Category Archives: Mind Magic

Metacognition Versus Public Disenchantment with Science

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“I do not like that man: I must get to know him better.”

–Abraham Lincoln

How is it, one wonders, that tens of millions of Americans can believe and echo absurd fantasies, while showing signs of disbelieving in science?

It clearly has something to do with hatred.

For most of my life, I would have associated disbelief in science with throwback cultures, as contrasted with one of the most advanced places on the planet.

To see it happening here is a shock.

Some of it has been accurately explained as confirmation bias, the insular lives many of us live, in which we only read, listen to and watch sources that tell us what we want to believe.

People whose lives have fallen short of aspirations naturally have fear and anger over that. Some of them who are white fall prey to white supremacy thinking because they fear that non-whites are gradually taking away their livelihoods. Many would simply rather believe that, than take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions.

Thus, racism could start from a shifting of blame – from blaming oneself to blaming others.

How ironic, in that there isn’t any value in playing the blame game in the first place! One shouldn’t have to shunt it outside, a metacognitive mind will see in advance where something leads and can stop the degenerative process far sooner. And reverse degeneration, by adjusting future predispositions consciously. That transmutes blame into better preparation.

Every event is a product of multivariate causes, so the blame has to be allocated, and having done so, one decides how to adjust one’s future action and moves on without the overt act of blame or even the covert clinging inside to the feeling of blame. This becomes clear to a person in a state of metacognition or Observer/Flow states.

One could blame it all on the money system itself, which historically creates a disadvantaged segment who can see the way the advantaged segment lives, producing a potential disequilibrium, which will come to be potentiated in one cranky way or another. And in a way, Marx did that, conceptualizing a radical new system to replace capitalism which was to never work as it was supposed to in the real world. It just made things worse.

Fear of communism and socialism naturally struck hard at American values of rags to riches by hard work, independence and small business, property rights, individualism, liberty, ideologies at the time being peddled via the violence of revolution. When I was growing up the whole environment taught me as an American patriot to loathe those systems.

That still exists today, and that fear instilled in all of us for so many decades is still being used by politicians today, even though our potential enemies abroad are no longer practicing communism except symbolically, everyone is doing capitalism this year.

No reason to make such a big deal about socialism anymore. Authoritarianism is still a valid cause for concern, not to mention the environment, the need for massive new clean energy resources, the mutating virus, mounting levels of violence, inflation, American schism… we have enough prime challenges today and cannot let ourselves be distracted by last century’s woes.

We ourselves are good people. My hunch/hypothesis (estimate of the situation, rather than article of faith) is that all human beings – all beings – are innately good. Hume called this universal instinct “sympatico”. The reason that is my hunch is that, like Will Rogers and similar to Abe Lincoln, I have never met a person I didn’t like, at least sometimes.

Fear causes anger and anger causes the world we now live in.

The digital media and even some traditional media have amplified our fear and our anger. So has the replacement of jingoism for journalism. The decline of journalism is also connected to the rise of digital media through the agency of money: as newspapers were largely replaced, so was a lot of journalism, thank God still not totally extinct and hopeful of a full comeback once we all come to our senses.

What makes me think we can ever come to our senses?

Metacognition.

What is metacognition? The term literally means “Above cognition”.

It’s a term coined by distinguished American developmental psychologist John H. Flavell in his 1976 article “Metacognitive Aspects of Problem Solving” – the same year my manual on how to achieve metacognition and the two states above it, MIND MAGIC came out.

Flavell defined “Metacognition” as “Cognition about cognition, or, more informally, thinking about thinking.” If we pay attention to our own mental/emotional processes (metacognition) we become practiced at it (Observer state) and eventually begin to have experiences of Flow state (what athletes call the Zone) – intuitive effective performance.

It’s my hypothesis that we can as homo sapiens “come to our senses” and overcome the present unstable state of global civilization, by accelerating the widespread education of practices proven to increase metacognition – and two even higher states of consciousness that metacognition is a precursor for, Observer state and Flow state. That automatically includes pragmatically being open to new evidence, and having the skills to weigh evidence logically and dispassionately.

QAnon zombies and extremists of all stripes can be cured by their achieving metacognition and Observer state. People who today believe things for the wrong reasons can untie the knots in their mind by the ability to weigh evidence dispassionately.

Metacognition and Observer state also enable detachment from long-accepted precepts. Metacognition is exactly what is missing from the present culture. It is not being taught in any public schools that I know of.

In order for the science of psychology to have its maximum positive social effect, people must be able to translate and apply findings to their own lives.

Today’s possibly most valuable psychology remains largely focused on the detailed mechanics of how the brain works, without relating such findings to the mind and the experience of the individual (qualia), the fancy name for our subjective inner experiences).

Tying scientific findings to a person’s experience would be valuable because it enables teaching and learning. The individual would have a map for dealing with his/her qualia, able to achieve metacognition/self-observe something by the use of operational methodologies taught in history by sages, and today condensed into my manual.

If science stops translating its findings for greater understanding among the people – which understanding has tangible positive effects – science remains valuable for its own purposes of knowing, but science’s disconnect from most people’s lives leaves a dangerous vacuum which is presently being filled with baseless argumentation of science versus fantasy, to no good end.

Hypothesis: An increase in the public’s ability to maintain a state of metacognition will cause a decrease in anger, hatred, class warfare, depression, mental illness in general, addiction, crime, war, terrorism, partisanship, misinformation, and other negative phenomena.

This is a hypothesis worth testing. My manual is one way to test it on yourself and on your employees. The U.S. Army and Navy have tested it and then requested/received workshops for high-ranking officers, as have some large corporations, and 34 universities. Thousands of readers of MIND MAGIC have written positively about its effects.

In the next post I’ll give you a pre-experience of what the manual teaches. That will be a special edition on Monday.

Best to all,

Bill

 

Favoring Your Better Side

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Created June 11, 2021

In the prior post I wrote about Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), which I hypothesize to be a milder version of Post Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD). At the end I provided a few brief takeaways that are effective mind tricks to get out of EOP and into your naturally most effective and happy states of consciousness:

  • Observer state in which you are able to really see your Self, where you have the reins to metaprogram your own behavior with true free will and creativity – vs. EOP where you are inattentive, predictable and robotic and not totally sentient. I hypothesize Observer state to be our state in nature prior to the existence of written language, civilization, culture, and the information overload it has all led to today. Remember, from the standpoint of the 12.1 million years it took to develop our species out of ape stock, the 5000 years since written language began is a relative eyeblink (.004% of the time since we started): EOP could simply be the initial shock reaction of the immense acceleration our species has gone though in only the last 250 generations.
  • Flow state in which, during well-practiced and/or innately gifted behavior, you are so immersed in what you are doing that it appears to be doing itself better than you thought you could, although you are at play and not attached to any outcome.

Readers of my book MIND MAGIC sometimes ask me if there is a way that I can simplify my advice. For example, consider this Amazon review:

“This book is THE owner’s manual for the mind. This book presents nearly impossible challenges to even the most powerful and dedicated seekers. I’ve never known a single person that actually finished the work contained in this book.”
—   Benjamin Zabriskie, Amazon review of MIND MAGIC

For readers of this blog, this post will attempt to release you from your Emergency Oversimplification Procedure by means of extreme further simplification. This would seem to be self-contradictory but let’s see if it works anyway.

The strategy recommended here also judos dichotomania (binary coding, seeing everything as polar opposites) which is an aspect of EOP, doing so by reducing everything to noting the two streams of inner dialog and images/feelings in your mind.

From this moment on, if you agree to try this experiment with me, note what you are thinking and feeling from moment to moment and decide which of your two selves that thought or feeling represents:

  • Your Better Self – Heroic, blasé, confident, positive, constructive, compassionate, loving, kind, strong, determined to always do the right thing
  • Your Frail Human Side – Fearful, worried, escapist, taking refuge in addictive practices, having no faith in happy endings, seeking the easy way out, guilty and remorseful about the past

Without overthinking it (because you could become as indecisive as Hamlet if you wait for rational certainty) steer toward your hero side at all times. Do not blame your other self for having unworthy thoughts or feelings. If you have an unworthy thought don’t touch it. Don’t act on it. Don’t yell at it. Don’t even reject it. Just let it sit there in the wake of your mind contrails and drift away into the past without giving it further attention as you move onto into the next new now. Instead turn to considering testing alternative ways of doing things in the future which ought to soothe and remove the cause of whatever it was that gave you those craven thoughts or feelings.

If this simplified method works for you, it will mean that it is a sound means for you to use to get into the Observer state, where you can see the EOP side of yourself but take away its power over you. Where you can drill down to causality paths that will remove the sadness and bad feelings the EOP mind retains but is unable to terminally process. Your better side will be able to remove all the gunk in your mind. Just hew to your higher self and you will re-become that self you were always meant to be in the first place.

All my best,

Bill

The Whole Human Race Has PTSD

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Created June 4, 2021

Post Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) is usually associated with combat veterans, but civilians have also had it after being in violent or dangerous situations. To millions of whites in this country having Obama elected president was a traumatic shock, and to half of Americans the Trump years were a prolonged traumatic shock. On top of these conditions came the pandemic, having to teach your own children what they were supposed to be learning at school, having your home turned into a submarine of compression togetherness, the insurrection, and the escalating publicity about police and domestic violence, the collapsing environment, overstretched national debt levels, threatening signs from other nations, and the ongoing sense of unreconcilable differences tearing us apart.

More than enough to account for the mass PTSD, leading with help from certain media to a degree of mass hysteria.

Maybe we should call it OTSS: Ongoing Traumatic Shock Syndrome.

The first step is to admit the possibility that you have a degree of PTSD. You may feel unmoored lately, unsure of your place in the world, unsure of where the future may be going for you, troubled by frictions within the family that had never existed before, challenged to keep the same level of income coming in. You may not be as certain what you believe in as you always had been. Letting yourself acknowledge such feelings is essential to begin to process those feelings into constructive thought and action.

My theory is that the human race has been in a degree of PTSD for a very long time. In MIND MAGIC I refer to the somewhat milder PTSD condition as EOP: Emergency Oversimplification Procedure. I believe we began to develop pandemic EOP about 5000 years ago when we started to see written language, which did something to our minds that has never been equaled.

The spread of EOP accelerated as written language led us to invent tools, weapons, machinery, media, governments, technology, science, and innumerable other things.

EOP results when we do not feel we have the attentional capacity to deal with the many questions in our minds, and so we decide to short-cut our thinking.

This increases the tendency toward:

  • dichotomania, the predisposition to perceive that everything fits neatly into one of two boxes which are polar opposites of one another;
  • subscribing to and becoming fanatically loyal to pre-packaged notions such as religions and ideologies;
  • increasing power to confirmation bias;
  • avoiding consideration of the largest questions in life;
  • replaying the same tapes over and over in one’s mind and in one’s speech;
  • actually hallucinating that one is seeing exactly what one expected to see and to hear exactly what one expected to hear, although that is not what really happened;
  • hasty closure, making up one’s mind too fast;
  • not thinking for oneself, although one may see oneself as a paragon of individualism and independence;
  • over-generalization: one person of that ‘type’ does X so all of that type do X
  • and a horde of other self-hypnotic, robotical microbehaviors, all of which underestimate the desirability of more objective self-observation, therefore keeping us out of the Observer state, and significantly reducing our chances of getting into the Flow state.

I started to write about EOP nearly half a century ago, and expected that in my readings I would eventually discover that someone thought of this a long time ago. Strangely, despite my wide-ranging reading over the years, I never came across the notion of EOP by any other name.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I was reading about the work of a fellow marketing/media researcher, Professor Karen Nelson-Field, whom I’ve met a number of times. What never came up in our brief conversations at conferences is that she has observed EOP and describes it using other language:

KNF: I’d like to give the attention economy a bit of background, if I may because it’s quite a buzzword now. Many people don’t really understand the context and its background. We all know that we live in this age of extreme distraction and our capacity to process is very small. What happens is that humans make decision shortcuts, and give little thought to what it is to avoid information overload. They give little thought to researching every single thing that comes past the desk.

The attention economy comes from the concept that taking decision shortcuts when you’re an air traffic controller or when you’re driving a car is not ideal. I think the study of information overload started during the World War II era. What impact does that have on our economic and social systems?

By its nature, the attention economy is a study of inattention and its economic or social impact.

Essentially, we want to understand not only the cause of inattention, the consequences of inattention but also some ethical solutions to correct it. MORE

I applaud Karen’s thinking and am grateful to now know of another scientist giving credence to what I call EOP.

Brief takeaways for countering EOP and thus returning to the more natural Observer state, doorway to the Flow state:

  • Stop moving, breathe deeply, observe your mind as if from afar.
  • Hold off on agreeing with the thoughts and feelings that arise in you, reconsider them from the other side with a fully open mind, reset the basic assumptions to zero just for this interlude.
  • Feel, look and listen for small “voices” (could be feelings or images) that are hunches about something you hadn’t been considering, trying to break through to your attention.

Best to all,

Bill

Feeling Happy

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Created March 19, 2021

The Pursuit of Happiness. It’s one of our inalienable rights.

But do we exercise it enough?

What percent of our thoughts does happiness get?

Before Covid, probably our own happiness did not get much of our attention at all on the average day.

Since Covid, I hear from my friends that the constant video calls are keeping them busier than ever, and I’m certainly experiencing that myself. That might mean that we are giving even less thought to happiness, our own and that of others.

Those of us on the front lines, still moving around outside the home, may have even less time to self-contemplate. Although there are times in everyone’s day that can be stolen moments, when the priorities are remembered.

The trick is not just to remember to think creatively about how to make oneself and others happy. It’s also, even more importantly, to simply remember to be happy.

Not that we all can turn that off and on like a switch. Most of us have little talent for switching over to being happy. But with practice, like with everything, it actually is something that all of us can learn to do.

The way it works with me is:

  1. First, I create a minute or two of alone space. No one can interrupt or distract me. That may require slipping away and locking oneself in a bathroom.
  2. Long slow breaths help establish a certain calmness.
  3. I’m prepared to take notes with pad and pen in pocket. Just in case I get a flow of inspiration.
  4. Am I happy? If not, why not, what activity can I undertake when I rejoin the world that I’d rather be doing, and can I put off what else I’ve been doing, and if so, to when? I’ve written here before about the importance of working on what you feel like working on at the moment – it’s conducive to Flow state, on top of making yourself happy.
  5. I put on a smile to help others and leave my hideout.

You might find other ways to switch yourself to the happy channel. If there are seriously painful things going on, that’s a whole different situation. Still requiring creativity, alone space to focus. The only constructive question is always What can I do about it? You can’t control the outcome of certain painful situations but you can identify where you can exert creative effort to make a positive difference. Sometimes the only thing you can control is the impression you make on others, showing how a mensch can stand up to anything, supporting others, still able to have an apropos type of smile on your face, calm and working toward the good every moment.

All of us can be refreshed and reinvigorated by a daily dose of a few minutes’ contemplation on our happiness. Or the whole day, it’s the one thing worth double-tasking. While you go about your day, remember that you are responsible to yourself to enjoy every moment of the gift of life.

Bring able to keep that criterion within every moment is one of the most important priorities of life.

It might seem selfish but on a practical basis it is not. Your being happy will actually make people around you happier than they would be if you are unhappy instead.

All my best,

Bill