The Three States of Waking Consciousness

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Western science has it that there is a single state of human consciousness. In his landmark book The Meditative Mind, my wonderful friend Daniel Goleman presents the ancient Eastern wisdom of the Visuddhimagga and other sacred texts, showing ten waking states above an access state which itself is superior to the everyday state on the path of concentration, and nine such waking states above access state and everyday state on the path of insight. This suggests that there are around a dozen waking states.

Obviously in the East they allowed self-observation to be considered a path to objective knowledge, a technique little used in the West. This is why psychotechnologies – ways of controlling our mental states by acts of will and concentration – were developed first in the East.

If there were only one state of waking consciousness, this means that Osama when he was reportedly high on heroin and about to be shot was in the same state of waking consciousness as Einstein was in when he had the insight of Relativity and the relationships between matter and energy, space and time. How plausible is that?

Even if we want to be snobbish know-it-all Westerners, unscientifically closed-minded and not even interested in experimenting with Eastern mental maps, is it not pretty easy to allow that there could be more than one state of waking consciousness?

As in the paths of concentration and insight in the example above, it is possible to conceive of a number of different maps of states of waking consciousness, all being true from their own viewpoint. There could be a map showing what you go through when you focus on your concentration in itself, and discover higher and higher degrees of your ability to concentrate. There could be a different map for what you experience when you practice ways of achieving deeper and deeper insights into what exists in your purview.

Here at The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI), because we are singularly focused on the goal of increasing human effectiveness, we divide waking consciousness into three states. We recognize that there are other valid ways of distinguishing states of consciousness, and that there are undoubtedly sub-states within the three states that we use as a basis for our psychotechnology. However, for utilitarian reasons, we simplify to these three states:

  1. Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). The “functional” state of the human race today. You are acting like a robot. Somebody who knows you well can predict accurately what you will do in a certain situation. He or she could get rich making bets on your next actions, were there anyone to take those bets. You always say the same things, keyed to the situation. You have the same feelings and go through the same mental loops when the same types of things happen to you. You are focused on quickly classifying incoming situations into types so you know what to do.
  2. The Observer State. You can see that you have been acting like a programmed machine. You can see that it’s hard to stop the robot part of you from controlling your actions even though you are wide awake to the situation.
  3. The Flow State. Aka The Zone. Often for short periods, some of us are able to spontaneously do exactly the right thing down to miniscule subtleties, and it all happens automatically while you watch your self do this, from your ringside seat.

We hypothesize that there are underlying measurable brain states corresponding to these three experiential (perceived from the inside) states. It’s possible that one drives the other but we need to be careful in coming to conclusions about which drives which.

In EOP, we hypothesize that there might be high functional connectivity (or functional coupling) between neural networks in Brodmann Area 10 (sense of self; aka BA10) and the limbic system and other brain areas involved in the ancient fight-flight reaction syndrome.

In the Observer State, we hypothesize that there is high functional coupling between BA10 and the prefrontal lobes.

In the Flow State, we hypothesize high functional coupling across a number of brain regions, signifying natural harmony, possibly appearing in brainscan as symmetrical and balanced, possibly crystalline pattern of moving energies. Users of low cost EEG devices such as Mind Mirror since the early 80s have seen this yantra/mandala--like pattern in EEGs of advanced meditators. The Mind Mirror device is conducive to showing these artistic brain patterns during subject Flow State because the display shows left and right brain from “above”.

Computer science professor and prolific science fiction writer Rudy Rucker uses the pre-existing term “autopoiesis” (self-creation) to mean the degree of control an individual has over his or her self. (Rudy’s characteristically quantum mechanics infused twist on the term makes for a paragraph interesting to read.) Using Rudy’s meaning, the three states of waking consciousness as we have defined them, constitute stages along a continuum of self-creation/self-control. In EOP, regardless of what one thinks, one is not in control of one’s actions, which are being driven mechanically by people who push your buttons and by what appear to be stray events. These events may or may not being dragged (by inter-personal signaling among mirror neurons) into your purview, attracted by your fears; it certainly seems that way. Your fears keep attracting the feared situation.

In the Observer State, there are degrees of control. At the earliest stage of learning how to be when in the Observer State, one can see what one’s robot is doing but cannot stop the robot from doing it. Later on there is a higher degree of control.

In the Flow State, one has such a high degree of control that it has become autonomic such that the individual’s will has no inertial drag as it processes through to motor control.

We define “psychotechnology” (the word had earlier meanings in the 1930s) as anything that helps people get from EOP into either or both of the two higher effectiveness states of waking consciousness.

I have been creating such psychotechnology for my own personal use all my life, and began packaging it for others in the 1970s. In 1976 I founded the Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) and others who saw the effectiveness increases from the early psychotechnology gathered around THEI to help disseminate it. We are working toward an even more effective package with the next book and its accompanying DVD video.

We hope you will experiment with these psychotechnologies on yourself.

Looking forward to that. All the best,

Bill

 

Psychotechnology for the 21st Century

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This post will overview the Institute and our work. 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 put 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 myself 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 ability. 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 currents 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, maybe 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, psychology, morality/ethics, aesthetics, and many other good things.

THEI’s psychotechnology is in the realm 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 normally biased against such possibilities.

My book MIND MAGIC is 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 original  version worked at least for some people. Including a range of well-known folks from Norman Cousins to John Lennon, Ram Dass and Daniel Goleman. Also some bank officials, corporate executives, Army Generals, Colonels, Navy Captains, 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 gets you stuck in every feeling and thought you have before you can apply quality control.

Some free samples of THEI psychotechnology are being offered in these blog postings and on our site. We hope you get something valuable out of THEI psychotechnology and give us feedback to help us make it better.

All the best,

Bill

 

The Future Evolution of Media Research

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In this posting I continue looking into the future of marketing and advertising research, today focusing on helping media decisionmakers.

What will media research look like in 2015?

First, the drivers:

  • Today the strongest driver is the universal CMO/CFO mandate to move from eyeball counts to ROI
  • This shift has to take place without incurring sizeable risk to the brand and to the brand manager (and CMO, et al. – all the people who could be blamed if it does not go well)
  • The manual agency workload cannot be increased any further at current compensation
  • The agency needs to make ROI bonus compensation a large part of the business model
  • Media agencies are also the ones moving faster than creative agencies toward custom video program production.

When I started in the agency business back at the dawn of time, we had ten people in the media department per million dollars of spend; today that is half a person. Procurement of media by people who initially had no idea of any other media value except CPM has hurt both brands and media agencies who became commoditized in a price war. The best of the procurement people have now become true media experts, and they are in the process of repairing the damage. That process is just getting rolling.

What then are the needs?

  • Singlesource* needs to continue its rollout. This method is essential to moving media research into the ROI world on a firm foundation, without need for assumptions or subjective judgments.
  • Analytic systems need to become integrated so that media people have a single screen dashboard on which they can see and manipulate all the available information in ways that are intuitively obvious, as in the iPad. This solves the information overload (at least in this aspect of their life) and scarce resource problems, and makes it easier to make the massive shift from eyeballs to ROI.
  • As a warm blankie comfort zone, sex/age currency cannot be tossed out overnight. Most brands will prefer to run in parallel, at least for a while. This means optimizers will have to hold sex/age delivery constant while increasing reach/frequency against the ROI driving segment of purchasers.

Finally, the prognostications:

  • The upfront is not broken. It will still happen in 2015. It will not look much different than it does today. The sweeping changes that will overtake the upfront before 2020 will only be seen in early baby steps. My Myers column written in 1999 described the upfront in 2005 as a war of optimizers and yield maximizers – this prediction will probably become a reality in the 2015-2020 period.
  • Sex/age will have reduced importance to many major brands by 2015.
  • Measuring all the new screens in a crossmedia, singlesource way will become the place to be for bleeding edge addicts (like me).
  • Singlesource and marketing mix modeling will become integrated, easing the transition from mix to singlesource as more and more marketing causals/media are measured by singlesource.
  • Media research companies (and other research companies) will escalate partnering relationships to bring together bodies of learning. Knowledge integration will provide more insight into how to effect higher ROI by bonding the new creative with the program environments most enhancing to sales effect and most skewed to the ROI driving segment. These decisions often have to be made before a campaign is launched, before singlesource effectiveness data become available, hence the importance of all other types of research. But to prove their validity, all other research types will ultimately have to demonstrate that they predict ROI as measured by singlesource.
  • The sharp dividing line between direct marketing and brand advertising will blur. All brands will want all of their marketing stimuli to cause audience involvement to the point of the audience taking some action, whether it be interacting, bookmarking, sharing, clicking the Like button, sending to friends, mashing up in Facebook page, and hopefully in the end buying more of the brand at less discounted prices.
  • True Sponsorship of programs and videos will increase, providing brands with increased involvement, affinity and gratitude among larger and larger audiences. Some of this sponsored content will have been custom developed specifically for the brand, mostly by media agencies taking on program production. Branded entertainment will expand from inserts into programs into the programs themselves, often with fully integrated “live read” (radio term of art) cast presenter commercials.
  • Cause marketing will similarly expand as a share of marketing dollars.
  • More brands will experiment with Gratitude Reach Units (GRUs).
  • The privacy wall will become permeable by bona fide best practices (i.e. in-context notification). This will unlock the tap for addressable commercials.
  • Marketing and media investments will become more cost effective and more accountable. In fact, more scientific. Marketing, advertising and media will attract more of the best people who have in their veins either creativity or quant/computer techie skills or both, because the game will have become – even more than ever – one of the most interesting games in town. The game I always thought it was anyway.

 

Briefly Noted

  • David Poltrack, speaking at an Advertising Age & TRA breakfast on April 14, was asked by The New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott about how conditions might have changed the odds of getting a hit show on television. David replied that in the 60s, 50% of the population sampled the average new broadcast network TV show between the start of the new season and the May sweeps, and today, with so many program choices for the viewer, that 50% is now down to 15%.
  • In the previous posting, Ameritest CEO Chuck Young alluded to four types of memory that a TV commercial must affect, and so I asked him to elucidate. This posting continues below with more thoughts on the future evolution of creative research from myself and from Chuck.

All the best,

Bill

 

The Future Evolution of Creative Research, redux

In my April 19 posting I wrote about helping advertising creatives to do their best work through future research into the minds of the audience, tied to what they buy and how that changes in response to specific stimuli.

In the previous posting I commented that through all forms of research including but not limited to neuroscience, advertising research will evolve into even more science and less art; we will learn how advertising, in all of its forms, works inside the mind/brain connection.

A superlative example of that trend from today’s research is in the work of Chuck Young’s Ameritest. For example, here is what Chuck has to say about the memory agencies which mediate advertising sales effect:

Four Memories: Advertising Is Planting Seeds

The original method of pretesting was recall testing because marketers understood that for an ad to be effective it had to leave something behind in consumer memory. Unlike promotions, ads create long-term value because of the brand structures they build in our memories.

But one of the chief lessons from modern neuroscience is that the old tape-recorder model of memory long held by recall testers was overly simplistic. It is now well established that there are multiple memory systems in the mind, not just one—It is now pretty clear that for an ad campaign to build strong brand value, it must make at least four kinds of deposits in the different memory banks of the mind.

To understand the four kinds of brand memories that are important for advertisers, it is helpful to think of a simple model about how we learn to make a sale.

Bright young people coming to work for me are afraid of the very idea of selling.  Fear of rejection is one reason for this.  As a result, their preferred method of approaching a client or prospect is to send an email. They quickly learn that this, by itself, doesn’t work very well.  So, as their level of knowledge builds and their confidence grows, they reach for the phone.  They soon discover that over the phone they hear something that was missing from an email, perhaps something in the tone of voice. What is being said, they realize, is sometimes not as important as how it is said.  An emotional dimension has been added through voice and a relationship begins.  But this, too, is not always enough to close a sale.  Finally, when they are competent enough in doing their job so that I am confident they can properly represent the brand of my company, they get on a plane to make a sales call in person.  Here the final discovery is made: the real trust that comes from physical eye contact is essential to getting to the handshake, turning a prospect into a loyal customer.

Selling in person is more effective than selling at a distance—and in large part this has to do with the different kind of memories that are created with the in-person sales call.

The semantic memory system, which can be thought of as the rational, verbal part of the brain, is the place where advertisers can use email effectively. These emails communicate features and benefits, product concepts, unique selling propositions, brand positionings. Semantic memories are those that can be accessed with traditional recall testing methods.

The episodic memory system is the place where personal, autobiographical memories are stored. Where were you on 9/11?  The images that come to mind form your personal narrative of the events that you have lived through, real or imagined, and how you felt about them. Advertisers can telephone their brand stories to this memory system of the brain with radio or television or other storytelling media.  Recognition, rather than recall, is a better way for researchers to access these emotional episodic memories.

The procedural memory system is the oldest place of memory, where physical sensations and physical skills are stored. What does a headache feel like? How do you remember how to dance or drive a car? Advertisers can shake hands with this part of the brain in two general ways.

The first, by means of the operation of mirror neurons, is through the magic of physical-action-at-distance that I call “virtual consumption”.  It’s why bite-and-smile, product-in-use or other kinds of brand experience scenes in ads are so important. It’s also why we consumers get so addicted to watching sports or playing video games.

The second way that brands can reach out and touch someone is through click-throughs and other action-interactions in this new high touch age of iPhones, iPads, Kinect and other Internet-machine extensions of our bodies. We researchers have much to learn about how to measure the impact on advertising ROI of these new physical brand memories being formed.

The fourth type of memory that is important for advertisers does not pertain to the brain but rather to the brand.  It’s the brand identity tag that links the other three types of memories to your brand’s name or icon or other identifier, turning the other three types of memories into a valuable property in the brain that can be monetized.

Measuring brand linkage across the three different memory systems of the brain is a work in progress that perhaps modern neuroscience can shed some light on. (If you would like to read more of my ruminations in these areas, you can find them on the Resources Page of our website, http://www.ameritest.net.)

The implication of thinking about advertising from the standpoint of the multiple memory systems of the mind is that advertisers need to develop a clear strategic framework for designing ad campaigns that sell the head, the heart and the hand of the consumer.

Increasing Profits for U.S. Corporations is a Social Good

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With all our flaws, the world is a better place for having the U.S. in it. We make our share of mistakes but our intentions are always good. We are trying to help out the world as best we can.

Not that we are alone in this. More and more nations every year are awakening to a viewpoint of enlightened self-interest that recognizes our connectedness and the fact that in order for any of us to succeed as nations, we must pretty much all succeed.

It hasn’t always been this way. The world was neatly isolated into silos as recently as a few hundred years ago. No more. All the world economies are linked like dominos.

Companies that used to be American have been bought by others outside America. The surviving American Red White and Blue companies are getting better. Reducing waste. Improving products. Improving processes. Improving marketing and sales. Their profits are going up. As they become less likely to be bought by a foreign company, the U.S. becomes stronger.

With pressure on our jobs and our homes, and everybody working harder than ever before, it sure would be great if we could find ways to pull together and uncork that good old American ingenuity to make our businesses more profitable, to benefit all of us, worker and owner alike.

It sure would be great if we could find a way.

There is a way.

Having moved from the Industrial Age into the Information Age, we now live with an emerging and ever-growing mountain of information we never had before. From which we can learn things. Some of what we learn will make our companies more efficient. Especially in marketing, where we (and the rest of the world) have been terribly inefficient. Yes, we know half of it is wasted effort. Actually, IRI studies years ago showed that 60% of marginal advertising spend and 80% of marginal promotion spend is wasted. We are talking about the better part of a trillion dollars a year being wasted. Even on the scale of a war, we are talking serious money.

What is the bug in the system? We postulate it is the emotionalization of privacy. Certain elements of the press and the government have made hay – sold papers so to speak – with an emotional appeal to make privacy so sacrosanct that balanced rational decisions (vs black-and-white, yes or no choices) are no longer an option. I guess it helped elect a few of them so I can understand from their point of view. But there is a social good to making our research/information/learning backbone more efficient.

The extra bonus to being a columnist who writes about privacy as a protector of his/her readers is that one is not just being entertaining, but is helping the reader and the world.

The irony is that a columnist can be seduced by hidden ego motives into adopting the savior role on the privacy front and wind up consequently working against the needs of the reader, and the electorate. We need two things: privacy protection and a successful U.S. economy, capable of supporting lots of well-paid workers who don’t have to kill themselves to make ends meet and own a home.

Whoever persuaded a large chunk of the American public that privacy protection and obtaining good information to make businesses more efficient were mutually exclusive? We can have our cake and eat it too. It does require data handling methods to be improved far beyond their current state of practice – to the level of the few companies certified by ISO 27001*, who prove we have the technological capability. It also requires the elimination of personally identifiable information except in actual customer relationships where buy-in has been established, and other such warranted cases.

This is not rocket science, but rather a matter of disciplined processes. It is achievable. And the prize is an accelerated economic recovery with a very long growth phase. Nothing has to be sacrificed in the process except long-winded rhetoric.

These points are made definitively in a 62-page tour de force citing chapter and verse entitled “Tragedy of the Data Commons” by Yale graduate Jane Yakowitz, a law professor at Brooklyn Law School. Among the many salient findings: there has been an intellectual effort to paint anonymization as pragmatically impossible, which it clearly is not. Anonymization is achievable through mathematics. The number of data points required to re-identify a person or a household is the science employed today on a daily basis by HIPAA consultants. If we rigorously employ the mathematical science, anonymization cannot be defeated except by the old bugaboo that affects everything and can never be legislated away: human error.

“Tragedy of the Data Commons” is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1789749

Best to all,

Bill

*ISO 27001 is a standard set by the nonprofit International Standards Organization, and covers every aspect of maintaining information security from the procedures one uses when non-employees enter the office to the self-locking of computers and other devices after a few minutes, from the types of firewalls one uses to the way new employees are checked out, and much more.

Note: As we had mentioned, the plan had been to post our thoughts on The Future of Media Research on 4/24, but we are still working on it so it will post on 4/29.