NamShuB... if the Sh is one letter (as in the Hebrew Shin), isn't that Bushman spelled backwards?
I have yet to read Snowcrash dispite it sitting on my desk for months. I should get around to that. The idea of a Namshab is interesting, though. But the whole idea rests more on the theory of subliminal programming. Like, your subconscious will process what you perceive even if your conscious mind misses it. There was a stink about using this to advertise in the '70s, with the practice being made illegal. However, recently released studies have shown that subliminal advertising did not produce any noticable effects in test groups. So maybe this whole idea is a bit flawed to begin with?
The idea that information received but not understood could still affect the mind is an interesting one, I'll admidt. I can certainly see how it might work. But does it? When we understand something is when changes are made in our brains to file the new information and link it with previous experience. And this understanding is a very conscious process. The moment of Eureka does not creep up on one in sleep, but is a blindingly obviously moment of conscious clarity. Now, it might be a workable approach to give someone segments of an idea until they can piece the whole thing together and understand the results, like studying koans to grasp enlightenment. However, there still has to be enough of a parsable idea there to work on. Cryptic encoding won't work if you can't parse it. So, its just stored as general word data or something else. There may be hidden meaning, but if you can't sense it, you don't receive it. You may hold the data, but its not working on your consciousness unless you can think about it. You also have to be willing to parse it. For example, if you are not seriously trying to understand the purpose of a koan, "What was your name before you were born?" is just a silly question. If koans require conscious work to digest, it follows that a namshab would as well.
So I think the whole idea is flawed, and you can produce a much more effective namshab by carefully and slowly explaining the idea in question to someone in easy to digest terms they can understand. Or hypnotising them first to make them suggestable enough to want to parse what you're feeding them. Ideally both.
And that sceptic article on NLP was really amusing, by the way. |
