the full range of politicians’ charms. He has seen Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney memorize the first names of every voter in a New Hampshire diner, and held former President Bill Clinton’s friendly gaze in conversation, even across a crowded room.
But when it comes time to create and vote on policies, Brooks said, that ability to relate to and empathize with the common man all but disappears. Brooks found himself wondering, he told a packed crowd at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) on Tuesday (April 12), “Why do the most socially attuned people on earth — the people I cover — make the most dehumanized decisions?”
The answers, Brooks said, lay in both politicians’ and American society’s flawed views of human nature. By trying to create policies based on the idea that humans are rational beings, Brooks argued in his talk, “Politics, the Brain, and Human Nature,” people ignore their irrational and unconscious needs at their own peril.
“We’ve inherited a view of ourselves that we’re divided selves, that we have reason over here and emotion over here,” Brooks said. “We value things we can quantify … and we tend not to devalue, but to be inarticulate about the rest.”
What scientific research is showing, however, and what Brooks argues in his new book, “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,” is that the irrational self can hardly be suppressed. Only by embracing that perhaps-unquantifiable need for community, relationships, and other unconscious desires, he told the crowd, can people make headway in pressing problems ranging from education to foreign wars.
Brooks’ ability to explore the intersection of the human sciences and practical politics garnered him the podium for this year’s Science and Democracy Lecture, organized by the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), said moderator Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at HKS. The evening, which included an all-star lineup of Harvard analysts to respond to Brooks’ work, was co-sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the GSD, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
In a wide-ranging talk, Brooks laid out the conclusions he found while searching for an explanation for “this amputation of human nature” in politics and everyday life. What he found, he said, is that scientists who study the mind, rather than theologians or philosophers, are yielding the most interesting answers to questions of what constitutes character, ethics, and virtue.
Most thinking is unconscious, he said, and studies are showing that emotions, or unconscious responses, are most likely the foundation of the reasoning people use to make decisions.
“Emotions assign values to things,” Brooks said. “If you don’t have that valuation system, then your decision-making landscape is hopelessly flat.”
Furthermore, he added, research suggests that humans are “deeply interdependent creatures” who learn and even forge our personalities from the people we surround ourselves with.
By taking advances in our understanding of human nature into account, Brooks said, politicians and other leaders could benefit from an entirely new range of skills that have little to do with academic expertise or traditional intelligence. He cited research that the ability to learn from others, to monitor biases and shortcomings in our own thinking, to pick out larger patterns from a jumble of information, and to maximize self-restraint, among other traits, play a larger role in our success in work and in life than they’re commonly given credit for.
“If we base policy on a shallow view of human nature … we will design policies that are not fit for actual human beings,” he said. “We will have child-rearing techniques which continue to underemphasize the most important things in life. And we will have moral discussions that will remain vague and inarticulate.”
Despite the sweeping vision Brooks laid out for the audience, a panel of Harvard experts remained somewhat unconvinced of his argument for embracing the unconscious self.
Max Bazerman, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, cautioned that emphasizing the effectiveness of human intuition could lead to dangerous overconfidence. America has already experienced the painful repercussions of leaders’ hubris in managing wars and the economy.
“People start businesses that should have never been started,” Bazerman said. “We fight wars because we want to get the bad guys. … We elect George W. Bush because we’d like to have a beer with him.”
And if policies fail to address social problems, then politicians’ preference for hard data over human experience probably isn’t to blame, said David Kennedy, professor of law and director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. Even if politicians embrace a broader idea of human nature, the process of policymaking will remain conflicted and confusing.
“I don’t see the policy process as the best place where people figure out how to solve a problem,” he said.
Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, argued that our lives are hardly governed by passion and instinct. While the sort of subtle social intelligence that Brooks described is helpful, he said, a much larger body of evidence shows that IQ — a quantifiable measure of intelligence — is much more likely to correlate with a person’s success in all kinds of endeavors, from work to marriage to literary or scientific accomplishments.
After two hours of lively exchange, however, Pinker was quick to applaud Brooks for his book’s contributions to the continuing debate about reason and emotion.
“It’s in the very nature of science that the practitioners themselves disagree over the evidence,” Pinker said. “I’d like to welcome David to our fractious arena, and to thank him for raising the level of political discourse in this country.”
Your subconscious makes decisions for you up to 6 seconds before you "think" you do. In fact, a scientist watching an MRI of your brain can tell you what choice your going to make 6 seconds before you consciously make the choice:
So what does this say about our free will?
Well, it means that perhaps who we are is dictated less by the choices we make, and more by the information we take in.
If we think of your brain like a computer, imagine what would happen if we opened up every program at once and overloaded it with more functions than it could possibly process at one time. It would slow down and probably crash.
This is sort of in a way like your conscious mind, you can work with information, recall it, anylize it, and reason in your consciousness, but your attention span is only so limited, as is your ability to process too much information at one time. You might be able to handle 1 game of chess, but you probably can not play 800 games of chess at the same time, its just too much information to focus your attention on.
In fact, the very word "Conscious" comes from the prefix "con" (as in contrary) and "sci" (to know/knowledge, as in science). It is the ability to step outside our instinctive processes and know them from a contrary viewpoint. Consciousness is literally the state of knowing ourselves.
The subconscious on the other hand is more instictual. it is in the background, and is able to run so many more processes than our conscious mind could ever hope to handle.
For example, when you first learn to read, or ride a bike, it requires attention, focus, and the labor of reason in the conscious mind, but once you have trained your brain to handle the process, your subconscious can take over and run it quite effeciently allowing your conscious to focus now on other things without the burden of processing the information on a conscious level. This is how your conscious mind is protected against becoming over loaded with to much information processing at once. Now when you read, ride a bike, drive a car etc, you dont have to think about it, it just happens...
So here is where the mind control part comes in...advertisers, propagandists, and others are constantly trying to train your subconcious to execute a program without having to go through the filter of your consciousness, that acts as a gatekeeper.
A salesman for example may ask you multiple questions to which he knows the answer will be yes, to train you in the short term habit of responding positively, so that when it comes time to sign the check, you say "yes!"
And we have all seen the hidden subliminal marketing methods of imprinting phallic symbols and sexy women into advertising. Sex sells, but it sells because it is a very deeply engraned program in our subcosciouss mind.
In fact, the three of the most basic instincts of humans are procreation, food, and survival. These are represented in sex, food, and fear. When a mind controller wants to implant a message, they will often "key" it against one of those instincts. Watch for subliminal media that contains 1 of those 3 elements, it may be an attempt to encode a message or idea into your brain!
Another important thing to understand is the concept of anchoring, that is fusing two elements together to create a concept in your subconscious mind. For example, if an advertiser shows sexy women with a hamburger all the time, your sex instinct will have a pavlovian response to drive you to buy their hamburger. Your brain will associate the two together.
Think of all the different elements that a mind controller can anchor together to build a thought concept in your subconscious mind...color, sound, smell taste, emotions, words, music, instincts...amd many more, can all be anchored together to create a concept or belief, and you may have this belief programmed into you without even knowing it. And you will think its really you that believs it when in reality it came from outside of you! (the movie inception plays on this concept).
Who you listen to is way more important than what decisions you make...decisions are the effect of belief, not the cause! if it were the other way around, then conquering addictions or bad habits would be easy! but the subconscious mind is far more powerful than the conscious mind.
If you get more involved in this topic, you will begin to understand how mind controllers work...and when you watch movies like inception, the matrix, eyes wide shut etc. you will begin to understand the programming methods more...
elements like mirrors, walls, doors, levels, elevators...these are all programming systems of the mind controllers that perform certain functions.
the truth is out there, you only need to need to search and you will find it!
If you're like me, you've heard about all the anti-aging creams. Of course, personally I don't care about creams... I would rather live young that look it.
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You can learn how people install mental programs in you without spending thousands on trainings, seminars and counseling. This alone makes Making Mental Machines - The Mind Control Audio CD a complete stand out from other mind control and self improvement products.
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Meditation produces powerful pain-relieving effects in the brain, according to new research published in the April 6 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.
"This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation," said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
"We found a big effect – about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent."
For the study, 15 healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. Focused attention is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.
Both before and after meditation training, study participants' brain activity was examined using a special type of imaging -- arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) -- that captures longer duration brain processes, such as meditation, better than a standard MRI scan of brain function. During these scans, a pain-inducing heat device was placed on the participants' right legs. This device heated a small area of their skin to 120° Fahrenheit, a temperature that most people find painful, over a 5-minute period.
The scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant's pain ratings were reduced, with decreases ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Zeidan said.
At the same time, meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, an area that is crucially involved in creating the feeling of where and how intense a painful stimulus is. The scans taken before meditation training showed activity in this area was very high. However, when participants were meditating during the scans, activity in this important pain-processing region could not be detected.
The research also showed that meditation increased brain activity in areas including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the orbito-frontal cortex. "These areas all shape how the brain builds an experience of pain from nerve signals that are coming in from the body," said Robert C. Coghill, Ph.D., senior author of the study and associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist.
"Consistent with this function, the more that these areas were activated by meditation the more that pain was reduced. One of the reasons that meditation may have been so effective in blocking pain was that it did not work at just one place in the brain, but instead reduced pain at multiple levels of processing."
Zeidan and colleagues believe that meditation has great potential for clinical use because so little training was required to produce such dramatic pain-relieving effects. "This study shows that meditation produces real effects in the brain and can provide an effective way for people to substantially reduce their pain without medications," Zeidan said.
There are actually different terms associated with mind control. Mind control is better known as brainwashing, coercive marketing, thought control in addition to thought reform. Usually mind control has a person called some manipulator or real estate agent using various method to implement an agenda on a person against ones own free will. This is certainly done through thorough tactics many done using a subconscious level minus the target or victims knowledge whatsoever.
Although self hypnosis is a form of mind control it happens to be doesn’t have to entail brainwashing against our will. For the reason that we can truly induce self hypnotherapy on ourselves to get various reasons. If your person uses do-it-yourself hypnosis its generally done to implant a beneficial idea that those hopes they can manifest within their lives. This is distinctive from implanting an agenda against someone’s free will or knowledge like for example mind control or simply brainwashing.
When we hear the concept mind control it will be implies a that is a patient. It suggests a person’s mind has been altered by dishonest manipulative tactics either psychologically and psychologically. Mind control is implemented for the result that anybody doing the manipulation called an agent is doing. When a broker sets out to overpower a person’s mind they’re just intending to restore the persons feelings and behaviors to slip the intended agenda in the manipulator. The persons 100 % free will and ideas are ideally replaced while using agenda that this manipulator implants in the victim.
There are a lot of tactics both covert and obvious that an agent or party uses when they looking to gain control on the person’s mind. Here are some of the more obvious ones:
Compliance Method — Here the agent is imposing the concept of “do as I say” on the victim.
The Persuasion Strategy — The agent tries to help make the victim reckon that what he is imposing relating to the victim is right and healthy for him
Education or Propaganda Method — targets ideological reform with re educating a victim also is known as the social change method. Its premise is don’t believe what others explain to you only what this manipulator says.
Brainwashing as mind control is considered the most severe at all forms in and additionally of its do-it-yourself. This is since it utilizes all strategies to mind control to obtain a victim to abide. Mind control will be an invasive aggressive action that is definitely directed at some sort of target that becomes a victim. It was designed to totally alienate a victim to have total dependence relating to the one or group completing the mind control or manipulation.
So that an agent or group to experience success with regards to a target the doctor has to have total control over-all aspects of your victims life. The goal is designed for the agent and also the group to fully dominate the victim with no control over the situation. This is your violation of human rights at it’s finest.
You might have heard of Mnemonics and how they can help you improve your memory.
Mnemonics aren't difficult or tiresome activities; in fact, it's as if there's no pressure when doing the actual memorization because of how simple and pleasant the steps can be. An example of a mnemonic method is the Loci System.
A good scenario when the loci system can be effectively used is when a person has several items or a list needed for immediate remembering. The first important thing to remember when using the loci method is the familiarization of a place and the correct order of locations of the chosen place. It could be the dining room, bedroom or kitchen at home or a favorite route in the park. It doesn't matter where, as long as the location can be easily recalled accurately by the doer.
Let's say, the specific locations are the parking lot, pond, willow tree and the benches in the park. So, let's pretend the items are umbrella, dog food, cell phone and picnic basket. To associate the items, visualize strongly hundreds of open umbrellas falling down on the parking lot as you find a space where you could park. Next, as you pass by the pond, you pick up the usual dog food to feed the fish followed by the big willow tree bearing cell phones for fruits and lastly, as you sat by the benches, a picnic basket approaches and sells you what is inside it. Each time you visit the park or any other place you're strongly familiar with; you can immediately associate the specific locations with any items you need to remember.
When using this method, it's better to imagine objects in familiar places in bizarre or amusing ways because it helps a lot in retaining information.
Click below to learn more about the Loci System and other memory improvement techniques:
Existential anxiety also prompted people to report increased liking for Michael Behe, intelligent design's main proponent, and increased disliking for evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins
The lead author is UBC Psychology Asst. Prof. Jessica Tracy with co-authors Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology at Union College, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens.
Published in the March 30 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, their paper is the first to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Despite scientific consensus that intelligent design theory is inherently unscientific, 25 per cent of high school biology teachers in the U.S. devote at least some class time to the topic of intelligent design. And in Canada, for example, Alberta passed a law in 2009 that may allow parents to remove children from courses covering evolution.
British evolutionary biologist Prof. Dawkins, like the majority of scientists, argues that life's origins are best explained by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. However, intelligent design advocates such as Prof. Behe, a U.S. author and biochemist, assert that complex biochemical and cellular structures are too complex to be explained by evolutionary mechanisms and should be attributed to a supernatural creator.
"Our results suggest that when confronted with existential concerns, people respond by searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in life," says Tracy. "For many, it appears that evolutionary theory doesn't offer enough of a compelling answer to deal with these big questions."
The researchers carried out five studies with 1,674 U.S. and Canadian participants of different ages and a broad range of educational, socioeconomic and religious backgrounds.
In each study, participants were asked to imagine their own death and write about their subsequent thoughts and feelings, or they were assigned to a control condition: imagining dental pain and writing about that.
The participants were then asked to read two similarly styled, 174-word excerpts from the writings of Behe and Dawkins, which make no mention of religion or belief, but describe the scientific and empirical support for their respective positions.
After going through these steps, participants who imagined their own death showed greater support for intelligent design and greater liking for Behe, or a rejection of evolution theory coupled with disliking for Dawkins, compared to participants in the control condition.
However, the research team saw reversed effects during the fourth study which had a new condition. Along with writings by Behe and Dawkins, there was an additional passage by Carl Sagan. A cosmologist and science writer, Sagan argues that naturalism – the scientific approach that underlies evolution, but not intelligent design – can also provide a sense of meaning. In response, these participants showed reduced belief in intelligent design after being reminded of their own mortality.
Tracy says, "These findings suggest that individuals can come to see evolution as a meaningful solution to existential concerns, but may need to be explicitly taught that taking a naturalistic approach to understanding life can be highly meaningful."
Similar results emerged in the fifth study, carried out entirely with natural science students at graduate and undergraduate levels. After thinking about death, these participants also showed greater support for the theory of evolution and liking of Dawkins, compared to control participants.
The researchers say these findings indicate a possible means of encouraging students to accept evolution and reject intelligent design.
"Natural science students have been taught to view evolutionary theory as compatible with the desire to find a greater sense of meaning in life," says Tracy. "Presumably, they already attain a sense of existential meaning from evolution."
The fashion industry is deeply steeped in Illuminati symbolism and hot new models are constantly recruited to make this symbolism “fashionable”. Chanel Iman is a perfect example of this, as exemplified by her photoshoot in the German Vogue – the Illuminati’s favoriteinternational fashion magazine.
Read about the link between Mickey Mouse ears and mind
control in the VC article on Britney Spears.
“OMG! It’s so fun to pose in Illuminati Mind Control pics!”
Pure mind control symbolism. One eye hidden, Chanel’s finger
Perfection is hard to achieve in any walk of life and persuasion is no different. It relies on many things going just right at the crucial moment; the perfect synchronisation of source, message and audience. But even if perfection is unlikely, we all need to know what to aim for.
To bring you the current series on the psychology of persuasion I've been reading lots of research, much more than is covered in recent posts. As I read, I noticed the same themes cropping up over and over again.
Here are the most important points for crafting the perfect persuasive message, all of which have scientific evidence to back them up.
1. Multiple, strong arguments: the more arguments, the more persuasive, but overall persuasive messages should be balanced, as two-sided arguments fare better than their one-sided equivalents (as long as counter-arguments are shot down).
2. Relevance: persuasive messages should be personally relevant to the audience. If not, they will switch off and fail to process it.
3. Universal goals: In creating your message, understand the three universal goals for which everyone is aiming: affiliation, accuracy and positive self-concept.
4. Likeability: ingratiating yourself with the audience is no bad thing—most successful performers, actors, lawyers and politicians do it. Likeability can be boosted by praising the audience and by perceived similarity. Even the most fleeting similarities can be persuasive.
5. Authority: people tend to defer to experts because it saves us trying to work out the pros and cons ourselves (read the classic experiment on obedience to authority).
6. Attractiveness: the physical attractiveness of the source is only important if it is relevant (e.g. when selling beauty products).
7. Match message and medium: One useful rule of thumb is: if the message is difficult to understand, write it; if it's easy, put it in a video.
8. Avoid forewarning: don't open up saying "I will try and persuade you that..." If you do, people start generating counter-arguments and are less likely to be persuaded.
9. Go slow: If the audience is already sympathetic, then present the arguments slowly and carefully (as long as they are relevant and strong). If the audience is against you then fast talkers can be more persuasive.
10. Repetition: whether or not a statement is true, repeating it a few times gives the all-important illusion of truth. The illusion of truth leads to the reality of persuasion.
11. Social proof: you've heard it before and you'll hear it again—despite all their protestations of individuality, people love conformity. So tell them which way the flock is going because people want to be in the majority.
12. Attention: if the audience isn't paying attention, they can't think about your arguments, so attitudes can't change. That's why anything that sharpens attention, like caffeine, makes people easier to persuade. And speaking of attention...
13. Minimise distraction: if you've got a strong message then audiences are more swayed if they pay attention. If the arguments are weak then it's better if they're distracted.
15. Disguise: messages are more persuasive if they don't appear to be intended to persuade or influence as they can sidestep psychological reactance (hence the power of overheard arguments to change minds).
16. Psychologically tailored: messages should match the psychological preferences of the audience. E.g. some people prefer thinking-framed arguments and others prefer feel-framed arguments (see: battle between thought and emotion in persuasion). Also, some people prefer to think harder than others.
17. Go with the flow: persuasion is strongest when the message and audience are heading in the same direction. Thoughts which come into the audience's mind more readily are likely to be more persuasive.
18. Confidence: not only your confidence, but theirs. The audience should feel confident about attitude change. Audience confidence in their own thoughts is boosted by a credible source and when they feel happy (clue: happy audiences are laughing).
19. Be powerful: a powerful orator influences the audience, but making the audience themselves feel powerful increases their confidence in attitude change. An audience has to feel powerful enough to change.
20. Avoid targeting strong beliefs: strong attitudes and beliefs are very difficult to change. Do not directly approach long-standing ideas to which people are committed, they will resist and reject. Strong beliefs must be approached indirectly.
Change minds
You should be aware that many of these factors interact with each other. For example when the message is strong but the source is dodgy, the sleeper effect can arise.
Argument strength is also critical. The basic principle is that when arguments are strong, you need to do everything to make people concentrate on them. When they're weak, it's all about distracting the audience from the content and using peripheral routes to persuade, such as how confidently or quickly you talk.
Weaving all these together is no mean feat, but look at most professionally produced persuasive messages and you'll see many of these principles on show. Incorporate as many as you can for maximum effect.
