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.

It’s that time of year when every blog and website about psychology starts giving you the top 10 tips for setting your New Years Resolutions and how to stick to them.

Well I’m going to do something different. Once you’ve set your outcomes, broken them down into short term goals and made a plan of action I want you to think about all the things you are going to start removing from your life.

For example, I sometimes visit a website that provides news and reviews of films, even though I haven’t been to the cinema in years and have never rented a DVD. For some reason I’m spending precious minutes of my life reading about movies I’ll never watch.

So from now on I vow to stop visiting that website.

The idea is that if I start removing all those useless activities from my life I’ll start spending more time doing the things I really want and need to do.

Now the trick of course is to make sure I don’t fill up the time I’ve won with other useless pursuits. I guess some of you watch television so you should consider cutting down on that (or stopping altogether, as I have). For me the main danger is aimless surfing on the internet. Although a bit of random surfing can be useful I think the best thing for me would be to put a time limit on it and enforce the time table I’ve set for my other interests.

The idea is that if I start removing all those useless activities from my life I’ll start spending more time doing the things I really want to do.

The first part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders explains how an airline is looking to start a new branch of it’s business to compete against other low-fair airlines.

They show how they have built up a profile of their ideal customer in order to get an idea of how to best market their airline. They probably built up this profile using market research data and information about spending habits from supermarkets, shops and banks.

As one of the commentators points out, it seems that a lot of advertising is becoming more and more focused on grabbing our attention in any conceivable way just to get through the noise of all the other advertising out there. I’m sure we all remember some really interesting, shocking or funny ads, but can’t remember what they were supposed to be selling. Marketers will say that it’s more about gaining repeated exposure with consumers, but that’s something that’s hard to measure.

Contrast that kind of advertising with traditional sales letters, where you can measure the success rate of different kinds of copy and adjust it to get the best results.

PBS has a really good 90 minute documentary on their site about how advertisers, marketers, think tanks and politicians are using the latest ideas in psychology and memetics to persuade you to buy their products or vote for their political party.

Frontline Persuaders

I’ll write an analysis of some of the concepts and ideas presented in the documentary at some point.

I’ve been reading the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle again and I’m able to notice negative thoughts a lot better recently. These aren’t big negative beliefs rather little agitated or irritated pieces of inner dialogue; ‘Why are those people always like that?’, ‘Why does this always happen?’ So short they’ve usually passed by before I’ve had a chance to notice them. I guess once you’ve noticed the big issues and worked with them it’s time to notice the smaller things and mop them up as well.

Eckhart suggests that you only need to acknowledge the negative thought in order to reduce its power. But I’ve be experimenting with tapping them and the deeper issues behind them. I see them as symptoms of underlying issues.

One of the important skills to learn is this ability to notice negative thought patterns, beliefs and emotions. It’s part of what Magnus calls emotional literacy. It can be challenging because you’ll often hide the things you need to work on from yourself. That’s why most EFT’ers ought to work with fellow tappers to uncover issues lurking in their blind spots. In the mean time emotional literacy can be cultivated by being present in your body as Eckhart describes.

Applying the principles of the Power of Now together with EFT seems to work really well and I recommend you all try it.

Ever feel like your thinking is going round in circles and you’re not really generating any new ideas? If you can’t even think of new ways of behaving how will you ever do things differently?

Here’s a quick exercise you can do when faced with situations where you need to generate new possibilities and think outside the box.

You take a problem statement, your outcome or a difficult situation and apply these four algorithms that play with the possibilities open to you. It’s best explained by giving examples.

Outcome: I want to give presentations with confidence.

Question: What would it be like if you did give presentations with confidence? (+/+)

Answers (Courses of action, useful states, new ideas, towards motivation): I would feel happy, proud, like I’ve achieved something, I’ll be able to do better at work, progress in my career more quickly.

Question: What wouldn’t it be like if you did give presentations with confidence? (-/+)

Answers (Away from motivation): I would not feel like I’m living up to my potential, I would not feel nervous before presentations.

Question: What would it be like if you didn’t give presentations with confidence? (+/-)

Answers: I would feel sad, uninspired, feel like I’m not progressing.

Question: What wouldn’t it be like if you didn’t give presentations with confidence? (-/-)

Answers: I would feel really good about myself, feel confident and in control, know what I have to do to progress.

The questions may seem a bit confusing so read them slowly. I find that they are helpful for putting me in that zen / no-mind state which is a really good creative state to be in. The last question especially makes me a bit dizzy!

You can apply the algorithms to a lot of things. Say you’re brainstorming around some ideas, you could ask: ‘What would we do if we were to build a new website to market this product?’ Or: ‘What would we do if we didn’t build a new website?’

I remember being told about the Knowledge Economy in school and that the resources for this economy consist of Data, Knowledge and Information (which I’ll call ‘content’ from now on).

• Data consists of raw symbols that are devoid of meaning.
• Information is what you get when you start to give meaning to the data and the relationships between them.
• Knowledge is the collection of information intended to be useful for a specific purpose.

I realised that there is probably at least another level on top of this and decided to call it wisdom. This is where you have data, information and knowledge and you know what do with it in order to achieve your goal. Wisdom is the ability to interpret content in original ways and separate the useful stuff from the rest. It also allows for someone to question the paradigm in which the content was created and decide whether or not these serve the intended purpose. You can then change the paradigm or look to other paradigms for different perspectives.Sadly for me it turns out I’m not the first one to come up with this idea. A quick search revealed:

Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

and

Knowledge economy becomes global

Anyway, the high quality problem we’ve created for ourselves is information overload. Too much data, information and knowledge that we are having trouble sifting through.

I think this is where wisdom comes in. It filters what’s useful from what isn’t and presents us with the right course of action to take with the content we have at our disposal. In the business world this role has been filled by consultants whom you pay for advice on a course of action.

Thanks to the internet we have access to consultants and experts on every conceivable subject and we can get a lot of information for free. This is the domain of the blogger who dispenses advice and expertise on their niche subject. The other example of wisdom in action on the internet is the rise of social bookmarking and new aggregation sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon. This is the wisdom of crowds in action, bringing to surface the content it’s users think others will benefit from.

Now I know there are flaws with both of these examples. How do you know that the self-proclaimed expert really is what they say they are? And don’t social bookmarking sites tend to promote content that appeals to the lowest common denominator? Valid concerns of course, but nothing solutions can’t be found for. And at the very least people tend to vote with their feet. If one person or site doesn’t seem to have the necessary wisdom to help users then they’ll find someone or somewhere that does.

I think the Wisdom Economy consists of people adding value to content with their wisdom and being paid for it by clients wanting to save time and money. This will happen either directly through fees or indirectly through advertising.