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Programming the mind

 
 
xenosss
16:21 / 13.07.04
I've been thinking a lot lately about our minds, always coming back to the metaphor of our minds as computers. We analyze, process, store, and do all the things computers do; albeit at a much faster rate. So where's our programming language, or is communication just that?

Words, sights, sounds, etc. all invoke emotions, a fact advertisers and media have been all to happy to utilize. Even we use that fact, sucking up to our bosses or friends to get favors.

I want to learn about the pseudoscience of language. How certain language affects people, words as viruses, memes, hypnosis, all that good stuff. What is hidden in the words and symbols people use to communicate?

Links, opinions, books, and anything else are appreciated. And if you have any topic related even a little, discuss that too.

Socioneurolinguistic cognitive psychology.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
20:46 / 13.07.04
I'm sure you already know this but the structure of Magic vols 1 and 2 by Richard Bandler and John Grinder are very good introductions to Hypnosis/communication and linguistics

Most of Bandler and Grinders early stuff is great, they did a pretty good job of nailing the basics of Ericksonian language patterns (Milton Erickson MD)

whilst I have no experience of it, I believe Bandler does something called Design Human Engineering, which I believe is a more generative form of NLP


Instead of working on modelling and fixing things in a remedial manner like most NLP techniques, DHE is more to do with how the brain works and utilising the methodolgy for your own good


Sorry for being so Bandler dominated. I have no affiliation with the man and half of me still thinks he is part snake oil salesman but there is another part of me that still clings to the hope and expectation that he is a genius


another area that might interest you (though not specifically what you were asking) is the work of David Nelms

He has devised something called the HAMR method

do a websearch for NELMS+HAMR and you should find his site. Interesting theory


Autogenic training is similar to Hypnosis, I have a book by Kai Kermani that is pretty easy to read and details the technique of talking to your unconscious and willed self change

other books that maybe of interest to you

Undoing Yourself with Energised Meditation. Dr Christopher Hyatt (Yoga....Reichian exercises and meditation


Quantum Psychology. Robert Anton Wilson


Hope that is of some interest to you . I am sure you are well versed in most of this stuff but I hope that some of it is new to you and at least gives you something to read when you get a moment


Joe
 
 
xenosss
20:20 / 14.07.04
Thanks for the info. I've also heard that Burroughs talks about this (even if his viruses are a bit more sci-fi in origin). "Language," William S. Burroughs reminded us, "is a virus from outer space."
 
 
xenosss
16:27 / 18.07.04
There is a theory (or belief) that our experiences our limited by our language. A change in language, thus, would equate to a change in reality. You may quickly discount this by saying that learning a second language doesn't change anything, but that's not what the theory means. A change in language, in the fundamentals, in the semantics, the grammar, the very essence of the language.

What do you think?
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
09:57 / 19.07.04
Sorry to throw more book titles at you but you could do with looking up Robert Anton Wilson's 'Cosmic Trigger' series as he talks about the 'reality tunnels' caused by language, he namechecks Alfred Korzybski, who grew up in a household where four languages were spoken, none of which were English. There are also some good websites out there on 'E-Prime', which you might want to look up, English without the use of the word 'is'.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
11:27 / 19.07.04
Yeah E Prime is interesting. Wilson claims that he did his best to correct all his thinking and speaking into E Prime for a week and the effect on his thought processes was startling
 
 
xenosss
15:57 / 19.07.04
I haven't read nearly as much Wilson as I should. The farthest I've gotten is Schrodinger's Cat and an interview in Disinformation.
 
 
TeN
20:34 / 19.07.04
here's an interesting article on the "alphabet of human thought" proposed by Descartes and Leibniz
 
 
xenosss
00:15 / 20.07.04
In the early 18th century, Gottfried Leibniz outlined a language in which grammatical and logical structure would coincide, thus making possible the automation of thinking.

That sounds pretty interesting. Unfortunately, every site I went to says Leibniz never finished his work, and I can't find out anymore about it. I was lead to "symbolic logic", the Universal Characteristic, and the adaptive toolbox. I am sure I would have found more, but my time is limited and even now I must go. Anyone else have more knowledge?
 
 
TeN
01:10 / 20.07.04
yeah, really. fuck esperanto... I want to speak the universal language of human thought. I can't even begin to imagine how cool that would be. how awesome would it be to write poetry in a language that could convey perfectly every thought that one could possibly think. it sounds too good to be true though... I mean, do all humans speak the same brain-language, so to speak? and why hasn't anyone ever tried to finish this?
 
 
Joetheneophyte
07:15 / 20.07.04
I suppose this could only be answered by a multilingual linguist or what is the other ....I think it is a philologist (hope that is the right term)

I seem to remember that Tolkien was a philologist (an expert in the roots of language)

I don't know whether there is any such universal language....not since the Tower of Babel


I would suspect that there are some rules hardwired into our brains regarding language, Presumably, whilst they don't always follow the same form or grammar...I cannot imagine a language without verbs and nouns, though I also believe that the original language of the people of Hawai contains no tense.....so it is difficult for a non native to understand whether thye are talking about past present or future when reading a translation of this language

I don't really think there is an EARTH langauage as such as in the example above, the way the average Hawai native of fifty years ago looked at the cycles of life must have been fantastically influenced by his or her language

If you routinely do not distinguish in your language, between past, present and future, then your idea of time as a result, is going to be very different than your standard western idea of linear time


I would say that there are probably familiar aspects in MOST (though i am sure somebody on here is clever enough to think of an exception) languages.........again, I can only imagine that most if not all languages have verbs, nouns and adjectives to some degree. These MAYbe hardwired into the language centres of the brain BUT I still believe that the cultural and specific environment and the language used by your peers, makes all but the foundational similarities redundant. To counter my own argument it is worth noting that most linguists and translators have found enough common ground between two languages in the past to allow communication between different tribes/cultures, so this does suggest a level of commonality between all languages at some 'meta' level (sorry to get all NLP here)

I still doubt whether there will ever be a standardised language ......even now chinese is competing with English as the predominant NET language

More likely there will still be a myriad of languages out there but like Spanish and Portugese, there will be enough crossover to make communication possible

What is that weird language that messes my head up....Hinglish?
I watched a program recently that showed an Indian girl talking in what sounded like Hindi but every so often she would say a phrase in English that I could recognise. It was a bizarre thing to listen to, this mish mashing of two languages. That is what I see for the future, rather than any universal language.
Funny enough I was talking to a guy yesterday who was recounting a tale about a member of the Doyle in Ireland....this MP was bemoaning that it was disgraceful and ignorant that 98% of the Irish people do not understand Gaelic, their native tongue. A colleague in the house stood up and said "well you must think us all ignorant as there are only fourteen people in this house who have more than a smattering of the same"

But the important point was that with national pride comes a renewed sense of pride and heritage. Whilst the NET has for the past 20 years, pushed more and more people towards English, it is my belief that the sense of national identity and pride in one's own history, will reassert itself and many people will take up renewed interests in their own heritage.
As the insidious creep of globalisation marches ever on, I can see a revival of Nationalistic pride being a reaction and ergo, a revival in long disused dialects. People's sense of powerlessness with the increasing stranglehold of Corporate greed cannot be stopped but on the individual level, a revival in one's ability to speak a native tongue is at least on some level a stamp of individuality

Shit I do go on and talk nonsense

sorry
 
 
TeN
19:42 / 20.07.04
"I can only imagine that most if not all languages have verbs, nouns and adjectives to some degree"

I'm not sure if there are any natural languages that don't use verbs, nouns, or adjectives, but as far as artificial ones go, it's not hard to eliminate one of them. Getting rid of adjectives is easy, simply treat them like verbs: i.e. instead of saying "the sun is yellow" you say "the sun yellows." To say "the yellow sun," you would then say "the yellowing sun." Jorge Luis Borges proposed a language without nouns. Jack Vance even proposed a language without verbs.
 
 
Lord Morgue
02:02 / 21.07.04
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc.
Anyone tried Psychocybernetics? Or plain old autohypnotism?
The advanced behavioural modification elements used in Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method go wayyy beyond the physical and postural exercises which most people think are the limit of their applications. They both boil down to refining the actual decision-making processes that give us free will. Strangely, heavily religious people can't seem to grasp this last element, like determinism is written into their brains at a fundemental level...
If any of you have read "Brave New World", the doctor who teaches the hero how to control his own behaviour without drugs is based on F.M. Alexander, the founder of the technique, and a mentor of Aldous Huxley.
 
 
Cheap. Easy. Cruel.
13:57 / 21.07.04
Interesting topic. There is a theory that mankind was not truly self-aware/self-determining until the tower of Babel incident. Instead, it is posited that Sumerian man had to go to the temple to get programs (sets of instruction about how to plant crops and other activities vital for the continuance and propagation of the community) called Me.

If someone today were able to speak Sumerian, would they be a neuro-linguistic programmer? Or would they only have an effect on someone who had been raised with the sumerian language?

An interesting book to read that deals with the subject is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It is a fun bit of fiction, but I don't know if I quite buy that pre-rational man was a programmable automaton.
 
 
xenosss
08:07 / 23.07.04
In a conversation elsewhere, someone mentioned language as limiting our ability to express (and thus, I thought, experience). They then went on to point out how art is oftentimes more powerful than any language could ever be. The banging keys of Mozart or whistful strokes of Van Gogh. So we talked more and I posited that maybe art has it's own language, one made of emotions and not words. The theory remained, but that same someone pointed out that art does not contain interaction, the "fundamental basis of language" they say.

So, art seems to be only half a language then. While you can be affected by art, you can not affect it. Languages allow us this power. Any conversation you have is an interaction between you and another, and both of you have the power to influence one another. There is the huge importance of language; it is a tool that allows us to subconsciously conquer and control others or be such taken over.

The two thoughts (art is a powerful communicator, but not a language) bring up the subtle (yet blatant) difference between language and communication. Music and paintings can certainly be used for communcation, but not as language. They are efficient, displaying themselves before our base senses and emotions, but they are still one-sided. However, that's all someone really needs, just that one side. Language offers the option of dual-sided interaction, but it can be in only one direction. TV and radio broadcasts are this way. The shows we watch, the commercials we hear, all designed to utilize language to take over our mind.

Sure, it's crude, but it shows progress can (and should) be made. Maybe this little thread we have going will lead to one of us going off and making huge strides in the cognitive / psychological / neurolinguistic field. Or, maybe this will just lead to more effective advertising.

This reminds me of the old advice to stop watching the TV shows and start watching the ads. I wonder if Test Card F has some relevance to this whole thread.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
08:49 / 23.07.04
Y'know only last night I was doing a websearch for Cut ups +Gysin

the webpage I got to had a column of Gysin text and when you hit a button, it split into three or four and the rearranged text was there for you to decipher messages out of it

Coincedentally,one of the message I got was something along the lines of of "art is 1000x language"

strange that
 
 
Tamayyurt
16:24 / 29.07.04
Autogenic training is similar to Hypnosis, I have a book by Kai Kermani that is pretty easy to read and details the technique of talking to your unconscious and willed self change.

This sounds really interesting, Joe. Do you think you could give us (me) more info about this? Just the best bits.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
21:18 / 31.07.04
I am not articulate enough to do it justice


I can do something though.........I can draw your atention to this website (THIS WEBSITE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME....IN FACT I AM WARY OF ELECTRONIC 'ORGONE' MACHINES....AS THEY, IN MY OPINION (WHICH IS ADMITTEDLY VERY LIMITED) ARE AGAINST DR DEMEO OR DR REICH'S FINDINGS)




www.magitech.com/autogenic/#hyp



Here on this website, you will find a brief but interesting overview of the fundamentals of AutoGenic Training and they are not too dissimilar to the work contained in Dr Kermani's book (though Dr Kermani goes into more detail and whilst a little dry (imo) his work is superior)



Sorry I cannot offer anything but the most fleeting of opinions on this. I would say that it seems to make some intuitive and common sense but I haven't been able to apply myself to the actual practice of following through the training on a day to day basis. I am lazy and always find an excuse to do something different or drink beer, therefore invalidating the cumulative effects


Hope that site is of some interest to you or anybody else curious about Autogenic training


Joe
 
  
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