Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created June 5, 2026
Some of you have read my book Mind Magic. The Seventh Edition is soon to be released, and it will contain Mind Experiments at the end of each chapter, games you can play with your mind that will have positive effects on your effectiveness in navigating through life. To give you a feel for the way the text of Mind Magic and the Mind Experiments will work together, in most of our posts starting here, we will serialize the beginning of the new edition. Hope you enjoy it!
All my best, Bill
The Human Heritage: Word Pollution
Because words are so powerful, we tend to believe them rather than assimilate our own experiences.
Word intoxication: All words hypnotize to some extent.
Where did words come from? From the depths of our soul. They were discovered inside us, not invented.
The evidence of similar-root-noises-for-similar-concepts across separated peoples, attests to this. We all discovered something like the noise mama for mother. Even apes apparently make similar sounds for the same concepts as we.
It is as if we were all discovering the same master language, distorted into various different directions by the effects of different genetic/environmental conditions.
Words just became important recently.
We came down out of trees over 1,000,000 generations ago. (1)
- “Generation” = 20 years
For 999,750 of these, humans used or heard only a few words each day. Over just the last 250 generations, this has increased to tens of thousands of words going through the average human head each day.
Words have tremendous programming power.
Words are not arbitrary sounds we can choose to ignore. They are tailored by physical (pre-human interference) nature to fit our sensori-cognitive biochemistry.
Like a key in a lock: words were discovered from inside of us. They can be used by a talking head to a separate listening or reading head, and when they are so used, they tend to exert a behavior-impacting influence on the listening/reading head.
When the ancients talked about spellcasting, it wasn’t just their superstitious ignorance at work. They were recognizing the hypnotic power of communication, lifted to a new level by the use of words.
How do words compound the power of communication?
By making it far easier for conceptualization to occur. Conceptualization is the structuring of individual perception-items (percepts) stored in memory, into association-clusters with specific “relationship bonds” between percepts associated. Like making a tinker toy.
Your concept of freedom, for example, is a tinker toy of all of the specific words, pictures, and feelings you have stored inside, associated with the retrieval-keyword “freedom”. Until words were popularized, people tended not to build such elaborate tinkertoys in their minds. Associations among percepts tended to cluster into “attraction” and “repulsion”, without many finer breakdowns. This meant that we tended, when we wanted an effect, to repeat all of the “causes” which we associated with that effect.
This is undoubtedly how the program of throwing salt over the shoulder, the program of blessing people for sneezing, and all other “magical” programs first arose: they had happened in the “first instance” and were thereafter regarded as causally essential.
Our magical phase preceded words and was pushed out by words. Words gave us the power to more easily separate things into parts. We didn’t have to conceptualize only with wholes anymore. We could put a word-label on a part of an event, to more easily trace whether or not that part always went along with the event or not.
Words appear to have kicked off a phase of developing the left lobe of the cortex, which handles data sequentially–analytically rather than holistically. When we were concentrating on our right cortex, we were able to achieve certain effects of persuasion, “getting our way”, etc. we didn’t understand at all—but we knew they worked and we used them.
Childhood is a time through which each of us has the opportunity to re-experience the whole evolution of the race, firsthand, in microcosm. As children, we do have “magical” means of getting our way through gestures and moods that somehow work.
So, the race has always wielded a lot of right-brain power it never understood. Then it took up words, wielding vast
left-brain power, which the race also used with only faint understanding.
As words can hypnotize,
they can also dehypnotize.
Out with the bad air,
in with the good air.
Mind Experiment
- World without words
Imagine that words had never been invented. Catch your tongue in your mouth. Use your eyes. Breathe.
Words cannot come into your head. Those that others speak are meaningless and are whisked away before they reach your ears.
At some point, you will remember having read the above description, and although you will not remember the words, the state they describe will come over you: your mind will, for a moment, give up its attachment to words.
You will look around you and see in a new way.
Your mind will look at issues and see deeply into them—without words. In this state, remember to look at the important issues.
Whenever you are confused by a situation, go into this “world without words” state and let the situation sink in.
Love to all,
