Here is a video of Don Beck speaking at the UN. You can find more videos of him speaking on YouTube.

Don Beck and Chris Cowan wrote a book called Spiral Dynamics based on work by Clare Graves. Spiral Dynamics is a theory of human development. The theory is that when humans are faced by more complex life conditions they evolve more sophisticated models to deal with the those conditions. Not only do our bodies evolve but so do our minds and in turn the collective consciousness of societies.When people say that we need to evolve a higher consciousness they usually mean that we need to step up to the next level of the holarchical-model (holarchy). The reason is as Einstein often quoted saying goes is because: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Environmental destruction and war are brought about by lower level thinking. Fighting for perceived to be scarce rescources is a useful strategy when you are a hunter-gatherer but it’s not the most useful strategy at this point. The thinking that created that strategy is outdated.Some people find it difficult to conceive of ‘higer consciousness’. What does it mean? I think one way to illustrate it is to think of an instance where a problem is solved in a highly original way. This could be Ghandi practising non-violent protest or a football player beating a defender in way that no-one could have imagined.

You’ll know when you’re operating on a higher level when someone sees you do something and exclaims: ‘That’s impossible!’

“We said we are going to do the opposite: rather than see what the relationship is between the eye movement and the solution right before you solve the problem, we said we’re going to see if we can force people to think differently and, without conscious awareness, move their eyes in different ways and influence their thought patterns,” Lleras said.As reported in their paper, titled “Moving eyes and moving thought: On the spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition,” the researchers were able to manipulate eye movement in order to guide participants to the problem’s solution.”So it’s not just the case that people who are going to get the solution are moving their eyes in a given way, but that the people who might not have gotten the solution, if you have them move their eyes in that way, then they actually can solve it,” Thomas said.

This is amazing stuff. Once again you can read the full article at Science Daily.

I wonder what could be done with this information. Maybe it would be possible to find out which strategies are common to those people that are good at solving problems and ‘model’ that strategy. Then we could teach it to others to improve their performance.

Oh wait… this is what Richard Bandler and John Grinder were doing 30 years ago. They call it Eye Accessing Cues.

For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, wild animals generally represented either a food source or a potential danger. Detecting an animal’s immediate presence and then monitoring its movements was vital to the physical safety, nutrition, and well-being of stone-age families.Now a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara has identified a nonconscious attention system, which still exists in the human brain, that maintains awareness of non-human animals and tracks changes in their location, behavior, and trajectory.

It’s strange to think that paying more attention to moving animals than moving cars is hard-wired into the brain, but that seems the case according to this study.

Read the rest at ScienceDaily.

I’ve worked with some people for whom public speaking or approaching a stranger brings on intense negative emotions and physical feelings. It can be debilitating and cause a large amount of stress. It’s a lot more common than you would think and you’d be surprised who suffers from it. When I went travelling in Australia I met a man who used to be in the special-forces branch of the army. He was in his 30’s but already retired. This man, who has probably done night time parachute jumps and could survive in the jungle with a pen-knife, was scared to death of going up to a strange woman in order to talk to her.

It was a text-book case of someone talking themselves into a negative state. Amongst other things he described it as ‘nerve-racking’. And spoke in universals as if it were true for everyone. Just talking about it created very negative physical feelings in his body. His hands cramped up, his face was grimacing, all the muscles in his body were becoming tight.

Now when I want to help someone for whom anxiety in a social setting is a problem I like to take two approaches. The first is remedial change work which is working on the immediate behaviour that is the problem. If someone goes into a negative state every time they have to do public speaking or want to approach someone then there is a specific way they do this. They will speak to themselves in a certain way, describe their feelings, thoughts and the outside world in a specific way. They’ll make particular images in their mind, play sounds to themselves and create feelings in their bodies. That’s stuff you can easily work on with NLP and EFT.

But a problem which people often have is that using the above methods they’ll initially get some good results but then snap back to their old way of being after a couple of days or weeks.

In this case you need to get some generative change happening. That means changing things so that you automatically start displaying more useful behaviours. You start looking at what underlying beliefs are creating these negative states. Beliefs like ‘Talking to strangers in unnatural’ and ‘People get bored when I speak to them’. Working on these kinds of beliefs will get you better results by making a more fundamental change.

But there’s a deeper level that you can work on that in my opinion leads to a more profound change. That is working on the fundamental beliefs that govern your identity and how it can change. Once you start working on this all other change work will happen much easier and you won’t get that bounce back to your old behaviours.

You need to investigate questions like: ‘Do I believe people can actually change? Do I believe I can change? How long do I believe change needs to take?’ etc. For me this is like ensuring that the plants and flowers you wish to grow have fertile soil to live in.

This will really loosen up your ideas about your identity and what you are capable of. Your whole behaviour will automatically adjust to whatever you consider your identity to be, because anything else just isn’t you.

This is a great video illustrating the realities of globalisation. Some of the statistics are a bit meaningless as they aren’t provided in any context, but the general ideas are sound.

It shows a lot of things that I’ve come to realise and discover about the world since the late 90’s. Most of my time in school I was being indoctrinated with the idea that I had to study and learn skills in order to get a job. Fashion myself into a cog that could fit into some machine. Problem is, that kind of thinking came out of the industrial age. India and China are pusing out around 4 million graduates a year. Anything that doesn’t need face to face contact will be outsourced. I have a friend who takes on programming contracts, but doesn’t actually do the work. Someone in India does it for him. There’s no such thing as a job for life anymore, soon a lot more people won’t have jobs at all. That doesn’t mean they won’t be productive or earn money. They’ll just go about it in different ways than previous generations.I had so many of these realisations around the age of 16 but I always trusted adults knew what they were doing and that I didn’t have the full picture. But about 2 years ago it finally hit home: most people don’t know what the hell they are doing. They just blindly follow what society-programming tells them to think and do. As I grow in confidence I learn to trust my instincts much more. I believe it’s life’s way of letting me know that I need to evolve.

I keep saying that you have to be mindful of what you focus on because you might miss some things that could be very useful to you. Here’s a fun experiment to show you how things might slip under your radar, outside of your awareness.

You’ll often hear people talk about the sub-conscious / unconscious / non-conscious processes of the mind. But how can we know that these processes actually exist? Mind Hacks found this great video of an experiment with a man who had the connection between his left and right brain hemispheres severed.

Experiments like this really make you wonder just how much of what you are processing is going on outside of your conscious awareness. The functioning of your mind and how it may be affecting your life is not brought to your conscious awareness unless you start testing it. A key point Mind Hacks makes is the following:

One of the most interesting things is that the patients don’t feel that their conscious mind is any different, but their split consciousness can be demonstrated experimentally, as shown in the video.

It’s obvious but mind-boggling. You have no idea what processes are going on outside your conscious awareness. ‘Unknown unknowns’ as Donald Rumsfeld would say.

What ways of thinking and being in your life could you be happening completely outside of your conscious awareness? Do you think some of those might be useful for you and some not so much? Do you think it might be a good idea to become aware of some of these processes and how you can improve them in order to improve your quality of life?

You can see the Great Wall of China from space… not!

Why do certain ideas persist even though they are not true?

The answers are in this great book I’m reading called Made to Stick which is all about why certain ideas seem to really take off and how you can change your communication to make it more sticky. It’s a great companion to the Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell.

I’ve already used some of the ideas in it to write part of a flyer I’m designing with a friend. We’ll see how it goes.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

This article highlights something useful to know about the mind. You can’t not think about something. For example, don’t think of a pink elephant on ice-skates… too late you just did. This is one of the fundamental ideas behind affirmations and positive thinking. Also it’s supposed to be helpful for teaching purposes, tell people what they should be doing rather than what they shouldn’t. For example: ‘Make sure to look both ways before you cross the road’ in stead of ‘Don’t run across the road without looking’.

Find the rest at the Washington Post.

When can you see what you can’t see? When you have blindsight, a “condition,” says the Oxford Concise Dictionary, “in which the sufferer responds to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them.” Here vision researcher Susana Martinez-Conde describes how a man named DB perceives flickering Gabor patches (see illustration above) much more accurately and consistently in his “blind” eye than in his sighted eye — even though he denies ever seeing anything with the blind eye

This research highlights that what we see or don’t see out there in the ‘real’ world is constructed by our brain. It’s definitely not a case of ‘what you is see is what you get’. Now philosophers in both the Western and Eastern traditions have been discussing this for thousands of years so it’s nothing new. But good to see that the western scientific paradigm is catching up with these ideas.

Now throw in the fact that what you experience of the outside world is also filtered through language, emotions, values and beliefs and you are well on your way to realising just how much of the world we construct in our minds.

Read the full article at Scientific American.