I’ll begin again with a question.  What does it take for something to exist?  Let me take a stab at this one.  Is seeing believing?  Is measuring believing?  I love my family.  I would have a hard time pointing to that love though.  I would have an even harder time measuring the love.  I would probably resort to an argument loaded with logical and rhetorical fallacies.  I would list things that I had done and say nonsensical things like “but you know how much I love you”.  In the end I would have accomplished nothing.  Well, almost nothing.  After all of that, if I took a futuristic measuring tool and looked in my wife’s synapses or my son’s synapses, I would measure a change in the representational state in a specific network of neurons.  It’s likely some dopamine and serotonin firing is going on but it’s such a tangled mess of stuff in there that I’d have a hard time pin-pointing the exact location.  The point is that there are a collection of behaviors and artifacts that I can put out in the universe that when each of those people looks at them, they will create a representation of love in each respective mind.

I’ll begin again but from a different angle.  The fact that that one can argue about the existence of a meme is, in a weird recursive way, proof of its existence.  A meme is a representational state in a mind.  When you think of the meme concept and you evaluate the plausibility of the said entity, you are manipulating a meme in your mind to see if it fits with the other existing memes and meta-memes in there.  How does it feel plugged in with there with the other pieces of your world view?  Does it shift your other schema, does it coincide with existing construals?  Are you able to understand it?  How much of life as you know it would you have to redefine based on this new-found understanding?  Are there things in your life that would fall apart that are emotionally keeping you from expanding your umwelt to include that meme?  That whole process is meme manipulation.  Whatever you’re shifting around, the Google searches that you are doing, the changes trends in your browser history and whatever other actions you take in the process were all triggered by some representational state in your mind.

I’ll begin again but from another experience.  Here I am a person surfing the internet and I come across your article; let’s say I’m coming from a position of unconscious ignorance.  I’ve never heard of a meme and my life has not beef affected in the slightest by its absence.  I lack that representational state in my mind.  But now I’ve seen the word “meme”.  For now, it doesn’t have a valence in my mind.  I couldn’t care less about it.  For that matter, let me pretend that I haven’t had over a two decades of genetics and neuroscience training just for shiggles.  I read an article written by an apparent authority (after all, he is writing for a big Psychology blog) and he gives me a great explanation of genetics and seems to be an expert on the topic(or else he wouldn’t be speaking so authoritatively on it- at least not on a blog read by thousands of people).  Now keep in mind that I don’t have two decades of genetics training so I haven’t learned about epigenetics, the environmental effects on gene transcription or fundamental replicator theory.  I have no idea that prions replicate by inducing a conformational change in another nearby prion through proximity and that there are multiple other generally accepted models of replication.  Again, I don’t have any of those representations in my mind, so I’m going to accept the authority’s article that he authored as a knowledgeable expert.  Even if I walk away NOT believing in memetics I have still created a representation, built a model albeit faulty, that I am now carrying around in there.  Several changes have taken place in my mind.

I won’t begin again.  I’ll pick up from where I left off in the last paragraph.  I have forgotten that I read that article on Psych Central and that several of my friends have shared it and discussed it and built representations based on different life experiences.  Some of them have gone on and done some more Googling, which is tickling Google’s algorithms and making the likelihood that a meme-related entity will pop up in each of their search results.  Ignore the fact that there are other derived meaning of memes that are going viral  and demonstrating variation and selection all over the place.  Eventually, a lot of those people will come across the use of the word in varied contexts and will continue to trigger their association processes to retrieve that representation, or maybe create another representation not realizing that they are the same thing.

In the end there is an outside of mind entity that we are each representing in mind.  Each of us has a different set of filters with which we approach that entity.  I won’t go into the details of the semiotics and interactors and artifacts as tools used by memes and of actions as symbols.  I will however point out the irony  in a person loudly proclaiming that mental representations don’t exist as he is in the process of making the very same mental representations in thousands of minds.  I’ll point out that in many of those minds it’s entertaining and that we will patiently wait for your understanding of memetics to reach aperceptive mass.

You see, that’s the thing about memetics.  Until you understand it, it does not exist to you.  Once you understand it you will see it everywhere.  Information is everything and memes are information.

Craig Calvert & Luther Cale

One of the best ways to have an awesome life is to know awesome people.  I interviewed Luther Cale, awesome guy and author of 33 Ways to Reboot Your Life: Double Your Energy, Improve Your Health, and Make an Impact.

1. Did this book idea explode in a rush on the brain, or did it build over time? Either way, what was the moment that jumpstarted it?

I have a new idea every minute, so I think if that if I had started writing this book on a Wednesday instead of a Tuesday, it would have been named Fire Your Fat Cardiologist or something else. As it was, the 33 just stuck with me as well as the idea of rebooting, so I went with it.

I had worked as an executive for ten years at one of the most successful healthcare tech start-ups of the decade, but was waking up with shooting pains in my arms and a dread of going to work. I started to visit the doctor frequently with strange symptoms. I knew that a pill couldn’t cure what ailed me, so I started off on a ten year journey to discover the secrets to healthy and happy living. I wasn’t really doing it for altruistic reasons; I was following a magnetic pull like a homing pigeon does, in attempt to understand more and also to make my life work better.

My journey to me to an experimental community in India, the curanderos of Brazil, a medical spa in West Palm Beach, a mystery school in the mountains of North Georgia, and Qigong and smoothies with four hundred nurses in hotel ballroom in Chattanooga. I also read almost a thousand books in 3 years (yes I know that it insane – almost a book a day – but thankfully, one of the first ones was on Speed Reading).

Through some pretty intense personal experimentation, I stumbled across what worked best for me. I found that there are several small things -  I like to call them energy multipliers – that you can can do that take very little time, maybe 5 minutes or so, but have HUGE positive effects rippling through the rest of your life.

So I have tried to distill down in this book  a series of experiments that anyone can try for themselves. I have narrowed the list to those things that gave the biggest bang for the buck so to speak in terms of that energy multiplier effect. Some are easy, some are hard. Some are free, some are expensive.

Some people will be drawn to some experiments more than others.

I recommend as a starting place for everyone to pick the three that they are drawn to the most & stick with those three for 30 days religiously. Write ‘em down. Put them where you’ll see them. Cross them off for 30 days straight, no excuses. Get an accountability partner if possible.

Then see how you feel in 30 days ….

2.  What is the most fun for you of the 33 ways?

I think for me the most fun was #18 Study the Life and Teachings of Someone Who Has Already Accomplished What You Wish to Accomplish.

Think about this Craig – our entire healthcare system is a sham!

I don’t mean that in some nutter conspiracy or evil pharma way, just that the whole enterprise is mislabeled. It’s not a “healthcare” system at all – it’s a diseasecare system! If it was a health care system, they would teach people to be healthy. They really don’t do that. The whole thing is set up to manage symptoms of disease.

That’s all good and necessary, but if you want to really want to know about health, you need to study people that have been healthy for long periods of time. That’s what I love about the work that Dan Buettner has done with The Blue Zones and then again with Thrive. He studies healthy and happy populations around the planet to understand the secret sauce. I have summarized his conclusions on the main factors that lead to longevity and happiness in Mind Map format for subscribers to my newsletter. Just sign up at www.luthercale.com and you’ll get access to those mind maps right away for free.

Anyone, if one person has accomplished something, it means that it can be accomplished.

So if you want to make money online, study the people that have already done that. How did they start? Who did they learn from? How have they adapted their approach over the years? What strategies and techniques are they using right now? Is there a way to meet them in person and/or learn from them over the internet?

But one caveat – do what they actually do, not what they say to do. Tim Ferris recently outlined the launch of his new book 4-Hour Chef and noted that in week one along, he had articles and interviews in USA Today, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bon Appetit, Outside Magazine, Wired Magazine, CBS This Morning, WNYC, Fox & Friends, The New York Post, and Dr. Oz.

If you think he did all that working a 4 hour work week, you are smoking crack. Do what he does (extensive research, producing tons of content that adds value, concentrated bursts of actions, leverage initial success into bigger success, tap the network, etc.), not what the title of the book says.

Same thing with health. If I get the same results that Dr. Atkins had following his own program, I think I’ll pass. That’s why I say Fire Your Fat Cardiologist. Seek out people that are models of health and haven’t needed a doctor in 20 years and see if you can do some of what they do. I am currently following Dr. Gabriel Cousens, Peter Ragnar, Brian Clement, and Jeff Primack, for example. I have met all of them personally, with the exception of Dr. Cousens, and each has radiant health and taught me one or two things that has stuck with me through the years.

Also, # 4 Sell All Your Crap turned out to be more fun than I thought – especially when I used some of the proceeds to buy tickets to live in Viña del Mar, Chile for a while.

3.  Which of the 33 ways requires the most discipline to keep up? The least?

I think everyone has different inclinations, so this will vary from person to person. For me, the easiest to do is #11: Spend 5 Minutes in the Evening Writing Down Things That You Are Grateful For. I feel like I walk around most of the time in a state of gratitude. And that comes from continuous practice, until it just becomes second nature. But it is one of the greatest levers for actually feeling happy as you walk through life.

The hardest one for me, as I noted in the book, was #7: Attend a Vipassana Mediation Retreat. That was excruciating in a way. Just you and the contents of your mind for 11 days. It’s enough to make you want to go back to watching the Kardashians! But of course, there is a payoff for the effort or I wouldn’t included it. In a way, I think about this one as the anti-dote for our times of constant distraction.

4.  We deal with a lot of scientists. If you had to repackage this book for skeptics, what would you add?

I would encourage more people, including scientist, to become personal scientist.

To experiment on themselves to see what works for them. If all the scientific literature in the world said that standing on one leg brought 73.8% of people intense euphoria, but through experimentation I discovered that for me standing on my head for 5 minutes a day brought intense euphoria, I wouldn’t give one whit what all the papers or people in the world said or what worked for them. I would simply do my 5 minute headstand and get on with my day.

It’s why I go into the jungles of the rainforest to work with the shaman or visit the curenderos in Brazil. Some scientist in a room in Connecticut might think that all these people do is hogwash and has no basis in so-called scientific reality. Hell, I might even think that too. But I’m not afraid to go find out for myself. Book the ticket and hop on a plane and check it out. I’ve paid for all these investigations myself, so I don’t have some bias or sponsor or system to account to. I just want to know for myself.

I saw a doctor from Chicago that had an inoperable tumor at the base of his skull/top of his spine receive an operation in Brazil from a so-called psychic surgeon that didn’t use any anesthesia. Now, my mind doesn’t have a filing drawer for that. But the operation lasted about 26 minutes and there were three other MDs in attendance helping hold the instruments and oversee the procedure (and to make sure this thing wasn’t a sham). I don’t have any long-term follow up study to know what happened to that guy. I do know that I saw him walking the next day of his own volition to a group meditation session, which was remarkable in and of itself.

So, we started with the idea of me winning over skeptics and I introduce the most woo woo thing I can think of. In reality, I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. If people want to make a life that works for them, I think the shortest route is to be clear on what they want, study people who have already achieved something in that area, and then begin intensive personal experimentation to see what works best for them.

5.  Which of the 33 ways do you feel is the scariest?

I think that for scientists, anything to do with energy healing (such as #23 & #30 in my book), would be pretty damn scary. Especially when doing so becomes personal. When you start to see with greater clarity how your inner world and its patterns – both personal and impersonal – have effected your outer world and life, you can’t exactly put that genie back in the bottle. You are then an active participant in what Joseph Campbell has deemed the Hero’s Journey. You are then taking a step that says something like, “I want to achieve excellence in my life. I want to know. I want to use my gifts to the fullest. I take full responsibility for my life and how I use my energy and time in every moment.” Not exactly for the timid.

For most people, I think the scariest thing is failure. That we take a big chance and it doesn’t work out. Then your mind just runs with the idea and somehow, you end up lying in a ditch penniless disappointing everyone your every loved. All in a nano-second in your head. It’s not real, but all of the sudden, it is a real movie in your head, triggering real emotions and real biochemical changes and dictating real actions in the real world.

‘OK, fine I’ll keep the safe job that I only sort of like so THAT doesn’t happen.’

Most of have not even begun to scratch the surface of polishing our greatest gifts and giving them continually without holding anything back. Would the world be a better place is we all did this? I think so, at least for more of us.

Most of us have another 70 to 150 years, so let’s give it a try. If we re-brand failure as ‘learning,’ then what have we got to lose? We can only grow stronger.

6.  Is it OK to be scared of your book? Is being scared at all OK?

Sure. Meaningful change is almost always accompanied by the emotion of fear or one of its cousins. I think the people who master change have learned an important trick. They feel the same initial prick of fear, but learn to laugh at it or channel it to meaningful use and then get on with it.

I remember reading a Ram Dass interview where he said after more than forty years of meditation that he had not lost a single neurosis. Not one. He just said that now we recognized them when the showed up and instead of freaking out, he just laughed and invited them to a cup of tea and a chat.

I think a healthy attitude to failure is like that.

‘Oh, great. Well I just learned how not to do a book launch. Awesome. For my next book launch, ain’t nothing going to stop me.”

I mean what’s the big deal? So I just told the grocery lady at my local Supermercado that I lust for her instead of how hot it is in the store. The world keeps turning. I think I even saw her crack a smile.

7.  Can you share your biggest success that came from the book? What about your biggest failure? What did you learn from that failure?

My biggest success was without a doubt cultivating the attitude of gratitude. I constantly walk around grateful for my life. For the people in it. For the opportunities in it. For the teachers and students I’ve met. For all the places I’ve gotten to travel. For my family. I was adopted at three weeks old, along with my twin sister, and always felt like I won some sort of cosmic lottery, so this one came a little easier for me. But still I had to practice to stepping back from daily stress and frustration and ambition and ideas, and saying, “Whoa. Dude, you got a lot to be thankful for. Let’s start with the fresh air and the sun shining.” This practice, while deceptively simple, has had the most profound effect on my feeling happy most of the time.

My biggest failure probably has to do with maintaining the healthy eating habits. It’s like I have been to the mountaintop and tasted the sweet nectar and then somehow fell into the fog of forgetfulness. I know what to do and do that most of the time, but then maybe will travel to a new place or make one exception, and then wake up three weeks later like ‘how did i end up sleeping under a dumpster in Detroit.”

But then you get back on the horse and start riding.

8.  Is your book for everyone, mostly everyone, or just for some?

My book is for people that are serious about having more energy and achieving some sort of breakthrough in their lives this year. Not everyone wants to do that and that’s OK.

9.  Can you give us a sneak peak at a reboot technique you trimmed from the book? Surely there is a 34th…

Because of the great response I’ve gotten from the first list, I have in fact, prepared a sequel. It will be coming out on Amazon later this year, with advance copies going out to subscribers of my email list.

I’ll give you a teaser with 2 physical things that you can do that will make a big difference … #1 Supplement with Blue Green Algae and #2 Wear Barefoot Shoes. For #1, I recommend a brand like E3Live in the frozen form. For #2, I am currently wearing Luna Sandals, although there are numerous great brands like Vibram FiveFingers and Vivobarefoot. If you need inspiration for #2, read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It’s one of my favorite books and a great story.

He’s been framed for jumping, but I wouldn’t advise it.

Every day, all day you are walking into situations in which you are being framed. Not being aware of it only makes you more susceptible to having your brain and behavior bent to do someone else’s bidding. In order to be able to defend yourself from these situations, and see where others leave themselves open to reframing and idea injection and schema modification let’s dive into the neuroscience of framing.

I’m assuming that you have already read the introductory posts Persuasion Science:Begin Here, and Information is Everything: Persuasion Science and Framing. If you haven’t, please take the time to build your persuasion science foundation by reading those posts.

Having read those two posts, you now have the correct contextual cues to pick up the subtleties of the persuasion techniques that we will be learning. You have just been framed! What does that mean and what are the implications?

What does it mean to be framed by neuroscience?

It means I have you right where I want you. Simple humans walk around all day thinking that they control their own thoughts. We don’t! First of all you have a collection of automatic thoughts bubbling in your head all day You know, the voices in your head. Yep they’re real–if they weren’t, you wouldn’t be hearing them.

Now before you have yourself carted off to a padded room with mesh windows, let’s deconstruct this idea. Let’s first stop calling them voices and refer to them as thoughts. Like love and anger, those are real and nobody else can see or hear them. I know…I know Hulk Smash!!!! Well, that leads right into my next point.

Your automatic thoughts, secret voices, intuition provide impulsive and reactive responses to environmental cues based on schema that you’ve been collecting since before you were born. Schema are a collection of mental models of how the world works.

When you perceive certain elements in your environment in combination it signals you to start looking for other elements to confirm that your suspected hypothesis is correct.   Later we’ll discuss how this makes you susceptible to confirmation bias.

Is talking to yourself bad?

If you talk to yourself, you’re not alone.  Most people do.  We let these conversations run…wait for it… automatically.  Some people use the aphorism about trusting intuition as an excuse for impulsive poor decision making.

Unless you are schizophrenic (or contextually psychotic), that constant stream of thoughts are often driven by the framing of others. These thoughts often originate from the activation of your associative memory (including the associative cortex) in response to stimuli. And when it comes to stimuli, it is either external or a collection of internal stimuli that was originally framed by an external source.  Learn to control the input, and over the course of time you can learn to control everything in your brain.

Some people treat these internal voices like something magical.  If anything about my description sounds magical, please go back and read it again.  There is no magic here, only persuasion science.

How do automatic thoughts affect your behavior?

The parts of your environment that catch your attention initially trigger your automatic thoughts.  They do this by being similar enough to existing schema in your mind to be recognized but by having just enough elements of difference to trigger a touch of surprise and cognitive dissonance to make you pay attention.

As you walk around with your automatic thoughts you compare them to your underlying rules (personal schemas) and come up with a reaction.  We’ll be going much deeper into these details soon and having a great time at it.  For now let’s pop back up to the surface.  What triggers your automatic thoughts?  Frames!  Frames.Frames Frames!

A combination of contextual cues in the environment are picked up by your perception and send your brain automatically looking for (and more likely to find) other related cues.  In some cases and in a hurry we may jump to conclusions and assume that the other cues are present to the point of seeing them.

Next Steps in the Neuroscience of Framing

On the next post we’ll be examining some visual and cognitive illusions that demonstrate what happens when schemata are violated.  We’ll also look at attention-blindness(what happens when you are busy pattern matching).

Here is how you can put framing to immediate use. Either you or somebody you know will soon have a cold. Do you know what the research says is the best remedy? Framing!

This is how you get a team’s sound and fury to signify somethingness.

You and I have only one point of connection.  The symbols that you are reading on this page from somewhere, maybe halfway around the world, are the only means through which I can change anything about you.  That should give you a certain measure of safety.  Don’t get comfortable with that feeling; I’m going to exchange it for reality.

Imagine for a few minutes that I wanted you to finish reading this post and go about your life as if nothing had changed but check your rear-view mirror every time that you are in your car.  Stop for a minute and imagine the ways in which I could accomplish this right now without you ever stopping by Click The Toad again.  Did you stop and come up with one way?  If you didn’t, then please do so now.  It’s not like I’m asking you to go out to your car and look in the rear-view mirror right this instant.  Instead I’m suggesting that you briefly think about going to your car and look in the rear-view.

How would I accomplish this simple task using information?  I could cater to your sense of enlightened self-interest by sharing the statistic that X% of injuries to children happen because parents fail to look in the rear-view while backing out of the driveway.  I could then share with you a story about  Lisa, a six-year-old in my neighborhood that died last week after spending six weeks in the hospital.  Her mother, Lauren, was backing out of their driveway on her way to pick up her brother Michael from football practice and neglected to check behind her.  Lauren had sent Lisa next door to play with Debbie’s daughter Brea.  She was not aware that while she was getting dressed to go pick up Michael, Brea and Lisa had returned to the driveway to continue the chalk drawings that the four of you had started yesterday.

Before you reach for your box of tissue, I’d like to pause for a short mental exercise.  How do you feel about the characters in this story?  Are you angry at Debbie for not calling Lauren to let her know that the kids were now in her yard?  How do you feel about Lauren for not checking the rear-view mirror?

I suppose a little more information would be helpful.  After all, you must be terribly curious what kind of person Lauren must be to barrel out of her driveway recklessly without so much as a glance at the rear-view mirror.

It seems that Michael senior had been stuck late at the clinic and had called Lauren at the last minute to go pick up Michael.  Lauren and Michael were arguing on the phone as she was coming out of the driveway because she had mentioned to Michael that she noticed that he had no patients scheduled this afternoon, and that this was the second time in the last two weeks that he had been “stuck late” despite an empty afternoon schedule.  As details of the conversation emerged it came out that Lauren had also mentioned to Michael that she had driven past the clinic the last time that this happened to find only Michael’s Mercedes and a nursing intern’s Honda Accord parked outside the clinic.  She had fully intended to drive over to the clinic on the way to the football field to see if the same coincidence had taken place again.

I would give you more information about this situation but I don’t have any yet.  Let’s stop to think about the role that information is playing here.  One of the first things that I’d like to think about is framing.  Though we’ll be diving into the power of framing and how it used used in persuasion, as well as the neuroscientific basis of framing and the associated confirmation bias and other biases, I’d like to first think through where we are after having read the above story.

First of all I’d like to put your mind at ease by letting you know that I entirely made up the story above.  Does that decrease your curiosity about what Lauren would have found when she drove past Michael’s clinic?  Does that take away the pain that you felt about the loss of Lisa’s imaginary life?  Most importantly, will this story and its characters entirely evaporate from your mind with the information that it is fiction, or does it and the memory traces continue to live in your mind waiting to be triggered the next time that you get in your car, see your kids outside playing on the ground, or wonder why your husband is staying late at work yet again?

We’ll dissect this story and the information contained within in several different ways in the next few weeks.  First we’ll look at the memetic triggers embedded in the story.  Then we’ll poke around some of the representation taking place in the story. We’ll even look at some neat concepts, such as misattribution of arousal, and how they are used in persuasion science.

Dr. Mani Saint-Victor, neuroscientist

I’d like to begin with a simple request.  As you read this and the following thoughts that I’ve poured onto the internet, treat them as fiction. Allow your imagination to be lulled to a comfortable place where the ideas that I am sharing do not threaten your core knowledge and understanding of the world.  It may help to pause from time to time while reading these thoughts to think, “What if?”

If you’re willing to accept that request, then it is my great pleasure to welcome you into my mind and to begin to inject ideas into yours.  We will start very simply.  If something doesn’t make sense then feel free to ask clarifying questions.  If something that I read  sparks your curiosity then I welcome questions that may take us down a shared rabbit hole.  We will progress quickly.  I am often attracted to an idea that I know will fit into the overall model that I am constructing but am not sure quite how.  I hope that you’ll forgive the occasional random digression and trust that if you stick around  we will come to a shared understanding of how it fits in the big picture.

Finally there will be some pain.  Call it growing pain.  At several points in this process you will find yourself thinking uncomfortable thoughts.  You may surprise yourself by blurting something entirely out of character to your friend or loved one driven by an irresistible urge to share some of your new-found ideas with someone outside of your virtual universe.  You will look and sound crazy.  I will not come to your rescue.  I’m used to and comfortable with looking and sounding crazy.  When you are able to bring others around to your way of thinking, then you’ll know that you are mastering persuasion science.

With that out out the way you’re ready to hop in.  Start with Information is Everything.

Ready to continue your persuasion science journey?