Psychotechnology for the 21st Century

As a media researcher I’ve analyzed large databases, done surveys, measured brainwaves, tracked eye movements, absorbed a vast amount of information, and thought for the past 40 years about the way media affect the mind.

I started using computers in the 60s and was on the Internet in 1980 when it was called Arpanet. My exposure to computers during this period as they ascended to a major role in our culture got me to think about how the mind and the computer work in similar ways. In my childhood my showbiz parents had me on stage from age 4 onward. The pressure of being on stage gave me the experience of “flow state” – almost an out of body experience, watching oneself perform as if from the outside. These experiences made me intensely curious about what was going on in my head not only at these times, but all the time. I have always been a meditator and contemplator, having discovered the techniques myself under pressure to perform at above what I thought was my level. What do these words mean to me? Contemplation is immersive observation, and can be focused on any subject. Meditation is when the focus of contemplation is one’s own self. You observe your self without identifying with the feelings and thoughts that arise, observing them as if from afar.All of these trends in my life coalesced into a set of theories that are the basis for my nonprofit work, which is the Institute.THEI as I call it for short has the Mission of disseminating useful psychotechnology – tools for internal information processing optimization – similar in a way to the media optimization tools I’ve helped invent for the marketing industry. Tools for sublimating negative emotion into learning and into action items. Leaving only positive emotion.The Vision is that one day probably pretty far in the future the whole human race will be using such psychotechnology on a continuous basis. Because this will avert war at the individual level and cause a shift from competitiveness to cooperation and mutual nurturing. May it come as soon as possible.The history of the human race is uplifted over and over again by the introduction of bits of such psychotechnology which in the past has manifested as yoga, Zen, religion, mysticism, philosophy, science, morality/ethics, aesthetics, and many other good things. THEI’s psychotechnology is under the wing of science and specifically relates to translating ancient and self-discovered practices into the language of information processing so that it may be considered objectively by all parts of the population including people who begin with bias against any of the above things.The book MIND MAGIC was an experiment to see if this personal psychotechnology (it has been proven to work in my own life, or I wouldn’t pass it on) could actually be transferred to anyone else. About 2000 letters, cards, and emails indicate that the pretest worked at least for some people. Including a range of well-known folks from Norman Cousins and Jimmy Carter to John Lennon, Ram Dass and Daniel Goleman. Also some Bank officials, corporate executives, Army Generals, Colonels, et al, people in jail, teenagers, seniors, without any known group excluded.Why do we need psychotechnology? It helps reduce stress, improve health, increase emotional intelligence, maximize performance, make you able to enjoy moment to moment Life even during downturns. It is speed learning. The element that it controls is attention – where you place it, where you don’t, and how to withhold the autonomic response that makes every feeling and thought your own to own.Attention has been blasted to bits in the last 6000 years by the accelerating information overload triggered – in my theory – by the advent of written language which moved the use of language into the sphere of the primate dominant sense (sight). As my friend Doug Grunther points out, McLuhan said the same thing in a different way.Ironically, the media industry that I help, and in which the latest development of the new media technologies I helped spawn, is the major contributor to our lack of focused attention. How can we focus when we are immersed in a world in which talking at us all the time are other people who like ourself are propelled by a tsunami of inputs driven centrally by media that occupy 90% of our waking hours in which we are almost always being bombarded by two or more media at the same time. The cycle of ‘media-people talking about what they got from media’ hits our cortex with tens of thousands of unresolved experiences per day, producing P300 waves in our brain signifying surprising information deviating from expectation models. But without time or methods to speed absorption assimilation and distillation of action implications from all that information, we enter a state of Emergency Oversimplification Procedure in which we allow the robot mind to take over and run our lives.A free taste of THEI psychotechnology is offered here on our site: Your Internal Navigation System. It’s a 15-day course. It is our gift to you for coming. In it are initial instructions regarding many of the “Cures” (For example the cure called “Mindquiet” is introduced in Day Eight of the Navigation course). The “Diseases” stem from the information revolution and from a prior tilt of the history toward a culture of physical domination stemming from identification of each of us as separate rather than all parts of one thing.

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