Disinfect Your Mind

If you already read my book Disinfect Your Mind, some parts may look familiar to you. For example:

Hack #11:
Psychologist George A. Miller concluded in a classic 1956
experimental survey that human short-term memory can hold only seven items at a time plus or minus two.

Actually, as this book notes, recent research suggests the magic number may be even lower – students at the University of Queensland did not perform better than a chance when analyzing statistical dependence between five variables ([2]), and even with four they performed much worse than with two or three.

Although, IMHO, some systematic factor may be in place. E.g. ancient Romans with their lead pipes probably would have performed poorer compare to their countryside counterparts. Today it could be a widespread of soda and hamburgers, drugs in schools or even cultural changes. Of course, it’s merely speculation which is very hard to prove and hence, if it’s true, even harder to get rid of.

[1] Miller, George A. 1956 “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” The Psychological Review, 63. http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

[2] Halford, Graeme S., Rosemary Baker, Julie E. McCredden, and John D. Bain. “How Many Variables Can Humans Process?” (January 2005). Psychological Science. Abstract at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/aps-hmc030805.php

The book is about using emotions in negotiation process. As you can guess, while not naming it this way, they teach to use emotions as anchors. For a trained eye, it’s also interesting that they teach to use them as anchors for a very important meme – the meme of yourself in other people’s minds. Specifically, they suggest five key anchors:

• appreciation – show appreciation for others;
• affiliation – make them feel in association with you, not a competition (even if the second is true);
• autonomy – respect boundaries, don’t step of toes;
• acknowledgement of status – show the boss that you know who is boss when appropriate; and
• “choose a fulfilling role”, or simply define yourself in the way that fits other minds well and lets you to play it.

From a memetics point of view the latter is a sort of carte blanches that covers the rest of points that were not chosen to be separate chapters. But that’s tolerable, keeping in mind that the book is about negotiations, and specifically, about emotions in negotiations, not generally memetics, and it covers a lot of general material on negotiations.

The Millionaire Maker: Act, Think, and Make Money the Way the Wealthy Do

The general Guy Kawasaki style stuff, and she ends up with just two kinds of passive income – rental properties and promissory notes. Those who tried rental properties, know how “passive” they are… And finding a reliable person or business who would give you 12-15% as in her examples, that’s not easy either.

But from the memetic point of view the book is done pretty well. It’s filled with anchors – start with “You – a Millionaire?” on the back cover, pitches the cause more than giving a substance (in memetics it’s called anchoring and building bridges) including all famous persuasion anchors like social proof (a story of her building some family’s wealth over TV), confusing a reader with senseless abbreviations (like Wealth Cycle Process or Freedom Day), not to mention making them all capitalized (see the chapter in my book of Pathos and Capital Letters)…

You will not get much advice from this book beyond Kawasaki, but as a sample of persuasion work, it’s amusing.

A collection of short articles by a group of celebrities like Tom Peters, Malcolm Gladwell and Guy Kawasaki edited by Seth Godin.

Very nice collection for the funs of Seth Godin and his Purple Cow. The subtitle tells it all, and it’s very nice motivationally. The short size of individual pieces and change of author voices provides a very refreshing variety.

If you don’t know, Purple Cow in essence is a semi-conscious hybrid of using mind viruses for commercial purposes in an ethical way and marketing in a post-socialistic (as well as post-capitalistic) society, popularly referred as “information age”. The author (editor) seems to be well aware of both memetics and the fact that the age of mass production is over, but does not bother his readers with that and instead presents his ideas in a fresh succulent way more readily imprintable on a mind of an average person… according with the very ideas he presents in his books.

If nothing else, go through the book in a bookstore or visit thebigmoo.com site.

An attempt by a scientist (a biologist), who is both believer and believer in evolution, to make the peace between ideas of God and evolution. Unfortunately, being a humanitarian scientist, he spends first eight of his nine chapters thoroughly igniting religious zealots, and the last chapter is mostly devoted to the idea that God works in indirect ways. However, as a natural scientist, he brings a lot of material on the way that you may find interesting and good to read. And he mentions a lot of right folks, including Dennet, Pinker and, of course, Dawkins, not to mention Darwin .

As we know, persuasion is essentially all about passing a set of meme with anchors and carriers fitted for the individual or a group and payload entwined with them.

Here are some chapter titles: “Storytelling”, “Gurudom”, “Exclusivity and Availability”, “Curiosity” – it all should sound familiar to you if you read the chapter on anchors in my book. Still, the book gets it much father than simply listing the anchors and gives a good review of how to use them down to famous bullet lists. It’s a little amateurish when speaking of electronic persuasion – web, maillists and blogs, but other than that it’s a really good read.

Although this book is not directly related to memetics, it’s great and a real fun to read. The main approach of the book is to trace our workplace behavior to our animal ancestry, and to show what to do about it. Hence, you will not find terms like “meme” or “group selection” in this book, the author clearly is well aware of them – enough to say that one of the chapters is called “Nice Monkey: The Search for the Unselfish Gene”, clearly a tribute to Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” book.

Still he touches the subjects easily explainable with the memetics theory. One example is the chapter “Monkey See…: The Power of Imitation”, where he talks about such subjects as “The Infectious Workplace” about emotions and attitudes spreading in a workplace like infections, or “Caveat Imitator” where he discusses how new managements fads get afoot because of success stories.

The second example is specially illustrative. Here is how it goes: imagine N companies engaged in different and worthless initiatives. Some of them will fail, some, by an accident, succeed. Successful ones may be adopted by others with another round of random results. Early or later, some initiative will collect three or four success stories in a row. Once it happens, management consultants start to spread it as “carriers”. Quote: “…and like the vectors of a disease the quickly spread the Big Idea around the corporate market place.” That was the case with “quality circles” in 70s, “job enrichment”, total quality management”, or “reengineering”. Does this remind you of something? Yes, many management theories are a perfect example of mind viruses with the anchors, carriers and payload in a clear sight.

By the way, being somewhat related to the management theories, I don’t think that all these initiative were really useless. It’s just once the fad is on, a lot of people, who have no clue, are starting to spread it around, as well as a lot of people, who are not capable of executing on them, try to do so. Management theories, like nuclear physics, require intelligence to be applied. Otherwise, you get a big boom – wrong place, wrong time.

In the end, I cannot resist one more quote from the book: “Assuming it holds up to scrutiny, the beauty of the idea is that it seems to provide a coherent explanation of the behavior of creatures from flatworms to corporate CEOs.”

It has been quite a while since I decided to avoid reading any health/diet/alternative medicine books. Today I decided to check this title which looked promising. I was wrong.

It’s not that the author lies to the reader or is totally wrong. He promotes a lot of good things – exercise, drinking enough clean water, avoiding drugs including antidepressants, pain killers, et al., eating fruits, sleeping enough, etc. It’s how he promotes these things which make the difference.

Of course, there is a question of inconsistency or, maybe, even conscious misrepresentation of facts.

He claims all information around us is biased to sell us drugs, processed foods, and other stuff damaging to our health. He spends about one third of his 600 page book repeating this pretty trivial statement again and again. He also spends significant amount of time pitching that government agencies, independent associations, news and mass media are all aligned with the interests of the industries selling these things. And still, his book reads as an advertising pitch for a number of products like coral calcium, electromagnetic healing devices, cleansing products and the whole alternative medicine and organic food industries, which are not small players in the United States anymore.

The author claims that animals in the wild don’t have diseases. First of all, that’s not true. They do. Second, they just die earlier. Humans in the wild - in prehistoric times - lived an average of 24-26 years. How many of us have diseases in our first 26 years?

The author also spends time discussing how the FDC and FDA treat him and his partners unfairly. It may be true – governments are known to treat small operators poorly, especially if there is large industry money involved. However, the more you read his book, the more it feels like a marketing ploy rather than a complaint.

He warns “never buy products advertised on TV” whilst his book carries a golden seal saying, “AS SEEN ON TV, OVER 3 MILLION COPIES SOLD!”

Anyway, that would not be interesting by itself from a memetic point of view. What matters are the things he plants into the heads of his readers. While you go through the book, you are repeatedly implanted with memes “You are sick”, “You are toxic”, “You have <a number of very unpleasant things> present and living in your body”. The whole book is about getting rid of poisons, parasites and negative factors from your body, while he actually pollutes your mind with self-destruct memes of enormous negative power.

It’s especially amazing considering what he says about the thoughts: “Thoughts are things. …Every thought you have can have a powerful impact on the cells in your body. … Negative stressful low vibration thoughts can give your body disease. …medical science cannot dispute the “placebo” effect. … Imagine, up to 40 percent of the time a person with a dreaded disease cures himself with his own thoughts! Thoughts can heal, but they can also cause sickness and disease.” (Page 109.)

You see, the guy knows perfectly well how thoughts affect people’s health, and page after page he consistently implants his readers with memes like “You are sick” or “You are toxic”! He claims – in effect and quite correctly in my humble opinion – that selling toxic foods should be considered criminal. Should not the poisoning of people’s minds be criminal too?

You may ask, how do you warn people about negative things and avoid hurting them? Actually, it’s not so tough. First, don’t make claims about the reader himself, skip right to the constructive statements. Don’t talk about toxic readers, talk about toxic foods. Don’t say “You are toxic”, but skip directly to “You can get rid of toxins in your body.” It does not take Einstein to figure out that if he eats something toxic, it’s a good idea to get the toxins out. When you talk about what happens in the body, speak about a third person. Not “if you eat processed food, you are toxic”, but “people who eat processed food are toxic.” It carries the same message, but allows an introspection of the statement without automatic imprinting into your mind. Of course, it has much less selling power this way. Which, by the way, makes me to think why he is not doing it in the first place.