Prime Time: When Your Unconscious is Thinking You

Unconscious priming--or subliminal priming--is a fascinating topic of cognitive science that is receiving more attention lately.

In a study that appeared in the journal Science in May, a team of English and French neuroscientists performed brain imaging on 18 men and women who were playing a computer game for money. The players held a handgrip and were told that the tighter they squeezed when an image of money flashed on the screen, the more of the loot they could keep.

As expected, the players squeezed harder when the image of a British pound flashed by than when the image of a penny did — regardless of whether they consciously perceived the pictures, many of which flew by subliminally. But the circuits activated in their brains were similar as well: an area called the ventral pallidum was particularly active whenever the participants responded.

“This area is located in what used to be called the reptilian brain, well below the conscious areas of the brain,” said the study’s senior author, Chris Frith, a professor in neuropsychology at University College London who wrote the book “Making Up The Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.”

The results suggest a “bottom-up” decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, if at all, Dr. Frith said.

NYTimes

In "bottom-up" decision-making, subliminal cues "prime" the sub-conscious mind toward a particular response set. Curiously, the effect of sub-conscious priming can last for many years.

Black and white drawings were shown to people during an experiment in 1982. Seventeen years later, the same people (and some more used as a control) have been asked by mail to answer questions about drawings, some of them identical to the ones they had seen 17 years ago, and some different. The people who had participated in the first experiment were primed: they answered more easily to the questions related to the drawings they had seen 17 years ago, whereas the control participants showed no such difference. A funny thing is that some of the participants were unable to consciously remember the first study! They vaguely remembered having participated in psychology experiments, but nothing about this one in particular.Source

Some research has suggested that "priming God" may increase altruistic behaviour. An interesting discussion of this research can be found here.

Combining the bottom-up, subliminal decision making involved in "priming", with the long time duration of priming effects, and possible behavioural effects of "priming God," it is easy to see that many "character traits" of long term and habitual behaviours, might be influenced by early childhood "priming." In other words, decision making that you may feel reflects conscious higher-brain decision-making, may actually come from the lower reptilian brain unconscious--controlling-ghosts from the past.

Combatants in cultural and ideological wars are exquisitely aware of the "mental programming" effects of subliminal priming, and use various techniques in attempts to eradicate past programming to allow present and future programming. Certainly the modern academic lobotomy practised in most university liberal arts and social science programs--heavy slanting of the presentation in favour of one particular point of view, while preventing a balanced presentation of alternative POVs--suggests an attempt at eradicating old programming to clear the way for new programming. Other terms for this re-education process include "consciousness-raising" and "brainwashing."

Early childhood priming can be extremely powerful and long-lasting, resistant to most attempts to change. New methods of studying priming will inevitably be accompanied by new methods of changing "dysfunctional" priming. Crude psychiatric treatments such as electro-convulsive therapy persist in the treatment of intractable depression--even expand into treatment for other conditions such as schizophrenia--because they appear to get results. But less potentially damaging treatments such as targeted low-amplitude electromagnetic brain stimulation offer a more finessed approach to both research and treatment.

While pathologies such as PTSD, Panic, Phobias, etc. represent "priming effects," it is also likely that less well defined counter-productive behaviours that obstruct a person's happiness and success are also a result of priming.

Certainly the "hyper-judgmental" attitudes observed in assembled crowds (see almost any "Oprah" or similar show), reflect a more ominous phenomenon seen in "lynch mobs." The public physical and verbal attacks made on E.O. Wilson, and other intellectual messengers bringing unpopular and non-PC messages reveal similar dysfunctional primings within the attackers. The same priming pathology is seen in violent abortion clinic attackers, muslim suicide bombers, and college professors who verbally assault and grade-discriminate against students who may diverge from the professor's particular prejudices.


It is not that some people are guilty of being influenced by priming prejudice while others are not. It is that some have never confronted their priming prejudices at all. They were indoctrinated, but never worked and fought their way through and beyond the indoctrination. Whether Islamist fanatics, eco-terrorists, clinic bombers, campus PC Thought Police, or members of seemingly benign ideological movements to "shape the minds" of entire generations toward more "correct" ideologies, these practitioners of censorship, destruction, and mental stunting are "true believers" who are still functioning on their subliminal priming, unexamined.

We have the popular mental image of the "zombie," stalking stiffly across the landscape, unconsciously seeking its targets. It is not such a stretch to overlay the zombie image onto the eager ideologue, seeking minds to program.

Brainwashing, Consciousness-Raising, and Cult Indoctrination

"Brainwashing" came to be recognized as a term around 1950, in Mao's attempts to transform revolutionary China. The term came into use in the western world in the USA during the Korean War of the 1950s, when it became known that the Chinese communists were using brainwashing techniques on western prisoners of war.

What is brainwashing?

In the late 1950s, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton studied former prisoners of Korean and Chinese war camps. He determined that they'd undergone a multistep process that began with attacks on the prisoner's sense of self and ended with what appeared to be a change in beliefs. Lifton ultimately defined a set of steps involved in the brainwashing cases he studied:

1. Assault on identity
2. Guilt
3. Self-betrayal
4. Breaking point
5. Leniency
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling of guilt
8. Releasing of guilt
9. Progress and harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth

Each of these stages takes place in an environment of isolation, meaning all "normal" social reference points are unavailable, and mind-clouding techniques like sleep deprivation and malnutrition are typically part of the process. There is often the presence or constant threat of physical harm, which adds to the target's difficulty in thinking critically and independently.

Source.

These methods should be familiar to anyone who has experienced indoctrination into a cult, or the political indoctrination known as "consciousness raising." Consciousness raising is a method of "programming" a person into an extremist philosophy--and is common practise in many leftist and nazi-type organisations. In fact the original method of programming for radical feminists was consciousness raising. It is important to separate the individual from her previous "program", in order to program her into the new ideology.

Our study groups were radicalizing our own consciousness and it suddenly became apparent that women could be doing on a mass scale what we were doing in our own group, that the next logical radical action would be to get the word out about what we were doing. This kind of study would be part of what was necessary to achieve the liberation of women on a mass scale. Source.

Cult indoctrination and indoctrination in muslim extremism follows much the same form as the other types of brainwashing.

* Breaking sessions: that pressure a person until they crack.
* Changing values: to change what is right and wrong.
* Confession: to leave behind the undesirable past.
* Entrancement: open the mind and limit rational reflection.
* Engagement: that draws a person in.
* Exhaustion: so they are less able to resist persuasion.
* Guilt: about the past that they can leave behind.
* Higher purpose: associate desirability with a higher purpose.
* Identity destruction: to make space for the new identity.
* Information control: that blocks out dissuading thoughts.
* Incremental conversion: shifting the person one step at a time.
* Isolation: separating people from dissuasive messages.
* Love Bomb: to hook in the lonely and vulnerable.
* Persistence: never giving up, wearing you down.
* Special language: that offers the allure of power and new meaning.
* Thought-stopping: block out distracting or dissuading thoughts.

Source.
Anyone reading the above list of characteristics of "conversion techniques" will notice similarities between cult techniques, political ideological techniques, and techniques used against prisoners of war in the Korean and Vietnamese wars.
The sad truth is, in leftist dominated universities in the western world, as in muslim and extreme fundamentalist religious schools, such "consciousness raising" types of brainwashing are routinely used in many classes given by women's studies, ethnic studies, political science, and many other departments where political and religious indoctrination is considered more important than preparing the students to be fit to meet the future.

Brain Calibration

Baseball pitchers warm up with practice pitches before every appearance. Basketball players shoot practice hoops before games. Actors practice emoting before acting, singers practice intervals and runs, surgeons go through the sequence of a major surgery before scrubbing. All of these preliminaries are examples of mental calibration.

Calibrating the brain is a priming operation. The brain can be prepped for specific types of performance. But it is not just professional performers and practitioners of high risk procedures who need to calibrate. Every morning when the brain wakes up, it falls into a new dynamic state. If the brain has to achieve a certain level of performance each day, it must be calibrated for that performance. Otherwise, the level of achievement from day to day is left to chance. That is how most people live, by chance. When has popular culture ever offered anything else?

In Palestine the children are calibrated daily to hate the Jew, as they are in Hizballah controlled Lebanon, and much of the arab muslim lands. Hatred of the proper enemy is too important to be left to chance. If a society wants a ready supply of suicide bombers and guerilla fighters, it must begin calibrating minds at an early age.

Christian fundamentalists begin calibrating the minds of their children quite early as well. Sunday School and church, religious schools, camps, bible schools, and so on. Maintaining the proper religious way of thinking is too important to be left to chance. Early morning mass, confession, liturgy, prayer meetings, revivals. If a group wants the next generation to carry on the traditions of the current one, it must begin calibrating minds very early.

But then, those examples are not really the same thing as calibrating for top performance. They are more like brainwashing. But why do so many parents leave the cultivation of the minds of their children to chance and a largely indifferent culture? Affluent societies so often breed listless and goalless children. Decadence is what happens when one generation leaves the minds of the next generations to chance.

People think in basic metaphoric "thought concepts", and combinations of concepts called "thought patterns."

A thought-pattern is always subjectively created, and successively "objectified" by different calibration procedures. The state of consensus (= collective agreement on validity) of any though-pattern is represented by its corresponding calibration history. Since the thought-patterns presented here lack an attempt to describe this history, they are to be considered basically my own. That does not mean, however, that I consider them all as having originated with me. On the contrary, I have often tried to express how I conceive the thought-patterns of others. This is of course an important part of the group-consensus forming calibration process.

Source.

Brain calibration can take many forms--from meditation to mental imaging to neuromuscular practice to estimating distances or calculations, then checking the estimates. More complex forms of calibration are needed for more complex thought patterns. Unfortunately, modern educational practices have not kept up with current findings in neuroscience, but have instead regressed to conform with current whims of "political correctness."

Many professors of educational trends are willing to destroy a society in order to see their methods of social engineering "tried out" on new generations of hapless students. Fortunately, there are others who pay attention to scientific findings, who are outside the reach of the fashionable trendsetting PC social engineers.

There is a lot of need for reform in education, thanks to the PC professors who currently rule the universities and schools of education. Whether they like it or not, this reform is coming.