Speak to the Other’s Saliency

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Powerful Mind Part 32

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 10, 2025.
Created October 13, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 31

Every conversation is a potential spike in learning, typically even richer than most
other times, though, “alone times” can reap the most surprising revelations.

The amount of learning available in each instant of life mostly goes untapped. Looking at life through a variety of observation lenses helps capture more of that nascent learning.

One way of looking at life is that it’s all a big reconnaissance. Looking at it that way defers the feeling of urgency to achieve closure on some solid pro or con position on every little thing.

Every conversation is a potential spike in learning, typically even richer than most other times, though “alone times” can reap the most surprising revelations.

Many of us live lives focused around day jobs in some sort of business or another, sometimes in the public or nonprofit sector, or academia or science, but it is still “taking care of business” on a day-to-day basis. This affords us many conversations, sometimes specifically goal-directed, and sometimes off-duty.

In our interactions, while taking care of business or at other times, each person often brings some hoped-for outcome. Say, for example, you attend a small group meeting or a one-on-one. The other person probably has one or more things they are trying to achieve and wants your help. You may be in the same position. It may not be obvious from the outset what the other person wants. You may not always be aware of your own expectations or desires; they may be hidden from you, and you may not have done your homework.

The networks in the brain we have discussed before include the salience network, which is responsible for prioritizing what to do next, what is most important in the present moment, and which has the key role of switching from the default network to the executive control network, which is an overarching theme of our body of work within what I call psychotechnology, the pragmatic optimization of mental/affective functions.

Saliency as a concept refers to that which stands out in the foreground against the background of everything else.

When you are with someone, it is polite and considerate to try to discern what the other person’s saliency network is prioritizing at the moment. For example, let’s say it is in a business environment. You may be there for a very special reason of your own, of which you are well aware.

The normative way of proceeding in today’s world culture – at least in the West – is to go for the jugular. Take the initiative to make your pitch.

However, you will learn much more and increase your chances of success if you start by helping the other person further the implicit goals of whatever is currently the focal point of their salience network. It’s also kinder, nicer, and – if my theory of the conscious universe is correct – the “force will be with you” if you do it this way.

In order to do this, you need to listen and observe carefully, without presuppositions.

You also need to avoid pigeonholing based on your first impressions. “Aha, they want X!” might occur to you, but keep an open mind.

Within the conventional bounds of whatever context you are in, of course, you are allowed to ask direct questions to find out what the other person is most concerned about.

This next thought is very much about the present-day reality and may not be so important in other eras. Prepare to be shocked because nowadays it’s not uncommon to hear a person say something that is strongly emotionally charged and deeply wedded to some political or anti-group position. If you don’t already know this about the person, it could flip a switch inside you that has the effect of feeling that this is not your sort of person. You may start to think about how to depart. Observe those reactions in yourself without ratifying them and let them drift into the past.

Continue to be open-minded and compassionate.

Once it becomes clearer what the other person wants, work on that first, and hold back what you are there to accomplish.

If it’s a group meeting, before putting forth your own agenda, observe carefully to see if you can make out what is salient to each person in the room or on Zoom.

Work creatively to help others accomplish their aims. Doing this before putting forth your own needs is a better pragmatic approach in terms of actual achievement of your aims.

Of course, if there is a natural linkage by which your desired ends can serve theirs, without contortions or fakery, then it’s a win/win.

Here are some helpful observational lenses lifted from my book Mind Magic, which may facilitate learning during the reconnaissance.

    • If I look at this situation as a child might, what do I see?
    • Be aware of the emotions radiated by each entity, including yourself.
    • How might I turn this to everyone’s advantage?
    • Unstitch yourself from the moment by looking down at the whole scene from the ceiling.
    • Question your own possible biases which may affect what you see.
    • Strip away your own interpretations to get back to the things themselves.
    • “Just the facts, Ma’am.” (Dragnet’s Joe Friday)
    • Remember that words have a physical impact on you, so you must guard against being influenced by them.
    • Toy with alternate explanations for events. Allow your imagination free reign to propose the most unbelievable such explanations.
    • Look at everything as if seeing it for the first time.
    • Why did I notice that?
    • Why did that happen? What is it trying to tell me?

Love to all,
Bill

 

Bringing on the Observer State by Observation

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Powerful Mind Part 31

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 3, 2025
Created October 6, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 30             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

“How observant of you!” We have all heard people say this from time to time, to us or to someone else. There is wisdom in everything that is said, often much deeper wisdom than even the person who says it is aware of. Old sayings, especially.

The Observer state is more than being an observant person, although that is one aspect of the state.

We are embarking here on explaining Key #7, which is about the perceptions, the five senses, and the internal sense, the mind with its thoughts and feelings. Feelings include more than emotions; emotions are the bodily manifestations of our feelings. Thoughts are more than us talking to ourselves in our minds; thoughts include images, memories, hunches, and ideas we understand without using words in our mind.

These sensory systems bring us information about the world outside and inside.

Key #7 is about how to use these tools to further your Mission, and take care of yourself and other people better, by getting into the Observer state. Key #7 focused on how to do that using more powerful methods of observation. Other Keys aim to get you there by other strategies.

To review, the default network in the brain, what we call EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), is the most common state of most human beings. The mind wanders, impulses arise, and you choose which impulses to act upon based on the past. A prominent brain function which neuroscientist Karl Friston refers to as the inference engine, acts like an AI to keep track of every event in your past and makes associations between event type, action taken, and result; and then sends you impulses to take specific action that would have been best, in that event type, in the past. I have called it the robot since the previous century, and lately have been calling it the Bio-AI.

This is, of course, not a perfect way to make decisions. What if the event you are now embroiled in has never appeared in your life before, and the default events that are most similar and which the inference engine therefore uses as proxies for your current situation, are really not close enough? What if none of the actions you took in the past were really all that effective? As explained in the chapters relating to Key #2, consistency is not really the best policy.

The inference engine is part of the old brain, going back millions of years. 200,000 years ago, our species evolved a frontal cortex specifically as an improvement on the earlier decision “optimization” system. This new part enables the executive control network in the brain, although all brain systems are distributed in many parts of the physical brain. This network is where you want to work from. The best way to shift gears to that network is through conscious metacognition, that is, by observing your own thinking and feeling. This will get you into the Observer state.

You can easily slip out of the Observer state into EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). The reason it is easy to slip out is distraction. The environment in what we call modern civilization is extremely distractive, unless you live alone in a cave. Another reason is long habit. Getting mad at yourself only makes things worse. Maintain your sense of humor; it’s another way of maintaining your sense of perspective. Perspective allows us to realize that minor slippages are usually unimportant in the greater scheme of things and are valuable learning experiences if you use them that way. The old sayings that captured this include “don’t sweat the small stuff”, “no use crying over spilt milk”, and “practice makes perfect”. Key #4 also helps with this, reminding you not to keep score (because it trivializes you) but rather stay focused in the present.

Ego

Metacognition and the executive control network do not assure the onset of the Observer state. Observer state is where you can identify impulses arising in you which come from ego. It’s not always obvious. And you’re in the Observer state when you can ignore such impulses, not act upon them.

Ego is a form of neediness, also known as attachment, where you experience negative feelings because something you have become needy of is withheld.

If something you were born actually needing is withheld – like oxygen, food, water, certain temperature levels, health – it’s natural to have negative feelings, and would not fall into the category of ego.

Most of ego is related to esteem – the desire that other people esteem you. Such dependencies weaken you and get in the way of achieving a powerful mind.

One of the things you will be looking out for as you amp up the power of inner and outer observation is your own subtle neediness. Observer state is the powerful will that enables you to surmount those attachments. Renunciation of that neediness doesn’t mean stopping yourself from enjoying those things when they come your way, but you must have the willpower to stop yourself from running after more of the same.

It will seem like the universe is testing your resolve (and that might be what is actually happening).

You make your will stronger by exercising it. Especially when you can discipline yourself. Be careful not to exercise your will by being domineering with other people.

As a first step toward internalizing Key #7, keep an eye out inside for signs of neediness and analyze what it exactly is. Imagine scenarios in which your ego gets the stroking you want and scenarios in which your ego is crushed and humiliated. You will sense progress when you realize you don’t care about that stuff so much anymore – the sting will have been taken out of such mortification incidents. You will have become a mensch.

Be vigilant from the start of each day to the end. It’s optional, but very helpful to keep a journal noting when ego arose in you and what you felt and did about it.

After this useful preparation, we shall begin to more directly address observation in the next post.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

Updating Your Life Plan

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Powerful Mind Part 30

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, September 26, 2025
Created September 29, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 29     |    See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Mountain road. Landscape with green field, sunny sky

“Comedian George Carlin once quipped, ‘Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.’” This is a quote from a Gallup report, which found that 60% of workers are dissatisfied with the work they are doing.

The pandemic gave us the space we needed to realize that we were not getting enough satisfaction out of the life we were living, and a person’s work is central to a person’s life – “Lieber Und Arbeit” (Love And Work) as Freud put it – the two key tentpoles (which in my book You Are The Universe I show is actually the bottom of the Tree Of Life in Kabbalah).

But even before the pandemic, many of us already knew that we had placed ourselves in the wrong spot, maybe even the wrong line of work. The education system has not prepared us to know what our true gifts to the world are, the passion work that would keep us in the Flow State more often. For some time, I’ve been recommending individualized education to bring out the best in each of us, and to know the occupational optimization answers for each of us. Ironic that the Latin word educare means “to draw out” and yet our education systems around the world pound information in rather than draw anything out.

I’ve also written about work study internships for a day, starting at very early ages, maybe as early as seven years old, where kids can pick and choose which of the participating companies and departments they would like to try out for a day.

Since the pandemic, tens of millions of people around the world have been contemplating changes in their lives, focused especially around the kind of work they do, and where and how they do it. A big part of it is not the occupation itself but the culture of the company. Too many companies treat employees as expendable cogs and not as partners and allies. If AI were used to enable the whole personnel of a company to insert anonymous or otherwise ideas and suggestions with true protections against repercussions (today’s HR departments promise that but do not deliver it often enough), and if the C suite got continuous AI summaries, a maximum of 25 words per hour 9-5, the C suite might realize that the wisdom bubbling up is unbelievably brilliant and right. Global consultant Chaim Oren and I discuss these points in this podcast: How to Thrive in the Age of Crisis.

How to thrive in the age of crisis - a guide for life
Be sure you know what work YOU want to do, and that it isn’t someone else who caused you to believe you wanted that. Then make a plan to get from where you are to that work. Consider the moves carefully so as not to waste the goodwill you have built up in the field in which you have been working. Don’t leave people in a bad place by abruptly pulling out; take care of the people and company you now serve, as you make your transition. If you do it that way, some of them may help you get to where you want to be. Maybe there are ways to intersperse what you now do with elements of what you want to be doing. This is a great testbed for early learning.

This will take time, so you mustn’t add to your existing stress by becoming discouraged at how it seems Sisyphean and that you’ll never get there. Here’s the key trick: life is an adventure. You may have lost that sense of adventure before, perhaps long ago and without realizing it. But now that you have taken control of your own life and are steering it toward making your true dreams come true, you must sit back and become grateful for this big second chance you have given yourself, and that however it comes out, you are at least going to enjoy the adventure, the true adventure of your life as it was always meant to be, now that you have the real target in your sights. You are going to enjoy getting there, even if you never do get all the way there!

Remind yourself of this every time you feel dissatisfaction returning. Like all negative emotion, that is just an alarm reaction designed to wake you up to some threat vector. Turn off the emotional alarm, thanking it for ringing, and set to learning whatever lesson has to be learned so that the source of that dissatisfaction may be reasonably solved to no longer cause you negativity.

This means that while you are on the adventurous path to your new life, no matter what happens, failure, censure, whatever, it isn’t going to get you down. You are at least pursuing your passion work, that’s what matters, and enjoy each second of the journey by learning from what appear to be signs that you will never attain your dreams. The outcomes are not the point. The pursuit is the point, as long as what you pursue is the highest use of the real you to the species and to the universe, in your own lights.

Remember that what you feel projects out and makes impressions that change the “external” world, so that the more quickly you turn off your own negativity, and keep envisioning (“predreaming”) the life scenario you want, the more likely you are to achieve it all. But beware of the trap of caring too much about the outcomes. Do what you can to obtain the outcomes you want, and let the chips fall where they may, and use negative feedback to refine your methods, but not bring you down.

Key #6

Be sure of what YOU want and enjoy the journey to your dreams,
without attachment to outcomes.

Here’s a little secret: Dissatisfaction is wrong predreaming, it brings you what you don’t want to happen.

Attachment to outcomes is a misunderstanding. It’s ego. It’s the need to prove yourself to other people, belonging, status/prestige, wealth/success, all those lower motivations that you were conditioned to be needy about. The established psychological principle of Yerkes-Dodson obtains: highest performance comes when there is just the right amount of desire to win, and performance falls off sharply when there is too much attachment to the outcome.

Enjoy the adventure!

Love,
Bill

 

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Stripping Away Imposed Limitations

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Powerful Mind Part 29

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, September 19, 2025.
Created September 22, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 28         |        See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

We have all been brainwashed. It was not done because of any conspiracy. It arose naturally as a result of the original minorities that seized power, the education systems and other structures that bloomed in the environments of those governments, the media the species invented, the economics of media and marketing in the world as it became.

The world we came into, the best intentions of our parents, and our own tabula rasa impressionability did the rest. Operant conditioning was applied “accidentally”. Our parents wanted to prepare us for life with all its warts, and so their advice was designed to help us avoid mistakes they had learned from, painfully. We, of course, insisted on learning for ourselves. By the time our childhood peers became more influential upon us than our parents had been, most of our behaviors, gestures, facial expressions, comments, likes, dislikes, and tendencies had already been conditioned by family influences, including the friends of the family to whom we were exposed.

We were more like little imitative monkeys than we realized. We were generally not cognizant of how what we thought of as our self was being formed by others. Later in life, we all realize it to some degree sooner or later. Some of us, more than others, upon realizing this insidious process and how it shaped what we thought of as our own thinking, rebelled. Without realizing it, perhaps we repressed anger at our parents for having controlled our belief systems and values to the degree they had. We suddenly valued independent thinking as a thing that had never mattered to us before. Often, in the process of trying to differentiate ourselves from those who had influenced our development, we came around to realize years later that the fight against the early conditioning had led a circular path right back to performing along the early ingrained lines anyway.

How can we, in reality, make a clean, permanent break from the brainwashing we endured and continue to endure each day?

How can we take charge of ourselves, stripping away the external influences, and will we find anything left of ourselves once we have done that? How scary to feel that without all the mimicry programs, there might not be a “self left to stand on”? Never fear. You do have a real self under all that. Your dreams, visions, and hunches tap into the roots of your individuality, even though they may be tainted by external influences too. Which is why it is a good idea to pay attention to your deepest thoughts, feelings, images, memories, and to analyze and understand what they mean, what your non-conscious mind is trying to communicate to your conscious mind.

This is all about you and your life, what you want to do with the blank canvas, which by now has scribbling all over it.

Don’t trash the scribbling because it too has messages that will help you understand yourself. Everything you have done – even things you now regret – is of positive value to you as learning experiences, and you have probably not yet extracted all of the learning you can get out of each experience. Looking back over your life, as we said here, especially the memories that still evoke emotion in you, is for the purpose of extracting the remaining lessons. Once you have fully assimilated an experience that has always made you feel guilty and ashamed, those feelings will no longer have any sting.

Metacognition – studying yourself – can actually unwind emotional blocks and take the sting out of “bad” memories. That is not the only benefit of metacognition, but it’s an important one.

How much have you gotten out of this series of posts so far? One way to look at that is to remember the “wants” that came into your mind when you read the post “What Do You Really Want?”  Hopefully, you took notes either on paper or in a device and kept those notes, and if so, you can review them now. In any case, what you can do right now is to repeat the short exercise of writing down the things you want, and even if you have no notes, you can think about how the wants you write down now might have changed. Your inner processes are not all at the conscious level, so you could be surprised at noticing that certain things you said you wanted a couple of weeks ago now don’t seem as important to the you of now. And maybe other wants have risen higher recently.

Think about this for a moment: which wants do you want to have, and which wants would you rather not have?

There could be things that used to drive you, and caused you painful experiences—these may be wants you don’t want to have anymore.

Also, I have found that it helps to throw off desires I have by plumbing the depths of, “Where did I get that want in the first place?” Once I discover how a want was planted in me, it makes it all the easier to cast off that want or to dial it down.

One of the most pernicious wants – especially if it becomes a need – is the desire for approval by others. Self-approval is, of course, a bedrock requirement. If we don’t like ourselves for any reason, we are going to be undermining ourselves, like a scorpion continuously addicted to constantly stinging itself. Why be that way? It’s an insult to the opportunity of life itself. You have to be on your own side. If something is preventing that, it’s a top priority to contemplate that first, and conquer it, no matter what else you might have to give up or dial down.

Whereas self-approval is a good thing, the need for approval from others is very undermining. Catch yourself justifying yourself to others: it is evidence that your need for the approval of others is causing you to act in a pathetic manner. Not everyone around you is sharp enough to see that consciously, but everyone can sense that you are needy without clarifying that in words in their own minds. Do you really want to appear needy to others? Is that really going to help you accomplish what you wish to accomplish in your life? Best to edit out those words that your impulsive default network sends to your tongue to enunciate.

Ask yourself:

    • What are you going to accomplish with the remainder of your life?
    • What is your mission, your purpose, your goals?
    • How are you going to deliver the gifts you have been given to the rest of the world.
    • How are you going to leave something behind that will make you feel fulfilled when you breathe your last breath?

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

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