Tag: psychology

Looks like full scale attack mode on Trump from GOP

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They hit him as hard as they can from every side, but he’s still standing.

“GOP has instructed every Senator and Congressman to not defend Trump. Do not talk about him favorably. It’s a coup.” (Source)

Trump is not the corrupt GOP and he is not the corrupt DNC.

If he wins, he will be the first democratically elected president in many decades.

Edit 10/09: It appears that Billy Bush, Jeb’s cousin, made the tape of Trump and that its release was coordinated across the GOP-DNC elite and timed a day before the second debate.

Scott Adams Interview: Trump’s Tactics and Hillary’s Persuasion Game

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Adams sees Trump as fundamentally a skilled persuader. In this interview, he explains this concept well. Adams also sees the New Yorker in Trump and mentions how this affects the way he speaks.

What Adams says about persuasion is probably largely true. But it is a truth that belongs in a world characterized by bad communication.

In the public sphere, there are no options to the world Adams describes.

In the private sphere of interpersonal communication, there are.

Unfortunately, most people use only the techniques of the public sphere in the private sphere.

They do this because they do not know any other techniques. FIML is a technique that allows for much better communication in the private sphere.

Using special techniques to persuade is the opposite of what FIML does.

FIML seeks to remove all artifice and assumption from close interpersonal communication. By doing this, FIML also removes them from the individual psychologies of FIML partners.

After doing FIML for some time, I no longer see individual psychology as a sum of traits and signs that can be studied or understood as if they were actual entities, actual ghosts or ghost-like sub-beings that have minds of their own and perdure over time. I don’t use signs to tell what my partner thinks or feels, or not very many save the straightforward ones.

Individuals are semiotic beings that respond deeply to communication signals, especially signals coming from people. In the public sphere, in the world Adams describes, we never know what anything means unless we have successfully persuaded someone. But then what does that mean?

And even if we have persuaded them, maybe they have really persuaded us but we don’t know it.

You don’t want to live like that with your best friend. With FIML you can put it all out there and figure it all out and all of that can be done at your own pace.

If you are using public-sphere communication techniques on your best friend (you are), you are actually allowing yourselves to be pulled apart by the public sphere. You are allowing yourselves to be absorbed by the public sphere, dissolved by it, destroyed by it.

FIML is a method that helps partners gain enormous control of their communication. Perfectly open, honest, and with no tricks.

No-Touch Torture Report

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Gloomy but interesting read on “no-touch” torture. Shows how inherent human weaknesses are used against people and what those weaknesses are.

An example:

5.       Imprisonment and Isolation

Isolation is commonly used as punishment in prisons. Many whistleblowers like Bradley Manning suffer this condition. In soft interrogation it is used to get the target to talk to their interrogator since humans have the need for companionship. In no-touch torture the target is driven from their friends and family using different techniques in order to isolate them so that the electronic mind control has more effect on their psyche.  Like in Guantanamo, the target becomes isolated losing their job and medical care. Part of the method involves slander in their community. They end up on the most part in poverty and paranoid about doctors and other people from false correlations that are purposefully induced into their lives. Isolation is also a form of sensory deprivation which will be discussed later. Days and weeks lose their meaning. (Executive Summary: Neuropsychological and Electronic No-Touch Torture Report)

I personally believe no-touch torture is sometimes done on people who have no idea it is being done at all.

Psychological gaslighting is an example of this, but there are many other reasons a person or group of people might seek to destroy an individual through clandestine means. And many other ways to do it, some of which can be found at the link above.

Somewhat related, this is not about torture but manipulation. Probably not a bad idea as reported: Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos A controversial foreign PR firm known for representing unsavory characters was paid millions by the Pentagon to create fake terrorist videos.

What can easily happen if you don’t have good FIML practice

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Being a little tongue-in-cheek but not that much.

‘I’ll fight you for the kids’: ‘Furious’ Brad Pitt attacks Angelina over bitter divorce paper claims that he’s a ‘bad dad with anger and alcohol issues’ – but Jolie tells him: ‘I just can’t do this any more’

The story above is tabloid fare, but it’s reasonable to suppose the anger and battling are real, as are the explosive emotions that are causing the whole thing to go public.

How do two people with time, brains, and money get to this point?

It’s a long buildup of misunderstandings and failed communication. I actually believe that if the couple had learned FIML five years ago, they would probably be happy together today and almost certainly would not be wrangling in public, which does neither of them nor their kids any good.

Even a small misunderstanding—even one that begins innocently—can have massive consequences as it snowballs through the years.

The best time to begin FIML practice is when you are happy as a couple, when you know you can trust each other, when you want to keep doing well and even improve on it.

Properly done, FIML will not take the glow off your relationship. It will only improve it.

When couples don’t do FIML at all, no matter how much they profess ideals of tolerance and love, there is no way for them to stop small misunderstandings from growing into massive differences.

Seeking novel perceptions

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Here is an interesting exercise. Do something small to give your brain a novel (new) perception.

Look at something from a new angle, make a new sound, pinch an unusual part of your body. The idea is to do something small but get a big result.

For example, take a glass and look through it as through a telescope. While doing this, deeply appreciate the newness of the perception. Just give it five or ten seconds.

It is your conscious perception of the newness that gets your brain to respond. Once it does, you can nurse the feeling of newness and have the effect last a long time. Can be repeated as often as you like with any sort of novel perception.

You can also just use any new perception that appears in your world and milk it for the extra stimulation it provides. See example below.

Happy Caturday!

For this exercise, sought novel perceptions should be small and wholesome.

You don’t need to take drugs or jump off a cliff to get very good results. By doing small and wholesome, you teach yourself how to energize your brain quickly and in any situation.

The key to success is to do it consciously and with the intention of stimulating your brain by opening its novel experience mode.

Seeking novel perceptions is wonderful in and of itself and also it may be a good way for people to better understand FIML practice.

FIML practice is designed to disrupt normal autonomous thought processes.

Once they have been disrupted, a new thought process will replace the old—thus providing a novel psychological perception.

Frequent use of FIML remakes individual psychology for the better while also greatly improving relations with your FIML partner.

US trust of MSM

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This explains a lot. It shows that 51% of  Democrats have done little or no independent research outside of their ideological echo chambers. This is not a poll about Trump versus Clinton but rather an indication of how people perceive political reality.

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning

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The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance. (link)

The notion that Chomsky is wrong is not new, but the linked article still a good read.

See this for a rebuttal of the above: Don’t believe the rumours. Universal Grammar is alive and well.

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The following is only tangentially related to the above articles.

The key point in FIML is that messages (language, semiotics, etc.) are often misunderstood and that these misunderstandings can have large psychological effects.

Messages can be misunderstood on many levels, but the level that is least appreciated today and thus has the greatest unacknowledged implications for human psychology is the micro-level.

The micro-level is the level of the short-term memory (time component) and the psychological morpheme (emotional component). Psychological morphemes arise as brief (short-term memory) associations are made with other semiotic and thought systems in real-time.

If errors at this level are not corrected, large effects can ensue. Errors at this level are best corrected in real-time as quickly as possible (while the contents of the short-term memory are still fresh). This is why the FIML technique is done the way it is and why it works as well as it does.

A psychological morpheme is:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

Gaslighting

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Gaslighting is a form of interpersonal abuse that works by manipulating meaning, memory, and perception.

Gaslighter(s) play dirty pool with the ambiguity inherent in all human communication.

Gaslighting could not work if interpersonal reality did not contain a great deal of ambiguity. Gaslighters know this and exploit it for selfish advantage.

In this respect, gaslighting shows how important it is to remove as much ambiguity as possible in relationships with significant others.

Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to tell if you are being gaslighted. Gaslighting relies fundamentally on abuse of interpersonal trust.

Victims of gaslighting…

…might harbor feelings of anger toward the person they sense is an aggressor but also find themselves thrown into positions of anxious defensiveness, which makes them feel unjustified and unsure of themselves. If their manipulator also happens to be skilled in the art of “impression management” — displaying superficial charm and enjoying the capacity to make favorable impressions on others — those on the receiving end of their tactics are likely to feel even crazier. (Gaslighting Revisited: A Closer Look at This Manipulation Tactic)

I bring the subject up for itself but also because it sheds light on FIML practice. FIML is the polar opposite of gaslighting. Rather than manipulate each other, FIML partners seek to remove the source material of gaslighting—interpersonal ambiguity.

From a FIML point of view, gaslighting is the worst thing one person can do to another short of criminal acts.

If you suspect you are being gaslighted, I suggest you try to get your partner to do FIML with you. If they are gaslighters, my guess is they will not want to do it. Or if they do, they will try to manipulate you through FIML.

But that won’t work for long. Before long, you will begin to see that they are lying and that their purpose is not to help you but to control you by distorting interpersonal “reality.”

I will venture a guess that most gaslighters will be incapable of the mindfulness or metacognitive self-control FIML requires. I will also guess that they will be deeply frustrated by FIML queries and that this will lead to anger and a spike in gaslighting behaviors.

Gaslighters are “reality bullies” that seek control of others by forcing their interpretations on them. This is the exact opposite of what FIML does.

(Note: Obviously not everyone who cannot or will not do FIML is a gaslighter.)

Triggers and microaggression

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I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.

Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.

I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.

My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.

It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.

The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.

Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.

I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.

Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.

Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.

If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.

Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.

Metacognition improves memory retrieval

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In this post I am going to argue that strong metacognitive awareness of one’s own intentionality in real-time translates into better and more accurate memory retrieval.

More specifically, I mean that the strong metacognitive awareness of one’s own intentionality that results from FIML practice is a skill that transfers to memory retrieval.

FIML partners spend a good deal of time asking and answering questions about each others’ intentionality in real-time.

The metacognitive skills that develop out of that practice streamline communication between partners, while also streamlining communication within the brains of each partner.

Each partner benefits psychologically as a standalone individual from the practice of FIML because FIML skills can also be applied to individual, subjective brain functions.

One of the psychological benefits of FIML practice is greatly enhanced awareness of the difference between truth and lies during interpersonal communication with the FIML partner.

This awareness beneficially affects memory retrieval.

It does so by increasing the individual’s capacity to better know when memories are reliable and when they are dubious if not outright false.

Advanced FIML practitioners will have less need for egotistical interpretations of their pasts (or anything else), and thus have minds and memories that are more streamlined and efficient.

This happens because FIML practice gradually shifts brain organization away from the heuristics of a static ego to operations that can be described as “metacognitive.”

Metacognitive operations of this caliber are a great improvement on static beliefs in a self or an egocentric narrative.

Additionally, since psychology is based on memory, fine metacognitive awareness of memory retrieval will also improve psychological functioning in other areas.

For example, emotions based on memory (all of them really) will be less likely to negatively influence intentionality if fine metacognitive awareness of memory retrieval is functioning in the individual.

The same can be said of psychological schemas, framing, values, beliefs, instinct and its interpretations, and so on. All aspects of human psychology can enjoy improvements (more truthful, less stupid) through the metacognitive skills that result from FIML practice.

Repost: Linguistics and psychology meet in FIML

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FIML is a practical technique that optimizes communication between partners by removing as much micro ambiguity as possible during real-time interpersonal communication.

FIML will also greatly improve meso and macro understanding between partners and discussions of these levels are of significant importance and cannot be ignored, but the basic FIML technique rests on micro analysis of real-time communication. Please see this post for more on this topic: Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding.

Real-time micro communication means communication within just a few seconds. If we are reading we can focus on a word or phrase and think about it as long as we like. If we are listening to someone speak, however, we normally cannot stop them to analyze deeply a particular word choice, a particular expression, a particular tone of voice, or anything else that happens rapidly.

This missing piece in the puzzle of interpersonal communication is of great—I would argue massive—importance because huge mistakes can be and often are made in a single moment.

FIML practice corrects this problem. In other posts we have referred to psychological morphemes, which we have defined as:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

The theory of FIML claims that psychological morphemes arise quickly and if they are not checked or analyzed can have massive influence on how people hear and think from that point on. This is why the practice of FIML focuses greatly on the initial arising or manifestation of a psychological morpheme. The morpheme may be habitual, having origins in the distant past, or it may have first arisen in the moment just before the FIML query that seeks to understand it.

The important point is that the person in whom the psychological morpheme has arisen, or has just begun to arise, realizes than it has arisen due to something that seems to have originated in the other person, their FIML partner.

This is the reason a basic FIML query is begun—because one partner notices a psychological morpheme arising within and wants to be sure it is correctly based on objective data shared with the partner. If the partner honestly denies the interpretation of the inquirer (who need not say why they are inquiring), then the inquirer will know that the morpheme that has arisen in their mind is baseless, a mistake. By stopping that mistake, they further stop a much larger mistaken psychological or emotional response from taking hold in their mind.

The stopping of a much larger mistaken psychological or emotional response from taking hold in the mind is the point at which FIML practice greatly influences psychological well-being. If we can see from the honest answers of a trusted partner that some of our most basic emotional responses are not justified—are mistakes—we will in most cases experience a rapid extinction of those responses.

In some cases of deep-seated mistaken interpretations, we may need to hear many times that we are mistaken, but extinction will follow just as surely even though it takes longer. FIML can’t cure everything but a great many people who are now dissatisfied or suffering with their emotional or psychological conditions will benefit from FIML practice. With the help of a trusted FIML partner it is easier to extinguish mistaken interpretations than it may seem upon fist hearing of this technique.

In addition to the above, FIML practice itself is interesting and will lead to many enjoyable discussions. Furthermore, FIML practice can also find and extinguish dangerous positive mistaken interpretations. A positive mistaken interpretation is one that feels good but that can lead to dangerous or harmful actions due to overconfidence, false assumptions, and so on.

FIML cannot remove all ambiguity between partners. That may be possible one day with advanced brain scans, but I suspect that even then ambiguity will still be part of our emotional lives. FIML can, however, remove enough ambiguity between partners that they will feel much more satisfied with themselves and with how they communicate with each other. When micro mistakes are largely removed from interpersonal communication, meso and macro emotions and behaviors will no longer be undermined by corrosive subjective states that cannot be analyzed objectively or productively.

The persistence of nonrational social norms

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Very concrete examples of persistent nonrational social norms can be found in consumer science.

For years, we received medical advice on fats and salt that had little scientific backing. Yesterday, an article appeared showing Medical benefits of dental floss unproven.

I had had my suspicions about the fat and salt though I did lean toward reducing intake, but the lack of evidence for dental floss surprised me.

Imagine tens of thousands of hygienists and dentists repeating the advice to floss over all those years. Dental floss is a multi-billion dollar industry.

I don’t blame hygienists or dentists. They were faithfully doing what they were taught—transmitting a social norm that seemed to be science-based (but was not).

That’s how societies hold together. Common beliefs and norms are typically transmitted by authority figures at the top. After the authority figures, come parents, news media, teachers, etc. in a long chain of transmission. Each in turn repeats what they have learned.

Could be about dental floss or it could be about keeping the sun in the sky by cutting out people’s hearts.

You can see something similar at an individual level. Much of human psychology is based on habits transmitted internally from one day to the next in long chains that sometimes can be traced back to infancy.

Much of what we think and feel is nothing more than habit transmitted faithfully from one moment to the next.

Psychological habits, like social conformity, work according to rules that we can understand in terms of reason but that often are not themselves reasonable.

Decision-making mental states

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Pretty sure most of us have deep mental states wherein significant personal decisions are made.

I am thinking especially of significant psychological decisions, life decisions, and social decisions.

An example of such a deep state might be being drunk.

Some people make important decisions about themselves and others when they are drunk.

Often those decisions are dark, even immoral. And often the drinker forgets making them though the decisions remain in effect.

In subsequent days, those decisions may seem to be obvious truths, not conclusions they reached while drunk.

This sort of psychological alcoholism—depending on the drunk state for decision-making though not otherwise alcoholic—can be very destructive because it fosters self-deceit and bad decisions.

Dark plans occur while drunk that are capably acted on while sober and unconscious of them.

This is a very effective form of self-deceit and may even be selected evolutionarily due to that.

I know someone with a strong trait like this and several others with milder versions.

OK, so that’s one thing and if you look, there is a good chance you will know someone who does this. You may even do it yourself.

Now, the second thing is I suspect there are a lot of deep decision-making mental states, not just the drunk one.

Some of them are dark and bad like the drunk one. Some are good. Some are idealistic. Some moody, some effective. Some analytical.

If you can see the drunk one, you can probably see others.

It’s interesting that we seem to reserve some mental states for deep psychological positioning or repositioning.

And like all things human some of those states are used for good, some for bad.

Some are inherently bad for making decisions (being drunk, over-confident, etc.) and some are inherently good.