Mind Control 101

Mind Control and Consumer Behavior

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

http://www.accountplanningblog.com/2012/02/mind-control-and-consumer-behavior.html

Posted by William Stephens

Mind control - is it real? Maybe. Maybe not. What is real is the fact that companies are making efforts to change our behavior beyond simply highlighting the benefits of a product and differentiating a brand.

In the following paragraphs I will introduce several methodological concepts that marketers and advertisers sometimes use to try to manipulate consumer behavior using psychology. You will learn about how we develop "cults" around the brands that influence us. You will learn about a French psychologist that feels there is a code behind every concept that can be tapped into to drive people against their free will. You will learn about covert hypnosis tactics that many brands, including Macy's use to change your behavior. You will also learn that it is possible that the concept of free will may just be in our heads. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, this is a lot to take in - enjoy.

I do need to make a disclaimer- just because some companies use these techniques does not mean that they are valid. Many of these are heavily critiqued in the academic environment - be it the methodologies or the lack of empirical evidence supporting these theories. The purpose of this blog is not to say that you, the consumer, is being controlled - but instead that there are efforts in place to try to manipulate you in these ways.

1. We are your family, you belong here

The Manson Family

I assume you already know the basis of contemporary advertising lies in marketing to the emotions, providing intangible benefits. At the bottom of this blog I include a very well put together Frontline documentary called The Persuaders. In the documentary, you will find strategist Douglas Adkin who takes this idea of emotional rewards and applies it to something much bigger: cult-like devotion (hence he wrote the book The Culting of Brands. Especially in the digital age where we are surrounded by these "imagined" online communities, people like to fulfill their carnal sense of belonging with brands in an almost spiritual sense. People seek rewards and guidance through the brands and people who are also in these subgroups. Think of Apple fanboys and fangirls. These computers are more than mere representations of who they are, they are the binding glue that holds these "cultures" together. This is also tobacco's largest selling point - in an age where most tobacco advertising is prohibited in the US and many other countries, these companies have to compete with each other almost solely based upon word-of-mouth. Forty years ago this method would have fallen fairly flat, but over time they have laid enough groundwork to keep people in their branded cults. Think how tobacco smokers join outside, complete strangers find it easy to strike up a conversation with very little effort. The culture is here and these companies are well aware of this.

These communities transcend one or two companies. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David takes note of these cultures on a couple episodes. He notes there is a kinship among bald men, as well as Prius drivers. I don't know if Prius dropped advertising dollars his way, but he notes that the Prius driver feels this sense of community and waves to other Prius drivers as they pass by. Now, Prius drivers don't actually often do this - but motorcyclists do. There are few people who are better able to make connections in society than comedians - they would make wonderful account planners.

What other areas do you see cult-like behavior in? What about political parties? Let me hear it in the comments following this blog.

But how does this tie in to mind control? This is only the groundwork. You must realize that a Coke is more than a canned bubbly drink. You must realize that brands talk to you below your cognitive thinking level.

2. Beneath the carnal needs

Clotaire Rapaille

Dr. Clotaire Rapaille is a highly sought after marketing and psychology expert. In his past he worked with autistic children, where he started developing his own theories of emotional attachments, largely derived from the work by Konrad Lorenz. He believes that humans are quite primal, as their instincts always rise to the surface. He calls this instinctual decision making "the reptilian brain." Be sure not to get his definition of the reptilian bran mixed up with the conspiracy theorists idea that there are reptilian-bred aliens living among us. This has nothing to do with the alleged Illuminati and other forms of government control. He sees the brain seperated into three parts: logic, emotional and reptilian. Sound a bit Freudian? That's because he takes a psychoanalytic approach to his work.

Rapaille consults companies through finding the point between the product and the individual's "id." Actually, he looks further into an individual, but instead into the "collective unconsciousness of the entire human race" as Jung states. How does he get this information? Hypnosis.

No, he probably would not call it hypnosis - but that is what it is. He runs a total of three focus group sessions with a single group, going deeper and deeper into their minds. His first focus group is under the guise of what people think they want. His second is more of a traditional focus group, as he has people cut pictures out of magazines to create art forms that tie in their emotional systems into the product. After he has worn them out, he has them lay on the floor with pillows and soothing music and takes them back to their childhoods to once again recount the first time they have felt this primal emotional. Once he has this data, he analyses it and develops a "code" that everyone shares.

He has a long track history of helping politicians and advertisers manipulate consumer behavior. Yes, I said politicians. We like to think that we are shown only the information that we need to make informed voting decisions, but just as products do, political campaigns use these covert methods to attempt to sway us. Whether you think his foundation and methods are a load of BS or not, he has proven himself to be able to reach consumers. Now, never forget that correlation does not mean causation - aka just because he feels that his role is to unlock the human "code" does not mean that his findings are necessarily regarding childhood affective memory as he believes. Take for instance, Jeep. He consulted Jeep to change their headlights to round because it represented freedom to an American audience. Jeep complied and the company saw the monetary benefits. There were other factors stemming from this that could have influenced that, such as Jeep started branding themselves as liberating. People who drive Jeeps do not drive them to go off road, they drive them to fit in this 'cultist brand,' as Adkin puts it. This is why on the back of Jeeps you often see the trademark of the apparel brand, Life is Good.

At the end of the day, Rapaille believes "the reptilian brain always wins." He feels that these methods counter the logical and emotional facets of the human consciousness. Once the "code" is unlocked, the brain must comply. This is only how he feels, but the foundation of his theories and how he conducts his research is heavily criticized.

3. No need to keep your eyes on the swinging watch

Some claim you don't necessarily have to be in a sleep state to be receptive to hypnotic advances, as it is only manipulation. There are varying levels of degrees of this alleged 'manipulation.' Just one person talking to another is one form, as the exchange causes people's thought patterns to change as they develop rapport. Salesman often use covert, or conversational 'hypnosis' in every day communication without even realizing it, as it in itself is nothing more than persuasive techniques. It is about planting ideas then relating the product back to these. This ties in with the basics of advertising directly to the emotions, as if you can get someone to recreate an emotion and then tie it back with the product, then you will be able to close the sale. Advertising takes this one step further, through a behavioristic system, trying to reward the users for buying their products and having these intangible benefits repeated over and over again.

That is the basis of this dubbed 'cover hypnosis,' but there are forms being used that often go a lot deeper. Take neurolinguistic programming, or NLP for short. It claims to take advantage of breaking people's patterns to temporarily confuse them, then restructures them toward the persuasion being offered. I won't go into too much detail, as after this I am sure you will be spending hours watching Youtube videos of people using NLP to pick up girls, make sales, do party tricks, etc.The NLP process is broken up into four sections - building rapport (simply mimicking the body language and vocal inflections to get yourself on the same level as them), anchoring (conditioning them to respond to a stimulus), the swish (the break in their pattern that causes momentary confusion) and reframing (changing the way in which the stimulus is received.).

It is a lot easier to show than to explain, so go ahead and watch the following video where Derren Brown is able to persuade Simon Pegg into a gift. After you watch the video, I will discuss how this is used in marketing.

Note: many psychologists advise against using NLP as a form of therapy because there is very little empirical data to support it; it is not a widely-tested interest. This does not mean that it is not real, but only that it is not common practice in the field of psychology. There are a great number of ethical concerns surrounding the use of NLP - not only in therapeutic settings, but also marketing.

Mind Control - How Companies Learn Your Secrets

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

By CHARLES DUHIGG

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”

As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.

There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.

“We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or ﬁll out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Inside the brain-and-cognitive-sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7-year-old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O.R.’s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains.

An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, snifﬁng in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t ﬁgure out how to ﬁnd it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped snifﬁng corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.

This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called “chunking.” There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it’s remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all.

Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you ﬁrst learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake.

Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street. So we’ve devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends — and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions.

To understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking rats. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats’ brain activity — once at the beginning of the maze, when the rat heard the click right before the barrier slid away, and once at the end, when the rat found the chocolate. Those spikes show when the rats’ brains were fully engaged, and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over. From behind the partition, the rat wasn’t sure what waited on the other side, until it heard the click, which it had come to associate with the maze. Once it heard that sound, it knew to use the “maze habit,” and its brain activity decreased. Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much deeper.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain ﬁgure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately ﬁght a habit — unless you ﬁnd new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.

“We’ve done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward,” Graybiel told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place and put in the rat and, by golly, the old habit will re-emerge right away. Habits never really disappear.”

Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward — craving the treat or the feeling of accomplishment — and there will be a measurable neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.

Our relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological “pleasure” (even if we don’t recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread — even if you know, rationally, it’s most likely not important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you’ll find, over time, that you’re able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box.

Some of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate America. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science, consider how one of the world’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, used habit insights to turn a failing product into one of its biggest sellers. P.& G. is the corporate behemoth behind a whole range of products, from Downy fabric softener to Bounty paper towels to Duracell batteries and dozens of other household brands. In the mid-1990s, P.& G.’s executives began a secret project to create a new product that could eradicate bad smells. P.& G. spent millions developing a colorless, cheap-to-manufacture liquid that could be sprayed on a smoky blouse, stinky couch, old jacket or stained car interior and make it odorless. In order to market the product — Febreze — the company formed a team that included a former Wall Street mathematician named Drake Stimson and habit specialists, whose job was to make sure the television commercials, which they tested in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, accentuated the product’s cues and rewards just right.

The first ad showed a woman complaining about the smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. “Sophie will always smell like Sophie,” she says, but with Febreze, “now my furniture doesn’t have to.” The ads were put in heavy rotation. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating how they would spend their bonuses. A week passed. Then two. A month. Two months. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud.

The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman’s home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.’s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.

According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, “What do you do about the cat smell?”

“It’s usually not a problem,” she said.

“Do you smell it now?”

“No,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!”

A similar scene played out in dozens of other smelly homes. The reason Febreze wasn’t selling, the marketers realized, was that people couldn’t detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don’t smell smoke anymore. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. That’s why Febreze was a failure. The product’s cue — the bad smells that were supposed to trigger daily use — was hidden from the people who needed it the most. And Febreze’s reward (an odorless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t smell offensive scents in the first place.

P.& G. employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze Febreze’s ad campaigns. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze to people’s daily habits. When that didn’t reveal anything, they went into the field and conducted more interviews. A breakthrough came when they visited a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 40s with four children. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn’t appear to have any odor problems; there were no pets or smokers. To the surprise of everyone, she loved Febreze.

“I use it every day,” she said.

“What smells are you trying to get rid of?” a researcher asked.

“I don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I use it for normal cleaning — a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room.”

The researchers followed her around as she tidied the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet’s corners, then sprayed the comforter with Febreze. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the children’s shoes, straightened the coffee table, then sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet.

“It’s nice, you know?” she said. “Spraying feels like a little minicelebration when I’m done with a room.” At the rate she was going, the team estimated, she would empty a bottle of Febreze every two weeks.

When they got back to P.& G.’s headquarters, the researchers watched their videotapes again. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video, when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done (reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). P.& G. had been trying to create a whole new habit with Febreze, but what they really needed to do was piggyback on habit loops that were already in place. The marketers needed to position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine.

The company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just-laundered clothing. Each ad was designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room (cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you’ve done a great job (reward). When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze (routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks.

And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs — air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents — that now account for sales of more than $1 billion a year. Eventually, P.& G. began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can actually kill bad odors. Today it’s one of the top-selling products in the world.

Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers’ habits to expand Target’s sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole’s most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways.

In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples’ most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.

But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there’s an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.

Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.

And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.

The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.

Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.

At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

When I approached Target to discuss Pole’s work, its representatives declined to speak with me. “Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience,” the company wrote in a statement. “We’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population.” When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point.” The company declined to identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target “is in compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information.”

When I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. “I’ve been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave,” said a very nice security guard named Alex.

Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

Before I met Andrew Pole, before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.

I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading “NO MORE COOKIES.” But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I’ll muster the willpower to resist.

Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.

When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.

Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.

All that was left was identifying the cue.

Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:

Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)

What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)

What’s your emotional state? (Bored.)

Who else is around? (No one.)

What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)

The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.

Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine — to socialize, rather than eat a cookie — I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn’t feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It’s now a habit. I’ve lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie ritual).

After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.

The marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample of women from Pole’s list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to see how they reacted.

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks — then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded. The company doesn’t break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 — when Pole was hired — and 2010, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $67 billion. In 2005, the company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.”

Pole was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. “I never expected this would become such a big deal,” he told me the last time we spoke.

A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn’t talked to him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my wife’s pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house.

Pole didn’t answer my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can’t have too many pacifiers.

When I paid, I didn’t receive any sudden deals on diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight, buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and besides the pacifiers, hadn’t purchased any of the things that a parent needs. It was clear to Target’s computers that I was on a business trip. Pole’s prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last time we spoke: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”

Charles Duhigg is a staff writer for The Times and author of "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," which will be published on Feb. 28. Follow him on Twitter and onFacebook.

Editor: Joel Lovell

The Persuaders

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Mind Control - Social Engineering in the 20th Century

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

An open-source documentary film by Scott Noble about the History of Secret Programs – Medical Research – and Human Experimentation made by corporations and government institutions such as the CIA and the military – using behaviorism theories – mind control techniques – dumbing down strategies and ideological propaganda to find ways of controlling people throughout the 20th century.

Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rebecca Lemov, Christopher Simpson, George Ritzer, Morris Berman, John Taylor Gatto, Alfie Kohn and others.

Mind Control - World Mission Society Church of God cult

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Prof Tark on Ahn Sahng-hong's World Mission Society Church of God cult from Steven A Hassan on Vimeo.

The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG) has been growing exponentially in recent years. The little known group, thought by many, including myself, to be a destructive group is taking to the streets and posting YouTube videos in an effort to recruit even more people into their ranks. I posted a video of a presentation done by a Korean anti-cult activist, Professor Ji-il Tark, on my vimeo.com site at http://vimeo.com/14811127

Amazingly, there has not been a single major media expose done on the group yet, and I am hoping that this blog will motivate a lot of coverage. The public needs to be warned.

What’s up with this group? According to former long-term members I have spoken with, they use deception and heavy pressure influence techniques. And, like most groups which employ Behavior, Information, Thought and Emotional control (my BITE model), family and friends report witnessing radical personality changes in people who get involved with the WMSCOG. People report marriages being disrupted and broken up, close family relationships and friendships cast aside if people do not choose to become involved and members are not successful in recruiting everyone else they know.

So, in December of 2011, the World Mission Society Church of God, A New Jersey Non-Profit Corporation, filed a lawsuit against Internet critics alleging defamation, trade libel, and civil conspiracy in connection with the website www.examiningthewmscog.com. Defendants in the lawsuit say the purpose of the website is to provide the public with information about the group. Former WMSCOG members and families of current members, have recently come forward on the site to talk about their experiences and concerns about the group.

I have become aware of Examining the World Mission Society Church of God web site. They are putting a lot of very important information online and encouraging people to reevaluate their involvement. I have been told that several long term and highly respected American members (and others) have defected in recent weeks.

The Korean group is telling its members not to believe anything negative on the Internet because it is of Satan, but younger Americans who have grown up on the Internet are beginning to realize that the groups’ leadership have not been honest with them about the history of the group and many other important details. For example, the group had prophesied the end of the world in 2012, but lately they are backtracking and saying that that was never a firm date. “Not true,” say former members I have interviewed.

It is so important that people be free to make their own decisions and think for themselves. Yet groups like the WMSCOG say that they know God’s Will and it is to be obedient to what they say. For me as a former member of the Moonies, it sounds so very familiar. I would not be surprised if it can be proven (at some point in the future) that this group took at least some of their theology from the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon.

According to a press release by a member of the WMSCOG, on December 25, 2011 "the WMSCOG carried out a large-scale movement all over the world, which the European, Asian, Australian, African and South American media have covered about Second Coming Christ Ahnsahnghong and Heavenly Mother New Jerusalem, who is here on earth. It’s time for America to know about this incredible news." [sic] On Christmas this past year, a holiday that the group does not observe, the WMSCOG choir, wearing yellow scarves, performed in NY Times Square. The WMSCOG later released this video of the performance where they sang songs proclaiming their god Ahnsahnghong, a Korean man who died in 1985 who the WMSCOG believes was the second coming of Jesus, while other WMSCOG members in the audience cheered and marched in place.

On January 1, 2012, WMSCOG members marched and sang at Millennium Park in Chicago (seen in this video)while holding up a sign that read "I have already come". According to the video released on YouTube, the purpose of the march was to proclaim the name of their messiah. Members chanted the phrase "We Love You" in homage to a Korean woman named Zahng Gil-Jah, Chairwoman of the “We Love U Foundation,” who the WMSCOG believes is "god the mother". WMSCOG members were seen lining the Martin Luther King Jr Paradeholding "We Love U" signs in Atlanta on January 16, 2012.

If you think that cults have gone away, think again. I suggest you check out if this group is operating in your town, city, state or country and warn folks to be careful. In the meantime, it is important for Internet activists to take note of this group and do what they can to shine a light on their aggressive recruitment efforts and warn the public. I’d like to see a message sent that it isn’t ok for wealthy groups to misuse the legal system to stifle free speech.

Neuroscience Mind Control for the Military

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Wars of the future might be decided through manipulation of people’s minds, concludes a report this week from the UK’s Royal Society. It warns that the potential military applications of neuroscience breakthroughs need to be regulated more closely. “New imaging technology will allow new targets in the brain to be identified, and while some will be vital for medicine, others might be used to incapacitate people,” says Rod Flower of Queen Mary, University of London, who chairs the panel that wrote the report. The report describes how such technology is allowing organisations like the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to test ways of improving soldiers’ mental alertness and capabilities. It may also allow soldiers to operate weaponry remotely through mind-machine interfaces, the report says. Other research could be used to design gases and electronics that temporarily disable enemy forces. This potentially violates human rights, through interference with thought processes, and opens up the threat of indiscriminate killing. The panel highlights the time that Russian security forces ended a hostage siege in a Moscow theatre in 2002 by filling the venue with fentanyl, an anaesthetic gas. Along with the perpetrators, 125 hostages died. The Chemical Weapons Convention is vague about whether such incapacitants are legal. Ambiguities like this must be ironed out, say the panellists. bit.ly Mind-controlled drones a Pandora’s box [Video] bit.ly Gamer 2009 movie Part 1 …

Mind Control - Cool Video on Psychopaths

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Scientists strengthen memory by stimulating key site in brain

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-scientists-memory-key-site-brain.html

This undated image provided by the Fried Lab/UCLA shows a brain MRI with an arrow showing where researchers applied deep-brain stimulation during tests on learning. A painless bit of electrical current applied to the brain helped some people play a video game, and someday it might help Alzheimer's disease patients remember what they've learned, a small study suggests. The game-players had to learn where particular stores were in a virtual city. They recalled the locations better if they'd learned them while current was supplied by tiny electrodes buried in their brains. That strategy may someday help people with early Alzheimer's hang on to many kinds of memory, suggested Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles. But "this is obviously a preliminary result,'' he cautioned. (UCLA, Fried Lab)

Ever gone to the movies and forgotten where you parked the car? New UCLA research may one day help you improve your memory.

UCLA neuroscientists have demonstrated that they can strengthen memory in human patients by stimulating a critical junction in the brain. Published in the Feb. 9 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, the finding could lead to a new method for boosting memory in patients with early Alzheimer's disease.

The UCLA team focused on a brain site called the entorhinal cortex. Considered the doorway to the hippocampus, which helps form and store memories, the entorhinal cortex plays a crucial role in transforming daily experience into lasting memories.

"The entorhinal cortex is the golden gate to the brain's memory mainframe," explained senior author Dr. Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Every visual and sensory experience that we eventually commit to memory funnels through that doorway to the hippocampus. Our brain cells must send signals through this hub in order to form memories that we can later consciously recall."

Fried and his colleagues followed seven epilepsy patients who already had electrodes implanted in their brains to pinpoint the origin of their seizures. The researchers monitored the electrodes to record neuron activity as memories were being formed.

Using a video game featuring a taxi cab, virtual passengers and a cyber city, the researchers tested whether deep-brain stimulation of the entorhinal cortex or the hippocampus altered recall. Patients played the role of cab drivers who picked up passengers and traveled across town to deliver them to one of six requested shops.

"When we stimulated the nerve fibers in the patients' entorhinal cortex during learning, they later recognized landmarks and navigated the routes more quickly," said Fried. "They even learned to take shortcuts, reflecting improved spatial memory.

"Critically, it was the stimulation at the gateway into the hippocampus – and not the hippocampus itself – that proved effective," he added.

The use of stimulation only during the learning phase suggests that patients need not undergo continuous stimulation to boost their memory, but only when they are trying to learn important information, Fried noted. This may lead the way to neuro-prosthetic devices that can switch on during specific stages of information processing or daily tasks.

Six million Americans and 30 million people worldwide are newly diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease each year. The progressive disorder is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and the fifth leading cause of death for those aged 65 and older.

"Losing our ability to remember recent events and form new memories is one of the most dreaded afflictions of the human condition," said Fried. "Our preliminary results provide evidence supporting a possible mechanism for enhancing memory, particularly as people age or suffer from early dementia. At the same time, we studied a small sample of patients, so our results should be interpreted with caution."
Future studies will determine whether deep-brain stimulation can enhance other types of recall, such as verbal and autobiographical memories. No adverse effects of the stimulation were reported by the seven patients.

Fried's coauthors included first author Nanthia Suthana, as well as Dr. Zulfi Haneef, Dr. John Stern, Roy Mukamel, Eric Behnke and Barbara Knowlton, all of UCLA. The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the Dana Foundation.
Provided by University of California - Los Angeles

Evidence of Revision -- Mind Control

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Excerpts from the 6 part, 10 1/2 hour documentary, Evidence of Revision.

This documentary is about to be re-released by the Quantum Future Group with subtitles and extra features. The monumental work to produce 10 1/2 hours of subtitles along with the special features has been a project of the Quantum Future Group in an effort to ensure that this important document reaches as many people around the world as possible.

If you would like to donate to this effort and others like it, please visit http://sott.net/donate

Amazon.com Widgets

Could the wars of the future be fought with mind control?

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Neuroscientists have made huge breakthroughs in our understanding of the inner workings of the mind, particularly how various regions of the brain are linked to specific cognitive processes. This is powerful knowledge... and it could be headed to the battlefield.

That's the finding of a new report by the UK's Royal Society, that warns these advances in neuroscience could lead to the creation of new weapons that attack enemy forces by disabling parts of their minds. Gases or even electronic devices could be specifically targeted to take down vital regions of the brain.

There's also some real danger in the flip side of this, in which the military attempts to improve the battle-readiness of its soldiers through these types of brain hacks. They might make for better soldiers, but that could well come at the expense of the soldiers' overall health, and the panel argues there are serious ethical questions about whether such neural weaponry violates human rights.

In the video up top, panel chairperson Professor Rod Flower of Queen Mary, University of London explains the findings of the report. For a more complete picture of the future of neuroscience on the battlefield, you can check out the complete report here.

Via the Royal Society.

The Hate cult know as the Westboro Baptist Church....

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

The Hate cult know as the Westboro Baptist Church's has movitated its opposition into donations for groups targeted by their protests.

If Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church are coming to your area (check their picket schedule online), let us know and we will add a Phelps-A-Thon for your community. We can work together to raise money for your local gay/straight alliance, LGBT community center, Jewish Community Center, Temple, or whatever organization we agree upon. [...]
http://phelps-a-thon.com/

Mind Control - How TV Affects the Brains of Young Children (video)

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Here’s a very interesting video on the cognitive effects of television on young children. Check out the results of his studies on young mice that were exposed to 6 hours of television per day compared to regular mice…and see how society is being dumbed down.

How to Plant Ideas in Someone's Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

By Adam Dachis / Source: Lifehacker.com

If you've ever been convinced by a salesperson that you truly wanted a product, done something too instinctively, or made choices that seemed entirely out of character, then you've had an idea planted in your mind. Here's how it's done.

Before we get started, it's worth noting that planting an idea in someone's mind without them knowing is a form of manipulation. We're not here to judge you, but this is the sort of thing most people consider evil, so you probably shouldn't actually do anything you read here. Instead, use this information to stay sharp.

If you've seen the film Inception, you might think that planting an idea in someone's mind is a difficult thing to do. It's not. It's ridiculously easy and it's tough to avoid. We're going to take a look at some of the ways it can work.

Reverse Psychology Actually Works

Reverse psychology has become an enormous cliché. I think this peaked in 1995 with the release of the film Jumanji. (If you've seen it and remember it, you know what I'm talking about.)

The problem is that most people look at reverse psychology in a very simple way. For example, you'd say "I don't care if you want to go risk your life jumping out of a plane" to try and convince someone not to go skydiving. This isn't reverse psychology -- it's passive-aggressive. So let's leave that all behind and start from scratch.

If you're going to use logic reversals in your favor, you need to be subtle. Let's say you want your roommate to do the dishes because it's his or her turn. There's always this approach:
"Hey, would you mind doing the dishes? It's your turn."

But in this example we're assuming your roommate is lazy and the nice approach isn't going to get the job done. So what do you do? Something like this:

"Hey, I've decided I don't want to do the dishes anymore and am just going to start buying disposable stuff. Is that cool with you? If you want to give me some money, I can pick up extras for you, too."

What this does is present the crappy alternative to not doing the dishes without placing any blame. Rather than being preoccupied with an accusation, your roommate is left to only consider the alternative. This is how reverse psychology can be effective, so long as you say it like you mean it.

Never Talk About the Idea -- Talk Around It

Getting someone to want to do something can be tough if you know they're not going to want to do it, so you need to make them believe it was their idea. This is a common instruction, especially for salespeople, but it's much easier said than done. You have to look at planting ideas in the same way you'd look at solving a mystery. Slowly but surely you offer the target a series of clues until the obvious conclusion is the one you want. The key is to be patient, because if you rush through your "clues" it will be obvious. If you take it slow, the idea will form naturally in their mind all by itself.

Let's say you're trying to get your friend to eat healthier food. This is a good aim, but you've got a tough enemy: they're addicted to the Colonel and need a bucket of fried chicken at least once a day. Out of concern you tell them to eat healthier. They either think that's a good idea and then never do anything or just tell you to stop nagging them. For them to realize what they're doing to their body, they need to have an epiphany and you can make that happen by talking around the issue.

To do this you need to be very clever and very subtle, otherwise it will be obvious. You can't just say "oh, I read today that fried chicken is killing 10 million children in Arkansas every year" because that's a load of crap and comes with an incredibly obvious motivation for saying it. If chicken is the target, you need to make chicken seem really unappealing. Next time you sneeze, make a joke about coming down with the avian flu. When you're ordering at a restaurant together, verbally convey your decision to order something other than chicken because you just learned how most chicken is processed by restaurants.

When you've done enough of these things -- and, again, with enough space between them so that it doesn't seem like odd behavior -- you can start being a little more aggressive and stop going with your friend to get fried chicken. You can also take proactive steps to improve your own health and tell your friend 1) what you're doing, and 2) how well it's working for you. After a few weeks, if your friend hasn't decided to reconsider his or her position on frequent fried chicken, you can casually mention it and they should be much more open to having a real discussion.

Undersell

Underselling is probably one of the easiest and most effective ways to plant an idea in someone's mind. This is another version of reverse psychology but at a less aggressive level. Let's say you're trying to sell someone a hard drive. They could buy a 250GB, 500GB, or 1TB hard drive. You want to sell the largest hard drive possible because those cost more and mean more money for you. Your buyer is coming in with the idea that they want to spend the least money possible. You're not going to get very far by telling them they should spend more money when you know they don't want to. Instead, you need to cater to what they want: the cheap option. Here's a sample dialogue:

Buyer: Can you tell me about this 250GB hard drive? I want to make sure it will work for me.

You: What kind of computer do you have and what do you want to use it for?

Buyer: I have a 2-year old Windows laptop and I need it to store my photos. I have about 30GB of photos.

You: 250GB is definitely more than enough for just storing your photos, so as long as you don't have many more files you might want to put onto the drive it should be just fine for your needs.

This last sentence instills doubt in the buyer. You could even add "you'd only need a larger drive if you wanted to be absolutely sure you'll have enough space in the future" but that might be pushing it a little bit. The point is, if you appear to have their best interests at heart it can be easy to make them think they want to buy more from you.

Again, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that planting ideas in the minds of others is not necessarily a nice thing to do. Use this information to detect when someone's doing it to you and not necessarily as a guide to do it to somebody else.

Decoding brain waves to eavesdrop on what we hear

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

These scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobe – the seat of the auditory system – as a person listens to normal conversation. Based on this correlation between sound and brain activity, they then were able to predict the words the person had heard solely from the temporal lobe activity.

"This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak," said co-author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience. "If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit."

"This research is based on sounds a person actually hears, but to use it for reconstructing imagined conversations, these principles would have to apply to someone's internal verbalizations," cautioned first author Brian N. Pasley, a post-doctoral researcher in the center. "There is some evidence that hearing the sound and imagining the sound activate similar areas of the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device."

These are frequency spectrograms of the actual spoken words (top) and the sounds as reconstructed by two separate models based solely on recorded temporal lobe activity in a volunteer subject. The words -- Waldo, structure, doubt and property -- are more or less recognizable, even though the model had never encountered these specific words before. Credit: Brian Pasley, UC Berkeley

In addition to the potential for expanding the communication ability of the severely disabled, he noted, the research also "is telling us a lot about how the brain in normal people represents and processes speech sounds."

Pasley and his colleagues at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, University of Maryland and The Johns Hopkins University report their findings Jan. 31 in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.

Help from epilepsy patients
They enlisted the help of people undergoing brain surgery to determine the location of intractable seizures so that the area can be removed in a second surgery. Neurosurgeons typically cut a hole in the skull and safely place electrodes on the brain surface or cortex – in this case, up to 256 electrodes covering the temporal lobe – to record activity over a period of a week to pinpoint the seizures. For this study, 15 neurosurgical patients volunteered to participate.

Pasley visited each person in the hospital to record the brain activity detected by the electrodes as they heard 5-10 minutes of conversation. Pasley used this data to reconstruct and play back the sounds the patients heard. He was able to do this because there is evidence that the brain breaks down sound into its component acoustic frequencies – for example, between a low of about 1 Hertz (cycles per second) to a high of about 8,000 Hertz –that are important for speech sounds.

Pasley tested two different computational models to match spoken sounds to the pattern of activity in the electrodes. The patients then heard a single word, and Pasley used the models to predict the word based on electrode recordings.

"We are looking at which cortical sites are increasing activity at particular acoustic frequencies, and from that, we map back to the sound," Pasley said. He compared the technique to a pianist who knows the sounds of the keys so well that she can look at the keys another pianist is playing in a sound-proof room and "hear" the music, much as Ludwig van Beethoven was able to "hear" his compositions despite being deaf.

The better of the two methods was able to reproduce a sound close enough to the original word for Pasley and his fellow researchers to correctly guess the word.

"We think we would be more accurate with an hour of listening and recording and then repeating the word many times," Pasley said. But because any realistic device would need to accurately identify words heard the first time, he decided to test the models using only a single trial.

"This research is a major step toward understanding what features of speech are represented in the human brain" Knight said. "Brian's analysis can reproduce the sound the patient heard, and you can actually recognize the word, although not at a perfect level."

Knight predicts that this success can be extended to imagined, internal verbalizations, because scientific studies have shown that when people are asked to imagine speaking a word, similar brain regions are activated as when the person actually utters the word.

"With neuroprosthetics, people have shown that it's possible to control movement with brain activity," Knight said. "But that work, while not easy, is relatively simple compared to reconstructing language. This experiment takes that earlier work to a whole new level."

Based on earlier work with ferrets
The current research builds on work by other researchers about how animals encode sounds in the brain's auditory cortex. In fact, some researchers, including the study's coauthors at the University of Maryland, have been able to guess the words ferrets were read by scientists based on recordings from the brain, even though the ferrets were unable to understand the words.

The ultimate goal of the UC Berkeley study was to explore how the human brain encodes speech and determine which aspects of speech are most important for understanding.

"At some point, the brain has to extract away all that auditory information and just map it onto a word, since we can understand speech and words regardless of how they sound," Pasley said. "The big question is, What is the most meaningful unit of speech? A syllable, a phone, a phoneme? We can test these hypotheses using the data we get from these recordings."

More information: Pasley BN, David SV, Mesgarani N, Flinker A, Shamma SA, et al. (2012) Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex. PLoS Biol 10(1): e1001251. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001251

Mind Control - My Review of Mentalist Martial Arts

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

B=
Here is the review I posted on Amazon:

With my interest in Mind Control (already written a few books on the subject) this book was a must read for me.

The premise of MMA is straightforward; that there are things you can do with in a high stress situation that will mentally distract and refocus the other person.

The Examples:
* Someone pulls a gun on you.
* You are threatened in a car jacking.
* Someone prepares to jump to their death.

Ryan Blumenthal has laid out a 13 principles to make it work and from my experience he's right, THEY WOULD WORK.

The caveats I have are that the book is too lean and the principles could have had more "flesh" by adding some clear cut examples of each principle in use. I would rather be bored to death with too many examples that to be left figuring out their application on my own.

Nonetheless, with a keen interest in social and psychological engineering I fully intend to dissect and apply the MMA.

Mentalist Martial Arts is a book I recommend but I also recommend that to master MMA you take the authors advise and brainstorm situations with friends and think of how to best apply MMA and it's principles.

Ryan Blumenthal, you've got a good first edition. I'm sure the next editions will be even better!

Dantalion Jones

Mind Control - Ethics of 'neuro-weaponry' hard to wrap your brain around

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Mind control will be a primary focus of neuro-weaponry, which is expected to reshape warfare, neuroscientists confirm.

Emerging technologies will give birth to highly sophisticated adversarial applications centred on brain science; conventional battlefield methodology could soon fade into history.

"We are approaching a time when brain science will be critical to our national security," confirmed James Forsythe of Sandia National Laboratories

According to James Giordano of Georgetown University and the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, and colleague Rachel Warzman at Georgetown University, the battlefields of the future will be shaped by advances in neuroscience focused for military purposes.

By: Robert Alison

"Major breakthroughs (in brain science) relevant to national security are both viable and imminently achievable," Giordano suggested at a recent neuroscience conference.

The result would be an "arsenal of neuro-weapons," concluded Jonathan Marks at Penn State University.

Such an arsenal could include "drugs, microbiological agents and toxins from nature," explained Jonathan Moreno at the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition to the use of "brain-machine interfaces," the hormone oxytocin could be used to make prisoners more co-operative in divulging sensitive military information. Other substances would make soldiers forget atrocities they might have committed.

According to Forsythe and Giordano, adversarial elements could include: "nanoparticles engineered to affect specific brain processes," "super soldiers created through pharmaceuticals and/or brain stimulation" and "brain imaging for interrogation-lie detection" as well as the use of "intelligent machines."

Other possibilities being considered by military strategists include an aerosolized shellfish neurotoxin fatal to humans in a few minutes, hallucination-causing bacteria and organisms that access and destroy human brains by crawling up the olfactory nerves.

Such technologies would have been unimaginable not so long ago, but the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has been focusing on the military applications of brain science, Moreno confirmed.

Some of its projects, posted on its website, include "neuroscience for intelligence analysts" and "accelerated learning."

For the past several years, DARPA, the military research and development agency tasked with maintaining U.S. military technology superiority, "has engaged in research on direct neurological control," confirmed Stephen White at Cornell Law School.

But such a dramatic alteration in the way warfare is waged has legal implications, analysts suggest.

According to White, there are concerns with regard to "criminal responsibility for war crimes."

"Science and technology should never be used to do bad things," Giordano pointed out, cautioning that history shows scientists often generate information misused for unintended military purposes.

White noted that international law has no "per se prohibition" with regard to the direction that neuro-weaponry appears to be taking.

Robert Alison is a zoologist and freelance writer based in Victoria, B.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 30, 2012 A11

Check This Out!

Mind Control Seminar

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:03:00 +0000

This is a Limited Time Offer.

What does next weekend look like for you?

I'm going to be putting on my Mind Control Seminar in Manchester, New Hampshire and you're invited to attend.

The good news is that you CAN attend as my guest … no cost.

The bad news is that there are only two seats left so please check your calendar.

Just read to the end of the web site.

http://www.TheHypnosisSeminar.com

Sincerely,

Dantalion Jones

Evidence of Revision -- Mind Control

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Mind Control - Women Trained to Kill VIDEO

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Okay, I admit this is dated and REALLY hokey. But it's a good laugh.

Leave me a comment.... I dare you!

"Kill him and take the case. Bring it to us."

Mind Control - The ethics of brain boosting

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:29:00 +0000

(Medical Xpress) -- The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true.

Yet promising results in the lab with emerging ‘brain stimulation’ techniques, though still very preliminary, have prompted Oxford neuroscientists to team up with leading ethicists at the University to consider the issues the new technology could raise. They spoke to Radio 4's Today program this morning.

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

TDCS uses electrodes placed on the outside of the head to pass tiny currents across regions of the brain for 20 minutes or so. The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to fire. It is thought that this enhances the making and strengthening of connections involved in learning and memory.

The technique is painless, all indications at the moment are that it is safe, and the effects can last over the long term.

Dr. Roi Cohen Kadosh, who has carried out brain stimulation studies at the Department of Experimental Psychology, very definitely has a vision for how TDCS could be used in the future: "I can see a time when people plug a simple device into an iPad so that their brain is stimulated when they are doing their homework, learning French or taking up the piano," he says.

The growing number of positive results in early-stage studies, led the neuroscientists Dr. Cohen Kadosh and Dr. Jacinta O’Shea to talk to Professor Neil Levy, Dr. Nick Shea and Professor Julian Savulescu in the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics about what ethical issues there may be in future widespread use of TDCS to boost abilities in healthy people.

The researchers outline the issues in a short paper in the journal Current Biology (pdf), and indicate the research that is now necessary to address some of the potential concerns.

"We ask: should we use brain stimulation to enhance cognition, and what are the risks?" explains Roi. "Our aim was to look at whether it gives rise to new ethical issues, issues that will increasingly need to be thought about in our field but also by policymakers and the public."

"This research cuts to core of humanity: the capacity to learn," says Professor Julian Savulescu. "The capacity to learn varies across people, across ages and with illness. This kind of technology enables people to get more out of the work they put into learning something."

He adds: "This is a first step down the path of maximizing human potential. It is a very exciting development but we need to control the release of the genie. Although this looks like a simple external device, it acts by affecting the brain. That could have very good effects, but unpredictable side effects."

One of the most obvious uses of brain stimulation techniques is in children as an educational or learning aid. The researchers believe that their use in children would be warranted, and that we should begin research to understand how TDCS might be used in children.

Roi notes that: "Parents will often send their child to piano lessons or to football lessons, wanting them to do well." He considers that providing people with ways of fulfilling their potential is not a bad thing.

The researchers consider whether brain stimulation could be thought of as cheating, with the idea that we can get extra cognitive abilities for no effort. Here they offer a resounding ‘No’.

The technique seems to boost the learning process in conjunction with standard education or training. There is no free ride here – people still need to work at learning a new skill or language themselves. "It won’t be possible to go to sleep at night with the electrodes on, wake up the next day and pass all your exams," says Roi.

They also look at access to this technology, and will it further benefit the well off. But they suggest the TDCS kit is simple and cheap enough to be available to all in schools.

"This technology overcomes some standard objections to enhancement: It is not a set of cheat notes," says Julian. "You require effort and hard work to learn. It is just that you get more out of your effort. And because it is cheap, low tech, easily affordable, it could be widely available. This addresses the objection that it will introduce inequality and unfairness. It could be available and should be available to all, if it is safe and effective."

The researchers’ concern is more that the technology is such that people could assemble all the components needed at home reasonably simply. Roi clearly says that this is not warranted yet with our limited current knowledge about the technique’s use: "The message should very much be 'Don’t try this at home'."

While there have been some ethical discussions in the past of using some drugs to boost concentration or attention, the researchers explain that TDCS is different and needs to be considered separately.

For example, drugs in general are prescribed for use by one person, ingested and taken internally, and with limits on dose. There are no such in-built limits with brain stimulation, and it may not feel as serious as taking a drug because it is an externally applied treatment – though its effects may be as strong.

"Once you have a brain stimulation device, you can use it as often as you want and there are no limits on who uses it," Roi points out.

But at the current time, most of the TDCS work that has been done is preliminary, small-scale and in the lab. There are no clear guidelines for its use as yet, as research is still establishing the optimal ways of using TDCS for different areas of cognition.

The researchers are concerned that in this gap, some people could step in to offer TDCS to vulnerable patients or parents desperate to advance their children before the technique is fully understood.

The researchers also identify a number of outstanding questions:

• Are there downsides to boosting capacity in one area of cognitive ability? Do other mental abilities lose out?
• The developing brain in children is different to adults. With most research having been in adults, the use of TDCS in children becomes a pressing question.
• And are the benefits seen in the lab clinically relevant: can TDCS lead to improvements that matter in normal daily life?

Julian says: "At this stage, we need more research to understand better the risks and benefits, in specific populations, in real life. Any regulation should prevent misuse and abuse, but facilitate good research. This kind of technology could be as important as the internet and computing. Those are external cognitive enhancements. This is basic fundamental cognitive enhancement."

The researchers conclude the exciting potential of TDCS requires that this research be done and all these ethical questions considered.

"Enhancing cognitive abilities, or our ability to learn, is not a bad thing to do. There is no problem with that, as far as we see, as long as there are no side effects," says Roi.

"What is the ethical way forward? More research before deployment," says Julian. "It is promising but not proven at this stage."

Provided by Oxford University

"The ethics of brain boosting." January 26th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-ethics-brain-boosting.html

Mind Control - Believing the impossible and conspiracy theories

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Distrust and paranoia about government has a long history, and the feeling that there is a conspiracy of elites can lead to suspicion for authorities and the claims they make. For some, the attraction of conspiracy theories is so strong that it leads them to endorse entirely contradictory beliefs, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science.

People who endorse conspiracy theories see authorities as fundamentally deceptive. The conviction that the "official story" is untrue can lead people to believe several alternative theories-despite contradictions among them. "Any conspiracy theory that stands in opposition to the official narrative will gain some degree of endorsement from someone who holds a conpiracist worldview," according to Michael Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton of the University of Kent.

To see if conspiracy views were strong enough to lead to inconsistencies, the researchers asked 137 college students about the death of Princess Diana. The more people thought there "was an official campaign by the intelligence service to assassinate Diana," the more they also believed that "Diana faked her own death to retreat into isolation." Of course, Diana cannot be simultaneously dead and alive.

The researchers wanted to know if the contradictory beliefs were due to suspicion of authorities, so they asked 102 college students about the death of Osama bin Laden (OBL). People who believed that "when the raid took place, OBL was already dead," were significantly more likely to also believe that "OBL is still alive." Since bin Laden is not Schrödinger's cat, he must either be alive or dead. The researchers found that the belief that the "actions of the Obama administration indicate that they are hiding some important or damaging piece of information about the raid" was responsible for the connection between the two conspiracy theories. Conspiracy belief is so potent that it will lead to belief in completely inconsistent ideas.

"For conspiracy theorists, those in power are seen as deceptive-even malevolent-and so any official explanation is at a disadvantage, and any alternative explanation is more credible from the start," said the authors. It is no surprise that fear, mistrust, and even paranoia can lead to muddled thinking; when distrust is engaged, careful reasoning can coast on by. "Believing Osama is still alive," they write, 'is no obstacle to believing that he has been dead for years."

More information: The article "Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories" in Social Psychological and Personality Science is available free for a limited time at http://m.spp.sagep … 786.full.pdf

Provided by SAGE Publications

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-believing-impossible-conspiracy-theories.html

Top 10 Worst Self-Help Books

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Source: E-Advisor Blog

There are some things you just shouldn't teach yourself from a book: open-heart surgery, how to kiss, ways to become less shy. Reading up on these skills wouldn't help you learn and would probably just be embarrassing or dangerous.

Self-help books make some readers feel like they can learn to do anything, from fixing their cars to changing their lives, and while there might be dozens of books that really provide useful information, many just aren't helpful. Check out what not to buy before you head to the bookstore to improve yourself.

WINNING LOTTO/LOTTERY FOR EVERYDAY PLAYERS

There are several disturbing aspects of this book. First, it's for the type of human who will not only throw away money on lottery tickets, but also shell out cash for a book on how to win the lottery rather than on making money through hard work. Secondly, the author either doesn't provide a first name or his first name is Professor, neither of which makes him seem very credible. The lottery is random and tested for biases with statistical devices. When you see a well-known statistician or mathematician writing about how to win the lottery, then you might be spending your money well.

MORE JOY: AN ADVANCED GUIDE TO SOLO SEX

This read takes the idea of self help a little too far. A sequel to his first book, The Joy of Solo Sex, More Joy is for the advanced practitioner. The author delves into techniques and taboos, but most of us would probably prefer we leave that kind of information to the imagination. If you do end up buying this book, you'd be better off buying it new than used.

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU

This famous book (and the terrible movie that followed) isn't full of the worst advice. Some of it's pretty good — but it also gives you the same solutions that all your friends have been offering you for months. If you're the kind of girl that will go out and buy a self-help book to figure out what a guy is thinking, you're probably the kind of girl who has been fixating on this dude and complaining to your friends about him non-stop for weeks. Instead of wasting your money on the book, just listen to the free advice your friends have been giving you: move on.

THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK

Who wouldn't love to quit working the traditional 40-hours-a-week job while still getting rich and doing whatever they wanted? It sounds too good to be true, and it pretty much is. Most readers admit that the first half of the book is motivational, if not a bit boastful on the part of the author, but after that, Ferriss offers very weak ideas to make your laziest dreams come true. He says you should outsource your responsibilities, like research for work and making appointments, to a virtual assistant abroad and then start your own business. Running a business seems like it would be the opposite of slacking off, doesn't it?

365 WAYS TO LIVE HAPPY

There's something to be said about choosing to be happy each day and finding ways to keep your daily life upbeat, but unless you're recovering from a brain injury, this book won't reveal anything you don't already know. You'll get some of the same inspirational drivel about following your dreams that you've heard throughout your life, but you'll also read some tips for happiness that make it seem like the author just ran out of ideas. "Avoid exposure to toxic chemicals" and "Call the police when you have witnessed a crime" don't seem like bits of advice that are going to change your outlook on life today.

I USED TO MISS HIM… BUT MY AIM IS IMPROVING

Most books probably coddle you and build you up after a breakup. "You're better off without him." "You're an independent woman." "He's not worth it." This book, though, seems to communicate something else entirely: "You're better off with him in pain." "You're a stalker." "He's worth the time it takes to put a hex on someone."I Used To Miss Him sincerely presents revenge and voodoo dolls as viable options for healing after a breakup. If you take this kind of advice, you're probably going to experience a lot of breakups in your lifetime.

WHO MOVED MY CHEESE?

People gobbled this book up when it came out in 1998 and for years after. It's written as a goofy parable about some mice and some Thumbelina-sized people who live in a maze and love cheese. The cheese represents basically anything in life that's important to you, and the message is clear and simple: things change so get used to it. Don't waste your time on a book that can be summed up in a fortune cookie.

HOW TO GET OVER THAT BITCH AND GROW BALLS THEY CAN'T RESIST

The advice in this book from a nine-year veteran male escort will make you believe that if this guy (who calls himself the Game Doctor) can publish a book, you can too. It's complete with a middle-school vocabulary and made-up statistics about the author's expertise and relationships. The idea behind the book is that women are vulnerable to masculinity so a man who learns to tame and control women can have whatever he wants. Anyone who reads this, though, should keep in mind that the Game Doctor gleaned this wisdom as he was being paid to go out with women. Those probably aren't the kind of ladies you're after.

DOGSENSE: 99 RELATIONSHIP TIPS FROM YOUR CANINE COMPANION

Trust us, guys. When it comes to winning over a woman, you shouldn't take lessons from something that drools all over the place, chews on her shoes, and poops under the bed. Man's best friend definitely has some positive qualities, but every problem in a human relationship can't be solved with fierce loyalty and a belly rub. The photos of the dogs are cute enough, but don't expect this book to change your life.

THE SECRET

Of course everyone wants to be in on a secret, especially when that secret promises to ensure you wealth, health, and whatever your heart desires. The problem with this one is that it's a bunch of New Age mumbo-jumbo — some people really believe in it, while most of the population rolls their eyes. The book is based on the Law of Attraction: positive thoughts attract positive outcomes while negative thoughts attract negative outcomes. The author pushes it as far as to say that poverty and disasters are the results of negativity. Science has proven that staying upbeat has health and life benefits, but it hasn't quite found that guaranteed link between positivity and everything you've ever wanted.

Mind Control - 15 styles of Distorted Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.
Polarized Thinking: Things are black or white, good or bad. You have to be perfect or you're a failure. There is no middle ground.

Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once you expect it to happen over and over again.

Mind Reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you.
Castastrophizing: You expect disaster. you notice or hear about a problem and start "what if's". What if tragedy strikes? What if it happens to you?"
Personalization: Thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who's smarter, better looking, etc.
Control Fallacies: If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you.
Fallacy of Fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what's fair but other people won't agree with you.
Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem or reversal.
Should: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People who break the rules anger you and you feel guilty if you violate the rules.
Emotional Reasoning: You believe that what you feel must be true-automatically. If you feel stupid and boring, then you must be stupid and boring.
Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. You need to change people because your hope for happiness seem to depend entirely on them.
Global Labeling: You generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgment.
Being Right: You are continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to demonstrate your rightness.
Heaven's Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You feel better when the reward doesn't come

Mind Control - What Does the Mind Notice?

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:01:00 +0000

A practical example of how the human mind works

Analysis of the above picture can tell us a lot about how different people think.

- For young men, it's a picture of a lady with a nice derriere but only the most observant will notice that she is crossing a street.

- The really observant will notice that she is wearing a thong.

- For older men, she appears to be a respectable woman - with a nice tush - on her way to work.

- The perverts among them will imagine her naked.

- Wiser men will ponder the presence of mind of the photographer to take the shot in the face of such beauty and be grateful that they shared it.

- For half of the women, this is an ordinary woman who should not have left home dressed that way.

- The other half will think she is a slut but wonder where she bought that blouse

- Older women will imagine the misery that the woman's curves will cause by the time she reaches 50.

- But only children, the extremely intelligent and the celibate will notice that the taxi is being driven by a dog.

The Struggle for Your Mind: Conscious Evolution and the Battle to Control How We Think

noreply@blogger.com (Dantalion Jones) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Click The Image. I dare you!

A revolutionary call to overthrow society’s mental controls and expand consciousness for the greater good of humanity

• Explores the tactics used to control consciousness, such as misinformation, debt systems, fear conditioning, and the distraction of entertainment and technology

• Reveals the emerging mechanisms for neurogenetic evolution within our brains that will enable us to throw off the shackles of mental control

• Explains how to break through the barriers inhibiting conscious evolution and restore our connection with Nature and the Divine

Within society there exists a silent war. The battlefield is our everyday lives: our education, our work, our leisure, our emotional and spiritual well-being, and our thinking and perceptions. Our very sense of “reality” is deliberately engineered to work against conscious evolution and preserve social norms. In short, we are all part of a war of consciousness. And the opportunity is at hand for us to win.

Assessing the ways modern societies limit consciousness and keep humanity obedient and distracted from their inner lives, Kingsley Dennis presents an eye-opening investigation of the way our minds have been programmed to preserve incumbent power structures and their rules. He exposes the tactics employed for thousands of years by the elite to control our minds, including misinformation and propaganda, debt systems, consumerism, religious doctrine, scientific authority, economic “uncertainties,” fear of terrorist attacks and armageddon, distraction through entertainment and technology, as well as the false belief that we are separate from Nature and the Divine. Despite these obstacles, humanity is awakening to culture’s imposed limits on perception through an accelerating rise in collective empathy and awareness. Exploring the biology of consciousness, Dennis reveals the emerging mechanisms for neurogenetic evolution within the brains of gifted individuals, psychics, and visionaries and the coming increases in solar and magnetic energies that will activate them within all of us.

Explaining how we can free up mental and emotional energy to break through the barriers inhibiting conscious evolution, he shows that by taking back our minds and changing the way we think, we can restore our connection with Nature and the Divine and lead humanity into a new age of harmony and awareness.

List price: $18.95