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Data Mining Your Own Intuition

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Volume 3, Issue 20

Intuition is when an idea (usually in the form of a feeling with cognitive elements embedded in it) pops into your head fully formed without being preceded by a step-by-step logical chain. These “cognitive elements” equate to meaning; that is, you know and comprehend the content of what it is you are saying to yourself. You know this without having heard words spelling it out and there is usually no image that you can see in your mind — although in heightened states of consciousness you may be able to see an image tied to this intuition.

Dan Goleman points out that at least some of these feelings — the ones we call “gut feelings” — are called that because we sense they are somehow coming from our gut, which is accurate because the part of the brain from which these intuitions come (the basal ganglia) is also associated with the nerve connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal system. These intuitions are really the net guidance stored from our experiences in the form of summary action implications that tell us the way we are going either worked or failed in the past.

These gut feelings are not the totality of the intuition but a subset of the intuition. Other intuitive packets come to us from other parts of the brain and some may not be directly traceable to our experiences in this life.

These ideas flash into our mind and usually flash right out again unless we have a strong and abiding mental intention to pay attention to and remember their content. Without such conscious intention, we probably won’t even notice these fleeting intuitions. They are a subtle guidance system that does not speak loudly in our mind.

By contrast, the ego voices that dominate most of our mind at most times are loud, strident and salient. These ego voices are the thoughts, inner dialog, and feelings that are linked to our base motivations. We are pulled around by our negative fears and anger reactions to events around us that we are attached to because we feel our livelihoods and social standing are at stake and at any moment something can be taken away from us. The ego is stressed out due to Acceleritis (Information Overload) on top of and thus exacerbating its own predisposition to worry. As a result of this inner competition for attention and the fact that most of our attention is at nearly all times cast outwards not inwards causes us to not even catch these intuitions in the first place.

If we do catch the event it is generally not heeded because of the jumble of subsequent louder thoughts giving us impulses to verbally fight, complain, argue, dismiss, or otherwise rain on whatever it was that somebody just said that may have triggered the intuition.

This is a testable hypothesis — you can experiment with the following to see whether it is the good advice I think it is, or not:

Start a program of paying attention to your own hunches and look for them to arise. When they do, put off the other business that seems so important to the ego and commonplace mind, and focus on what your intuition just told you. Make sure you remember the content by either writing it down or forming a keyword or key phrase or key image that will serve as a retrieval mechanism to bring back the whole content of the idea.

Then at an appropriate time in the proceedings taking place around you, if any, tentatively see if the application of that intuitive idea seems to contribute anything to the situation or not. Do this instead of — or at least before — offering any of the subsequent jumble of thoughts that came after the intuition to the company around you.

This is the reverse of the commonplace mind’s procedure, which is to speed past the intuitive event and come up with some other strategy for dealing with the present situation. Or even if we retain memory of the hunch our tendency is to edit and “improve” upon it, which often has the opposite effect. Stick with the way it appeared in the beginning — based on my experience, the odds favor this being the successful course of action.

On the other hand, you might see what the intuition is and realize that although triggered by the current situation, it really applies to another situation. You would then wait to tentatively apply the hunch until you are in the situation to which it refers. In this case also resist the tendency to edit that first flash — though using diplomatic language is always a good idea so long as you do not distort the original idea.

Sometimes the intuition gives us not the right answer but an answer that is wrong but which will lead to the right answer, one that might not be reached other than through this wrong answer. Socrates appeared to know this — he flowed with his intuitions yet by phrasing the ideas as questions he protected himself against error.

More on the complexity of intuition and its optimization in upcoming posts.

Happy Independence Day to all!

Bill 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Entering and Sustaining Flow by How Much of the Mind Is Cooperating at One Time

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Volume 3, Issue 4

Continuing our theme of recent posts, we are contemplating and “unpacking” Buddha’s root notion that mindfulness plus comprehension is the one route to true human happiness.

And we are relating that notion to our theory of Holosentience, wherein the brain and mind operate most perfectly and effectively when the sentience, or self-awareness, gathers itself into a wholeness exclusionary of nothing — when the selfness is so complete it disappears into absorption with the wholeness of experience in the now.

In earlier posts we posited that the physical brain is in Flow state (the Zone) when all parts of the brain are contributing and processing harmoniously. Below Flow in perfection is Observer state, where the self has a degree of objective detachment from its own emotional and cognitive arisings. In this state the prefrontal cortex is postulated to be in control though the whole brain is not yet in synchronistic action. These hypotheses are not yet supported by conclusive evidence.

Below the Observer state is what in the last 6000 years of recorded history has been called the normal state of waking consciousness, which I judge to be a state of brain process division far from Flow, and which I attribute to the information overload produced since written language was invented. I call this phenomenon Acceleritis. This lowest mental state I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) meaning that the mind is cutting corners to get things done despite being overloaded, overwhelmed, torn into warring bits, and confused.

Mindfulness is a word that has the connotation of striving for itself. The word has been used going back to the Vedas (the term is again on an upswing) as a tool to remind the seeker that he and she must remember to be mindful, to pay attention — but to what? To both the events around and outside oneself, and the ones inside. At the same time. “Inside” and “outside” both being constructs of the mind. In effect, “mindfulness” is the trigger word for the Observer state — a mnemonic device to remind oneself how to get out of EOP.

For my entire lifetime I have had the intuition of a common natural evolution of mindfulness and comprehension that is accessible internally to each of us. We don’t need outside inputs to discover it. So I have spent most of my life unpacking that intuition into communicable language. And articulating the intuitive cookie-crumb trail that is leading me myself back from EOP into Flow. In doing so I intuit myself to be reiterating the communication of the psychotechnology that resides within each of us, which others throughout history have also communicated, using language more common to their times, and often using metaphors when explicit language was challenged by a lack of models. Living today I have the advantage of the existence of models of information processing that are for the first time in history ideal for articulating what goes on experientially in our consciousness, since in our theory consciousness is an information processing system.

To be continued next week, with more techniques for attaining Observer state and making the transition to Flow.

Best to all,

Bill 

The Human Effectiveness Institute: A Personal View

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Volume 2, Issue 40

Many people ask me how my books compare with the flood of self-improvement books crowding the psychology/philosophy shelves nowadays. When my first book appeared there was not so much of a glut of such titles and the question rarely came up. Instead people told us they had never seen that kind of book before. Funny how things change. And it’s great that writers and publishers are filling so much bookstore shelf space with books to help people master the art of life — arguably the single most important practical topic imaginable from the standpoint of the pursuit of happiness.

My first book Mind Magic is still unique in the sense that it’s a set of techniques that came out of trial and error in my personal experience. Some of you know that my showbiz parents had me on stage at age 4 and my ensuing early experience of Flow state is what caused my concentration on learning to “control” and/or trigger desirable inner states. Mind Magic is a collection of what worked for me. Originally written just for myself as my “Book of Programs”, friends insisted I publish it because it worked for them too. Over 2000 readers have written that the book changed their lives, which encourages us to go on and add to the body of techniques we make available as widely as we can, in hopes that someday Flow state is a common occurrence, and its lead-in Observer state even more common.

Other books sitting near Mind Magic on the shelves are not so precisely focused on bringing on these two states. More generally, books “like” mine are aimed at making people feel better about themselves, and handling stress in their lives in a more effective and peaceful manner. Some are excellent condensations of latest psychological science or of ancient Eastern psychologies/philosophies, and some blend these together. Ram Dass and Daniel Goleman are two of the best in the world in this genre. Both have written endorsements of Mind Magic. Ram Dass and Dan aren’t just condensers and reporters, they teem with their own brilliant creative insights.

A long time ago Dan, his fellow former Harvard psychobiology professor Dr. Richard Davidson, and I were partners in a pioneering and successful brainwave research venture in the advertising industry. Dan and Richie coined the term “hijack the brain” to describe what happens when the limbic system and the amygdala in particular become energized to produce extreme attachment and cognitive distraction. This is exactly what I write about when describing the fall from Observer/Flow states into what I sensed as a child, EOP for Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, an ineffective involuntary bodily “strategy” for dealing with challenging external situational and/or internal mentation challenges.

Another friend and exceptional brain-trainer-psychiatrist/author/artist is Dr. Phillip Romero, who uses the term “triggering” to describe the brain’s program of switching into a limbic-system-control state. He created Logosoma Brain Training, a consilient algorithm that integrates theories of Buddha, Darwin, and John Bowlby for his patients. Logosoma training helps people master Relationship Stress, the most powerful stress trigger that hijacks our capacity for mindfulness, creativity, connectedness and compassion. Where Phillip is focused on training people to liberate themselves from Hostage Relationships and Reconnect with compassionate creativity, my colleagues and I at the Institute are focused on helping people achieve the exceptionally higher states of consciousness above normal waking consciousness.

Phillip has taken me to task for creating my own language that I find useful in inner space, where I find that I am dealing with parts of myself that respond to metaphor and imagery. As noted above, some 2000 people have reported that the heuristics presented in Mind Magic, even if more symbolic than scientific, are useful to them in attaining more creative and effective states. Phillip is right in that agreement on terminology will be critically important in pulling together the work of many people in order to turn the art of life into more of a science to the degree that is desirable.

My vision is that techniques for increasing personal success in dealing with all of life’s challenges will someday permeate the syllabi of the public education system. The books, audios, videos, television programs and movies that we envision for the future are aimed to be a resource for when the culture becomes even more attuned to this dimension of inner space navigation.

Best to all,

Bill

Setting the Mood for Conflict Resolution

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Volume 2, Issue 39

With Better Data and Analytics for World Class Solutions

Two posts ago for the first time in this blog’s history, I retracted an idea from the article within 24 hours of its posting. In a quick series of blunt emails a dear friend thoroughly convinced me that even raising the possibility of any form of debt cancellation is a terrible idea.

Why terrible? Because:

  1. Anything that could reduce even an iota of faith in the notion of the United States of America as the most stable country on Earth could panic people. This is not because people are rational, quite the opposite — it is because they are under the sway of Acceleritis, and are operating in mental shortcut Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).But a fact is a fact. Bad idea to bring up. Speak of debt conversion, debt service renegotiation, and especially get the top economists into a creative mood and talk about any other out-of-the- box ideas that they want. Just not the idea of debt cancellation.
     
  2. It plays right into the hands of the current severe polarization between those who hold it to be virtuous that the strong should always protect the weak (we call that the Left) and those who believe this but to a lesser degree, and are most focused on individual independence and freedom including the minimization of laws restricting individual decision making (we call that the Right). Nothing should be done to further exacerbate the hatred that has snuck up on us and suddenly become harsh and rigid on both sides. This is a far worse threat than the fiscal cliff, which is a temporary aberration and will be solved one way or the other so as to minimize suffering, although there will still be plenty of that. Legislators the world around will perform better in making the tough decisions ahead to put the economy of the world back on a firm sustainable footing, to the degree that they start in a creative mood and not in this mood of vendetta that appears to grip at least half of us, enough of us to bring everything to a grinding halt (aka gridlock).

On a world scale, if we cannot balance Severity (the Right) with Mercy (the Left) (these are called Geburah and Chesed in Kabbalah), in the very long run what are the possible scenarios? These two mammoth groups around the world could between them set off the first (and perhaps last) World Civil War. Not based on borders, the Blues everywhere would fight the Reds everywhere. Those in the middle would try to keep peace but that would just make it a three-way civil war once peacekeepers got killed en masse for the first time.

Hitler’s deranged mind wandered over these mental landscapes in somehow believing that killing off the Jews would make the planet work better. The hatred we hear and read today from both sides of the Left/Right debate conjures images of one side launching a war of extermination to wipe out those who think oppositely about the degree to which the strong should protect the weak.

On what basis is there a feeling that the strong should protect the weak? It comes from many sources: intuition, love, kindness, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, noblesse oblige, simpatico, pragmatism, my theory that we are all manifestations of the same single Being, all flavors of the same intuition or instinct for supporting others that we all naturally have except when a person is damaged emotionally during upbringing.

Conflict Resolution processes that worked in Northern Ireland could be imported into the US situation and mass media campaigns could be sponsored by top advertisers, with the Ad Council leading the way with a pro bono campaign.

Fact-based communications must be made to drive out the current meaningless level of babble that passes for debate. New parliamentary rules need to be instituted to eradicate time-wasting sneering language and j’accuse statements that do not move toward solutions with any creative new ideas in them. Every legislator should demand quantification on statements made. Here we are debating how to deal with $120 trillion in unpayable debt, and yet we cannot easily find even with the Internet, a coherent and definitive input-output table of the world economy from which an observer can run simulations, optimizations, do sensitivity testing, and otherwise move toward reducing the decisions that need to be made to mathematics, where optimization can prove exactly what has to be done in order to achieve whichever objective one sets.

For example, in my not-so-productive idea two weeks ago, I wasn’t talking about the US cancelling only its own debts and doing so unilaterally. I was talking about a UN-level group using factual data to brief each country’s negotiators to discuss and advance the common good.

For example, there are loops that could cancel out debt with no injury, such as where someone owes money to himself/herself. One of these loops is that 49% of the total US debt is owed to the Social Security Fund, Federal Reserve, or State and Local Governments. Not sure that these entities all consider themselves one US entity so perhaps these loops don’t change anything.

My point is that in marketing we have tons of data and in general are looking at it and can answer questions and make decisions with it. How could it be that in running the world we are under-using data? Yet it seems to be true. We have to fix this right away. We need to pool efforts to create an open architecture input-output economic model using agent-based modeling i.e. bottom-up not aggregate level. We need to be able to simulate, so there need to be transition probabilities from state to state for each agent, region, and country. All the historic data need to be poured into the model and harmonized. The optimizer must allow the setting of objectives in terms of the weight to give protecting the poor vs. protecting the strong, so that many optimizations with different settings can be run. Then the output actions determined by each optimization run can be fed into the simulator to see how the scenario plays out by time periods, whether an optimized scenario validates or not according to this gauge.

Who is going to do this?

Because the Human Effectiveness Institute’s Mission is to engender Observer and Flow states in as many people as possible everywhere as the most primal, direct and effective means to improve decisionmaking, we are going to continue to focus on this primary mission in this blog. Ideas about fixing the economy shall move out of this blog into the new sister site, The Democracy Channel, to launch here early in 2013. TDC will contain not just my ideas but the ideas of many people. The commentary will be edited to exclude negativity and partisanship as much as possible while letting through all verified factual content, new ideas, and solution suggestions, so that readers can also vote on other people’s solution ideas.

A friend of mine who passed along to me wisdom and moods he had acquired in India, pointed to the greedheads who were holding the world back. It was not consistent with his forgiving mood. He excluded the rich, including top politicians and largest corporations — some of you will recognize this as the 60s. Rachel Carson, Vance Packard, and others had shown some dark side and the present conspiracy theorist culture began to balloon outward into the hinterlands.

When I went into the advertising industry, my friend assumed I was going to try to cure the ills from the inside. That was part of it. The other part was that I was not looking for ills. So far, over the course of decades in the world of large corporations in 34 countries, including their C-level execs, I have yet to find any evidence of evil bad guys. As the sides have drawn apart, they have lost touch as people with one another, they avoid each other’s company, and so they are unable to feel the reassuring inner sensations of “this person is OK” one often gets after getting to know someone even a little. Everyone has reasons that have led them to their own personal convictions. Frontal confrontation with their convictions is obviously the least indicated communications strategy for conflict resolution. If you indulge in demonizing the other side, you are not only wasting time, you are chasing away the Flow state (Zone) which is not going to come over you while you are processing distracting negative emotions. You need to bootstrap yourself into the Observer state where you can edit out insulting catchphrases in discussing solutions with people from the other side of the aisle. Once operating consistently in the Observer state, in a conflict resolution mood of forgiveness, we can, together, bring us all back together again.

Best to all,
Bill

PS — "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. 

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. "
— Charles Darwin*

* Thank you Philip Romero for the Charles Darwin quote.