2016
Hargrave, John.
Mind hacking : how to change your mind for good in 21 days / Sir John Hargrave.
1. thought and thinking.
2. change (psychology).
BF441.H313 2016
158.1--dc23
John Hargrave, Mind hacking : how to change your mind for good in 21 days, 2016
( Mind hacking : how to change your mind for good in 21 days / Sir John Hargrave., 1. thought and thinking., 2. change (psychology)., BF441.H313 2016
158.1--dc23, 2016, )
p.17
As he stood over the printer, stewing over another paper jam, he began to approach the problem like a hacker. He couldn't keep the printer from jamming, but he could motivate his coworkers to clear the jams.
Rushing back to his desk, he cracked open the source code of the printer program and came up with a brilliant hack. Who would be the most motivated to clear out a paper jam? Someone waiting to print a document. So whenever the the printer jammed, he instructed the central computer to send out this alert to everyone waiting for something to print:
> The printer is jammed, please fix it.
By sending the alert to people with waiting print jobs, he crowdsourced the solution (before that was even a word). The solution was simple and elegant, and it worked ... until the day the new printer arrived.
p.18
To Stallman, it was a betrayal of the hacker ethic, a violation of the shared code that everyone should share code.
p.18
Like open source software, together we are inventing a science of self-improvement.
p.19
Principle #2: Mind hacking is experimental (and you are the experiment)
p.23
Like scientist, write down your results.
p.25
Share your mind hacks with others! The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “While we teach, we learn”, and educators have long known the best way to lock in your own understanding of a topic is to teach it to someone else. Explaining these concepts to other people will not only help them, it will help you, because you will be able to articulate your understanding more clearly.
p.31
You are not your mind!
p.32
If you're a movie geek like me, perhaps you've had the experience of deconstructing a movie as you're watching it. It's the opening credits of The Lord of the Rings, and you're watching the title sequence, analyzing the music. Now comes the first scene, and you're evaluating the actors, admiring the cinematography, imagining the director orchestrating the action. And then ... if it's a good movie, you quickly get lost in it, losing your perspective. You forgot to analyze the movie, because you're in it.
Your mind is like that movie. Just as in the movie theater there is “you” watching a “movie”, in your own head there is “you” watching your “mind”. And like a great piece of cinema, you are absorbed in the movie of your mind: the thoughts, emotions, memories served up in a constant stream.
But the mind is no ordinary movie. It's a 3-D IMAX, Oculus Rift, full-on Sensurround-with-THX epic beamed directly into your head. And it's been playing since birth. So it's no wonder that we're so accustomed to watching it. It's a lifetime habit, and no one's ever told us, “Hey, you're watching a movie.” Instead, they've told us, “This is reality.”
I sometimes picture a virtual reality mask that you pull on, with the headphones and goggles, but also with electrodes that tape to your forehead, beaming thoughts and emotions directly into your brain. After twenty, thirty, forty years of living that way, how would you even remember that you're in a simulation?
p.32
This is why it is so difficult for us to “pull ourselves out of the movie” for very long. If you think it's tough to run out of the movie theater to take a bathroom break, just try stopping the mind movie. In fact, just try being aware that you're watching a mind movie.
p.39
What my chess coach taught me was “metachess”. He taught me how to work on my game, not just work in the game.
Work on your mind, not just in your mind.
Our modern word “meta” comes from the Greek preposition meta, which means “after”. (Aristotle's Metaphysics was simply the book that came after Physics.) In the 20th century, the prefix “meta” evolved into a term meaning “about its own category”, or “an X about X”──for example, a “metatheorom” is a theorem about theorems in general. We use this prefix all the time in modern technology, such as metadata (data that describes other data) or metatags (HTML tags that describe the content of the HTML page itself). We even use it as an adjective, saying “That's meta” to describe concepts such as:
pp.39-40
• Superman reading his own comic book
• Gödel's incompleteness theorems, mathematical proofs showing that
mathematics can never be fully proven14
•
• TV shows that break the fourth wall, like the Doctor Who episode
entitled “The Mind Robber”, in which the Doctor and his companions
face the threat of becoming fictional characters
•
• Metaprogramming, or programs that write new code for themselves
a runtime; a simple example is the JavaScript eval() statement
• Metajoke, such as: “A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar.
The bartender says, ‘What is this, some kind of joke?’”
p.40
In mind hacking, we are not just thinking: we are metathinking, or thinking about our thinking. The technical term for this is “metacognition”. We are analyzing how our thoughts form, the sequence of thoughts that follow each other, how those thoughts drive our emotions and actions, and how they ultimately impact our lives.
p.40
But metathinking is the critical skill to develop for mind hacking.
p.44
Our minds are like that dog, constantly chasing squirrels, mailmen, and passing cars. This is easily observed by simply trying to quiet your mind. Within a few minutes your dog mind will leap up, run around in circles, and pee on the carpet. It doesn't want to sit still, and it doesn't want to obey your commands. What's more, the temptation to let the mind do this is incredibly overwhelming.
pp.44-45
It's as if our minds have been misbehaving for so long that we've tuned out the incessant barking and are content to live with the craziness. In fact, we seem to relish the craziness, to take comfort in the stream of thoughts. I can't emphasize enough how seductive and irresistible our thoughts can be, especially when we're trying not to get lost in them. It is incredible easy to get caught up in the movie──and when we're caught up in it, we're not directing it.
p.45
Now for the good news: like dogs, our minds can be trained. And, like a well-trained dog, our minds can go from a holy terror to man's best friend. If you've ever owned a well-behaved dog, you know the pleasure of having a faithful companion, an obedient helper, and a loyal pal──and your mind can be the same way. (Sorry, cat people. Find your own analogy.)
Truly, your mind can be both your worst enemy and your best friend.
p.45
In this universe, most citizens have no idea where all their attention goes; it just seems to get used up, and there's never enough to go around. Everyone, it seems, has attention deficit disorder.
p.46
He cites the old proverb “It takes attention to make attention”, showing you how to invest attention to create even more of it.
p.46
The idea of an “attention economy”, named by Babson college professor and management consultant Thomas H. Davenport, states that human attention, not money, is the scarce and valuable commodity.1 All those Super bowl advertisers are paying for all that human attention. Time square is such valuable real estate because it attracts so much attention. A tech company with millions of users can be worth billions of dollars, even if it doesn't make a dime in profit, because of its attention-generating power.
p.49
Your mind craves information; that's what it eats.
p.50
The great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained dogs by always ringing a bell before he presented them with food. Eventually he found the dogs would slobber uncontrollably as soon as he rang the bell, even before he had presented the food: their bodies had become “conditioned” to prepare for food when the bell was rung. Similarly, attention-interrupting “tools” like email alerts and instant messaging have conditioned our minds to expect a tiny burst of informational pleasure.
p.51
The key is this retraining is the lost art of concentration, the subject of our next chapter.
“”──
p.56
Ola Kåre Risa of Norway, who wears not only sound-canceling headphones that you might see on a flight but a cap with a long visor and side flaps. His side flaps are hilarious, ensuring that no distractions enter his peripheral vision as he stares at the computer screen. He looks like a horse that's wearing blinders while landing a plane.
p.56
Henry L. Roediger III
“We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that's not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention ”3 (my emphasis).
The fundamental skill these memory athletes have developed is known as “attentional control”, or the ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore. We might call this your ability to concentrate .
Sometimes you'll say, “My attention was wandering”, which is an excellent phrase that shows that you have something called an “attention”, which is sometimes under your control but sometimes goes for a brief walk. This “attention”, this focused point of consciousness, is under continual assault, much of it by the environment you create for yourself.
Some distractions cannot be avoided.
pp.99-100
p.99
“Ten months?” Hertzfeld remarked. “That's impossible.”
Tribble agreed. “The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek”, he explained. “Steve Jobs has a reality distortion field.”
p.99
Tribble went on to explain this “reality distortion field” to Hertzfeld: “In [Jobs's] presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”
pp.99-100
Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating──until he saw it for himself. Hertzfeld later wrote:
The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic
rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend
any fact to fit the purpose at hand. Amazingly, the reality distortion
field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it,
although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often
discuss potential techniques for grounding it ... but after a while
most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.3
p.100
Jobs's “reality distortion field” was a personal refusal to accept limitations that stood in the way of his ideas, to convince himself that any difficulty was surmountable. This “field” was so strong that he was able to convince others that they, too, could achieve the impossible. It was an internal reality so powerful it also became an external reality.
p.119
classic pieces of hacker literature is a text document called The Story of Mel
The Story of Mel
Mel Kaye
p.125
One of the critical messages of Inception is that implanting an idea in someone's mind can have a far-reaching impact on the person's life──for good as well as bad.
We want to use care in choosing our mental loop.
p.125
Remember, your loops create your thoughts, your thoughts create your actions, and your actions create your life.
p.133
food diaries
In addition to education and collaboration, the secret weapon in this approach was keeping a food diary, with participants keeping a list of everything they ate, whether that be on a pad of sticky notes or digital device. While common sense says that keeping a diary would not result in any meaningful weight loss, the participants found that knowing their food choices would be recorded──rather than eaten and forgetten──was a powerful motivator to make better choices. Further, they began to notice patterns in their eating that could only be appreciated when they could write down and take the “meta” view.
The results were astounding. “The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost”, said the study's author, Dr. Jack F. Hollis. “Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.”5
p.133
Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: how creativity works
p.134
Richard R. Peabody, The Common Sense of Drinking, 1931,
p.135
write down the next day's schedule
Then, at the end of the day, the patient reviews the day's schedule, then plans for tomorrow, again writing it down.
p.137
p.140
Allen Downey
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
“Students should read and understand textbooks. That's it.”13
p.142
First, writing things down reminds you of your goals on a regular basis. It's easy for our minds to get distracted, and this recenters your attention on what you have defined for yourself as most important. Writing down your positive loops cements them into your mind.
p.147
Scott Adams
With his analytical mind, Adams tried to reverse-engineer why this technique worked in his books and in various post to his blog.5 While he called his experiences with the repetition technique “fascinating and puzzling” as well as “wonderful and inexplicable”, he also was careful not to attribute them to “voodoo or magic”. Instead, he theorized about a logical explanation, even acknowledging that it might be nothing more than “selective memory” (perhaps he tried the repetition technique multiple times but only remembered this success).
p.147
It turns out they didn't have any special power except for one: they were more likely to notice opportunities.
pp.147-148
As Adams put it, “Optimistic people's field of perception is literally greater.” If you are methodically repeating your goals each day, you are more likely to notice the people and situations that can help you achieve those goals as they present themselves.
p.148
In my experience, this is absolutely true. When you repeat your goals daily, you set your expectations accordingly, and you begin viewing situations in a different light.
p.148
Adams also points out that repeatedly writing things down takes effort. Because you are investing time and energy in this small goal, you are commiting yourself to investing time and energy in your larger goal. It is a way of kick-starting your mind into achieving your dreams, a kind of mental boot-strapping.
p.148
“My favorite explanation ... also has the least evidence to support it”, Adams concludes, “i.e., none.” In this explanation, reality is so mind-bogglingly complex that our minds simply deliver a “highly simplified illusion that we treat as facts.” In this model of reality, the constant repetition of our goals may be a “lever” that we use to create some natural chain of cause and effect, but not a chain we are capable of understanding. So when the results come, by what appears to be luck or coincidence, it is simply by natural laws that are not yet fuly understood. “While this view is unlikely to be correct”, he admits, “it has the advantage of being totally cool to think about.”
pp.148-149
“Here's a good test of your personality”, Adams concludes, in response to the skeptics. “If all of your friends told you that they win money on the slot
machines whenever they stick their fingers in their own ears, would you try it? Or would you assume that since there is no obvious reason it could work, it's not work the effort?”
p.149
Repetition is key. Also, repetition is key.
One of the best parts about living in Boston, besides the wealth of technology talent, is sledding in the winter, It's a thrill seeker's dream, because you can sled as long as you want, as often as you want, and, unlike roller coasters or hallucinogens, it's totally free.
I live near Wellesley College, the renowed all-women's college that has produced notable alumni like Nora Ephron and Hillary Clinton. Wellesley has a sledding hill that is just phenomenally dangerous. It has (what feels like) an 85-degree incline, where you attain (what feels like) speeds of up to 75 miles per hour. On one side of the hill, a fifteen-foot oak branch spreads out across the snow, like a giant, deadly limbo stick. If you don't press your body flat into the sled, you will be decapitated by the tree. It's insane that they allow sledding on the hill at all, but even more insane is that the women of Wellesley college sled down the hill on plastic trays from the dining hall. (It's funnier if you picture Hillary Clinton on a tray.)
As any sledding enthusiast knows, if you get to the hill after a fresh snow, it's just clean powder. Then, as people sled down the hill, it creates grooves, or tracks, in the snow. After a few days the Wellesley students have built snow ramps and moguls at the bottom, so that the sledding down one of these tracks will launch you into orbit.
A few days after a snow, you'll find one set of snow tracks that take you under the Oak tree of death, and another set that will shoot you off the Ramps into hyperspace. Even if you start your sled on another area of the hill, you end up locking into one of those two tracks.
Our minds are like that hill. The constant repetition of our negative loops cuts deep mental grooves, and it's natural for our minds to “lock into” those grooves, even when the negative loops are self-destructive.
p.150
The good news is, through repetition, you can cut new groove. When I take my kids sledding at the hill, we often have to cut a new track, packing down the snow where we want it to go, when physically slowing and redirecting ourselves to the new tracks. The sled “wants” to lock into the existing groove, but by patiently working the new path we can eventually get the sled to lock into the new one instead.
p.187
Roy E. Baumeister and John Tierney's Willpower: rediscovering the greatest human strength
p.187
acting on tiny goals
p.187
The technique that Blaine uses to get back into shape is one that any of us can use: acting on tiny goals. When he goes back in training, he says, “I make tons of weird goals for myself. Like, when I'm jogging in the park in the bike lane, whenever I go over a drawing of a biker, I have to step on it. And not just step on it──I have to hit the head of the biker perfectly with my foot, so that it fits right under my sneaker.”
p.187
He [David Blaine] then explain the magic formula: “Getting your brain wired into little goals and achieving them, that helps you achieve the bigger things you shouldn't be able to do.”
p.187
Think back to Dr. Richard Peabody, who had recovering alcoholics sit down at the end of each day and write down the next day's schedule. The power of that practice was that the alcoholic could make a list of tiny goals that could all be accomplished within twenty-four (24) hours. Achieving those small goals creates a kind of rhythm, a positive momentum that slowly turns the alcoholic's negative spiral into a positive one.
One of the reasons so many of us fail at our goals is that we try to take it all on at once.
p.192
Beautiful Katamari
p.192
All these systems are based on tiny subgoals: complete this mission, finish this level, make it through this challenge. As we discussed at the beginning of this book, the geek mind loves to control and possess a small portion of the world, to know everything these is to know. It drives my kids crazy when we're playing a video game together and I have to find every hidden treasure, unlocking 100 percent of the characters and costumes. But this is the fun of video games: mastering tiny goals that give us tiny rewards, until one day we've conquered the game.
When we think of our personal subgoals like the missions in video games, we can shift our mind-set from “work” to “fun”. After all, video games are a kind of work: you have to learn new skills, think through problems, and compete against other players. But somehow it doesn't feel like work, because there are tangible rewards along the way: you can see how far you've come.
p.230
10. Scott Ambler, “Just Barely Good Enough Models and Documents: An Agile Best Practice”, Agile Modeling, http://agilemodeling.com/essays/barelyGoodEnough.html
p.231
13. Allen B. Downey, “The Textbook Manifesto”, Green Tea Press, Jan. 6, 2010, http://www.greenteapress.com/manifesto.html
14. Richard Wiseman, 59 seconds: change your life in under a minute (New York: Anchor, 2010), 22.
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