As you might have noticed I sometimes post about political and economic issues. The reason for this is that I think these are areas where a lot of people are indoctrinated into a particular paradigm and don’t realise that a lot of assumptions they have are not immutable laws of the universe, but are in fact quite arbitrary.
For example, if you’re a little confused about what’s going on with the world economy at the moment then I recommend you watch these excellent videos. Now I don’t know whether it’s all part of some world wide conspiracy as seems to be the conclusion of these videos, but it is still a great introduction into how the banking system works.
I post videos of optical illusions and psychological experiments because it shows the limits of our perception and cognition of the universe. They make you aware that what you see and what is out there in the world is not necessarily the same thing, the map is not the territory as they say. This isn’t limited to material objects. It works just the same for concepts, ideas and beliefs, ways of living and being.
So if you find yourself having a negative emotional reaction to anything you see in these videos or instantly dismissing it as a crack-pot conspiracy theory, please consider that you are unconsciously protecting your current idea of reality. Something which might not be serving your long term best interests.
Here’s an interesting optical illusion. Depending upon how your brain interprets the sense data from your eyes the dancer in this video either spins clockwise or anti-clockwise.
If you see it change direction, rewind and watch it a again, you’ll find it doesn’t change at the same time. Apparently the direction you see it move in depends on which of your brain hemisphere is more dominant. I find that if i defocus my eyes I can sometimes make the figure change direction.
The world you see out there… is all in your head.
Oprah Winfrey is a big fan of Eckhart Tolle and she’s doing a series of live web seminars based around the book A New Earth. You can sign up for the seminar for free on Oprah’s web-site or you can watch the videos on YouTube.
I had noticed Eckhart’s books in the shops long before I started reading them. To be honest the covers and titles always turned me off as they seemed really cheesy. I thought the Power of Now was all about ’seizing the day and living for the moment man’ and A New Earth is sub-titled ‘Finding Your Life’s Purpose’. To be honest they seemed like a lot of other generic self-help books.
But I eventually read his books and found them really useful. In a very basic sense Eckhart’s writings are about being aware of your internal dialogue and turning it off, and with being present in the moment. The ideas are similar to Eastern meditation practices, and Eckhart comes at it from a similar spiritual angle. Now I don’t know what people mean by being ’spiritual’, at this point I haven’t had any experience that I would class as spiritual.
But I don’t need to interpret Eckhart’s ideas in a spiritual way for them to be useful to me. I haven’t watched all of these videos, I just don’t have the time right now. But I’ve heard from people that they’ve found these useful and has helped them put some of the more difficult ideas in to practice.
The other day I met a man who didn’t believe there was such a thing as hypnosis or trance. He was telling me how it’s just down to picking people that are suceptible to suggestion and social pressure to perform (he was speaking about stage-hypnotism). It can be difficult to convince these kinds of people because they know how the world works and resist anything that conflicts with their world view. Now I could of course put them into trance right there and then, but that would be unethical.
By far the best introduction to hypnosis and trance is contained with this book. Don’t get me wrong, Paul McKenna’s main stream introduction to NLP is great in itself, it’s easy to read, covers all the basics you need and even introduces some EFT.
But it’s the CD enclosed which is the real reason to get this. It’s a 45 minute hypnotic induction that will put you into trance guaranteed! Some people do need to listen to it a few times, but it will put you under. And you’ll know that you weren’t just sleeping when you consistently ‘wake up’ to Paul saying ‘3, 2, 1, Wake Up!’
Breaking news! Reliving past traumas over and over as practised in many talk-therapies might not be such a good thing after all!
Following the latest study showing that some anti-depressant drugs are of little clinical benefit for most patients, more and more individuals are likely to seek treatment through various forms of psychotherapy, which collectively have come to be known as “the talking cure”. However, a recent article in the Psychologist journal, entitled When Therapy Causes Harm, cautions that approximately 10% of people get worse after starting therapy.
Read the rest at the Guardian: When it’s bad to talk
I always love reading crazy theories and have recently heard about something called Bicameralism. Julian Jaynes wrote about his theory in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
The basic ideas is that ancient humans to an extent functioned as ’schizophrenics’ in that they had frequent auditory hallucinations. They literally heard voices speaking to them and interpreted these as the voices of gods.
Julian uses this explain how language and consciousness developed in humans and why early humans really believed that their gods were speaking to them. It’s a fascinating theory that touches on many interests of mine, ancient history, psychology, evolution of humans.
What’s particularly interesting for readers of this site is that it might help to explain how and why hypnosis works. Maybe we were used to taking ‘commands’ from one half of our brain for many thousands of years before both hemispheres started working together.
It’s also interesting that some areas of the brain that deal with language use also help us to recognise and distinguish rhythm. If you know anything about hypnosis you’ll know that speaking in certain rhythms (and listening to repetitive rhythms) has a hypnotic effect. Tribes in Africa engage in dances to rhythmic music for hours in order to go into a trance, and in the west we even have a whole sub-genre of dance music called Trance. This is the reason why for example Richard Bandler does hypnosis work with a musical backing track.
Read more about Bicameralism at Wikipedia: Bicameralism
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Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.
Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists
Yet another story about the power of the Placebo. Now I don’t mean to be negative picking up on these stories all the time. It’s just funny to me that people question that science is social construct when things like this occur all the time. Some scientists say Prozac works one way, the others say something else, and at the end of the day it’s down to what the individual believes.
Don’t get me wrong I think modern science is great. But you’d think that by now we’d realise to what extent science is a social construct, then again the concept of a scientific paradigm is still largely outside the current paradigm. Everyone uses the phrase but few know what it really means. It’s like someone acknowledging that people’s perceptions are biased because of their upbringing, beliefs, culture and mood, except thinking they themselves are exempt from those influences.
Maybe a lot of us just need a sugar-pill to make ourselves feel better, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Look at Dumbo, he had a magic feather to make himself feel better!
In a classroom in South Tyneside, a small group of 11-year-olds is considering the finer points of Stoic philosophy. The teacher, Mrs Carrahar, points helpfully at the blackboard. “Come on now, kids, remember your ABC: Adversity, Belief, Consequence. Sometimes how we feel about things depends on … what? It begins with P … Yes, Darren?” “Perspective, miss!” says a small child. “Very good, Darren!”
Read the rest here: Teaching happiness: the classes in wellbeing that are helping our children
Main stream Psychology continues to forge into bold new territories. Some people are starting to realise that it might be a good thing to focus on what we want to move towards and not just what we want to get away from.
Women who undergo IVF increase their chances of pregnancy if they are also treated with acupuncture, a new analysis suggests.The benefits may be large — a 65 per cent increase in the chance of becoming pregnant, and a 91 per cent increase in the number of live births.
Read the rest here: Course of acupuncture may raise success of IVF treatment by 65%
I only started to become interested in acupuncture after I started using EFT which is sometimes referred to as an acupressure technique. One of the explanation for EFT is that it involves manipulating the energy that flow through meridians which are pathways in your body. I don’t know if that’s how it works. But it’s interesting to note the similarities.
An interesting side note is that in the Chinese martial arts I practice we are sometimes shown nerve points which are very sensitive and hurt a lot if you happen to get pocked or prodded there. That knowledge must come from Chinese medicine.
With regards to the above article; what baffles me time and again is how some of these phenomenon are dismissed as a mere placebo. Fine, but what is this amazing placebo affect and shouldn’t we be investigating it?
In the second part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders, marketers explain how advertising has moved away from explaining the features of products and towards the emotional benefits that a consumer gets from buying products.
The idea is to create meaning system for consumers through which they get identity and an understanding of the world. Douglas Atkin explains how he started to research cults, fans and devotees in order to find out how people become involved in them in order to create that devotion in consumers for brands. People that love Harley Davidson, Mac’s and the Grateful Dead all have something in common that explains their rabid devotion.
Douglas breaks it down into two key points:
1. People want to belong.
2. They want to make meaning (of their lives and the world around them).
It’s easy to think of brands and advertising that try to sell you a lifestyle, a belief-system, a way of thinking about life and the world. I don’t know how you’ve experienced advertising but I’ve always found it pretty transparent. ‘Buy this and you’ll be cool, you’ll be part of the in crowd’. And to be honest I’ve always found it pretty offensive. Someone is telling me what I’ll BE when I buy their product!?
The creepiest part of this documentary is the engineering that is applied to the Song Airline brand. In stead of saying something is great, employees are encouraged to say: ‘That’s so song’. I don’t care what kind transcendent lifestyle experience it is to fly with Song, that’s all it is at the end of the day, an airline. All in all, highly pretentious. And as the presenter points out, despite millions spent on marketing and advertising you’d find it to difficult to come by evidence that shows how successful this kind of marketing is at selling particular products.
What is does succeed in doing however is creating the mindset in many people that purchasing certain things and services actually enhances you personally in some respect. Don’t buy into that.
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