If you are reading this blog, you are curious about Human nature. If you are curious about Human nature, there is a book you ABSOLUTELY have to read.  It’s the book I just finished.

Daniel Kahneman is a Professor of psychology. An extraordinary one. A psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economic Science.
Together with his long time collaborator Amos Tversky, they conducted research since the 1970’s that have disproved the widely accepted economic model which traditionally assumes that humans are rational and maximise utility.
Their research lead to the development of a new science called ‘Behavioural Economics’ based on the assumption that humans are irrational, and that we tend to be influenced by data that is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand.

For example, in one experiment they asked college students two questions:
“How happy are you with your life in general?” and “How many dates did you have last month?“
When asked in this order they found almost no correlation. However, simply changing the order of the questions influenced the students a great deal: those who had been on a lot of dates rated themselves as much happier than those who had not.

In another experiment in Germany, they found that experienced judges were much more likely to give shoplifters a longer sentence if they had rolled a dice loaded to give a higher number just before making that decision.

‘Thinking, Fast & Slow“‘ is a great way to start the year: after reading the book, you will feel completely comfortable being as irrational as you want, and let’s face it, nothing is more liberating than irrationality.

Another way to understand Human nature and the complex processes behind our decision making is to take one of the NLP courses that we have lined up for you this year. Visit the schedule of all courses to read more about them.

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When we are driven by a need to be right, conflict arises. Listen to this TEDx talk by Jim Ferrell.

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Are we in control of financial markets, our landscapes, communication and ultimately of our universe? According to Kevin Slavin, as algorithms are increasingly used to break out ‘big things into small things’ and build ‘small things back into big things’ we have less and less control over our universe. In this TedGlobal talk, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture.

‘We are riding these things that we can no longer read’ and we lost sense of our world. You can find those algorithms everywhere, in financial markets, but everywhere else. Algorithms lock in loops with each other without human supervision. Netflix “pragmatic chaos’ for example is trying to understand what movie you want to watch in order to present it to you. ‘Epagogix’ is an algorithm that movie moguls use to determine whether a movie will be a hit or not. Cleaning robots are algorithm based. Have you ever been in a button-free lift (one of those where you have to select your floor before you enter the lift).

We are increasingly designing our world with algorithms. ‘If you are a wall street algorithm and you are 5 micro-seconds late, you are a loser’. The closer you are from the place that the internet is distributed from, the more advantage you have. So algorithms trading companies hollow out building next to the building where the internet originate to close the deal 3 micro seconds faster, and gain that competitive advantage and squeeze revenue out of that space.

We are now writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control. Which leads to a question that has been at the centre of philosophers and scientists attention for a few decades now: do we have enough wisdom to handle the complexity that we have created in the world? The answer so far has been negative.

Wisdom is not taught as a skill, but can be developped in many ways. At The MasterMinds, we hope to make a contribution through the trainings and the experiences we facilitate for the public (check the schedule of courses here).

Developping the ability to think systemically is one of the requirements for the leaders of the 21st Century who will be faced with a world that is increasingly complex and uncertain. We address this specific issue during the Collective Values module of the NLP Master Practitioner Certification course, based on the work of Clare Graves (next course in November 2011).

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A very interesting Newsweek article on how American children are being misdiagnosed as suffering from bi-polar disorder and the dire consequences highlights the relationship between language and our health.

In his article, Stuart Kaplan, a child psychiatrist with nearly 50 years experience, talks about the fad diagnosis that launched bi-polar disorder as a juvenile disease and the subsequent 40-fold increase of outpatient office visits for children and adolescents with bipolar disorder from 20,000 in 1994–95 to 800,000 in 2002-03. “Before 1995, bipolar disorder, once known as manic-depressive illness, was rarely diagnosed in children; today nearly one third of all children and adolescents discharged from child psychiatric hospitals are diagnosed with the disorder and medicated accordingly”.

What he tags as ‘trendy thinking’ started in the 1990s, is founded on shaky scientific grounds he says (notably that the symptoms for children bi-polar disorder include behaviours that are natural in children, and that several of the studies done by some leading scholars on the disease are based entirely on reports by parents).

Children (mis)diagnosed with bi-polar disorder “will likely be given dangerous adult medications with no known effectiveness for children and plenty of known dangers. One of these is the powerful drug valproate, a medication for seizure disorders, which has proved useful as a “mood stabilizer” in the treatment of bipolar adults but has yielded anything but clear results in children. The side effects can include fatal damage to the liver, pancreas, and brain, as well as the masculinization of female patients”. The issue is serious.

It is well worth reading the whole article which is an eye-opener on how a certain type of medicine is practiced and the consequences on our health.

NLP is a study of how language not only describes but literally determines the world we live in. And this article is a good illustration of this.

Take ‘nominalisation’ for example. A nominalisation is the process of turning a verb (i.e. a process which has movement) into a noun (thereby freezing it in time). For example: blood pressure is a noun that refers to the how the blood flows (a process) in our body. Virtually all diseases are nominalisations (i.e. a name that describes a process that is happening inside the body).

A process has movement, and can therefore easily be changed, but nouns refer to something that IS. The issue with nominalisations is that it becomes very difficult to see a way out of it.

Then, there is the issue of the psychology behind influence. When someone in a position of authority/celebrity (a fortune teller, a doctor, your parents, a friend, a celebrity etc…) tells us something, we tend to believe it (read “Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion”, by Robert Cialdini for a very good study of those mechanisms at work). So when ‘a Harvard child-psychiatry group led by Dr. Joseph Biederman, a prominent supporter of the diagnosis, recently insisted, “Juvenile bipolar disorder is a serious illness that is estimated to affect approximately 1 percent to 4 percent of children’ most people, even psychiatrists, will deem it to be true.

Another dimension of influence is that, as propagandist and advertisers know, the more we see and hear a message, the more familiar it becomes and the more we tend to believe it is true.

Finally, the more we invest (time, money, efforts) in something, the more attached we become to it because our focus becomes solely concentrated on the subject we study. Someone who specialises in studying bi-polar disorder in small children will more likely indeed find that the disease exists because the mind is programmed this way.

Have you ever wondered how psychiatrists know that someone suffers from a mental disorder? All mental disorders are compiled in a ‘bible’, a book called the DSM (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). The book is published by the American Psychiatric Association, but is used outside the US as well. There have been several editions of the DSM since its first edition in 1952, the DSM in use nowadays is the DSM 4 published in 1994, and a major review is to be published in 2013 (DSM 5).

Of course, we need objective references and  scientific criteria in medicine, hence the necessity for a reference book such as the DSM. And it is also true that putting a noun in print and making it a ‘condition’ has a huge influence on how we see the condition, which is why the revision of the DSM attracts so much criticism. In the first edition of the DSM published in 1952, homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder. What would we do with this nowadays? Societies evolve with time and societal beliefs change.

Kaplan laments that ‘in the U.S., popular culture has had an outsize influence on psychiatry, […] the popular debut of a medical disorder began with the publication of a book, The Bipolar Child, by Dr. Demitri Papolos and Janice Papolos, a husband-and-wife team. As part of the book’s promotion, the authors were featured on the show 20/20. Within 30 minutes of the segment’s airing, 20/20 received more than 6,000 emails. Shortly thereafter, the authors appeared on Oprah and eventually sold more than 200,000 copies of their book’.

It is not possible for the human mind to be completely objective (see the post ‘the limits of reason’ in The MasterMinds Blog), but it is worth keeping an open mind and getting a wide range of information on subjects that affect us as deeply as out health.

Click here to check the schedule of courses and certification trainings on language and communication that will change how you understand information.

NB1: Kaplan is a child psychiatrist and a clinical professor of psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine. This article is an adaptation from his book, Your Child Does Not Have Bipolar Disorder: How Bad Science and Good Public Relations Created the Diagnosis.

NB2: For more on the business model of the pharmaceutical industry and the business of defining mental illness, read this post on The MasterMinds blog.

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‎“Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neuro-audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language”…

Biologist Mark Pagel shares a theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language and transformed humanity in the process.

Did you know that the European Union spends over 1 billion Euros every year just on translating between the 23 languages of its members countries? Pagel makes the point that language has been shaped by the evolution needs and that our world requires cooperation more than ever before. Is it far fetched then to think that we are heading toward a one language world? Watch the Ted video to find out.

And click here to check the schedule of courses on language and communication.

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Remember Mona Lisa? What was she thinking about?

There is more to a smile than what we usually think. Research has shown that smiling & laughing can reduce stress, improve the immune system, and even could help with recovering from certain diseases. The most famous case is Norman Cousins’ recovery from (what is now thought to be) reactive arthritis which he claims in his book “Anatomy of an Illness” he cured with mega-doses of Vitamin C and heavy doses of daily laughter. He mentions : “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” he reported. “When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.”

Many Eastern traditions have also incorporated laughter as part of a daily set of practices such as Laughing Yoga and Laughing Qi Gong. The power of the Taoist ‘Inner Smile’ meditations has been well documented (we teach some of those practices during our Beat Stress, Pill Free half day workshop. Check date for the next one on the schedule of all courses webpage)

Watch the Ted video below where Ron Gutman reviews a number of studies about smiling, and reveals some unexpected results.

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The only think you need to do now is to watch this short video. I made a mental note to remember Heather Dorniden next time I hit the wall.

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BaGuaZhang andTaiJiQuan master, Guo Sifu, explains and demonstrates some key fighting concepts of the Chinese Martial Arts. I use this as a metaphor to explain what powerful communicators do, so this video is valuable even (especially?) for those who are NOT into martial arts. Powerful communicators are trained in those techniques. although not physically.

Just hear sifu Guo’s words (or if you don’t speak Mandarin, read them) while holding in your mind a picture of the flow of communication instead of physical sparring.

‘Control your centre’: know your outcome & hold your focus.

‘Attacking the beginning’: when there is softness on the other side, use strength (when yin is present, use yang).

‘Asking for force’: ask for force on one side to induce resistance there, then use strength on the other side.

‘Avoid the substantial and attacking the empty’: You will encounter much more resistance in places where force is focused, so go for the line of least resistance. If there is strength somewhere, there must be weakness somewhere else. This, by the way is the foundation of permissive (or Ericksonian) hypnosis. Learning to displace resistance is a skill that the most successful coaches & hypnotherapists learn early on, as well as the most effective salesmen!

‘Generating power’: you must practice many times to unify the power from your whole body. In other words, practice congruence to be congruent. The implications of this run deep: coaches/hypnotherapists will not be able to actualise in their client what they do not believe to be possible themselves. How congruent am I about the possibility for change in others and myself?

‘Rolling’: finally, scatter strength by rolling. In other words, keep in movement and keep the movement open to all possible directions.

Finally, ‘people are living things’ he says, a reminder that all human relationships are a wave riding exercise, nothing being constant or permanent.

Although we do not use such war-like frame of reference, a lot of this applies in communication when, as coach or hypnotherapist, we need to assist people to change deeply entrenched patterns of thought and behaviour.  The patterns of language used in Ericksonian Hypnosis for example are effectively very powerful covert reframes that we can use to displace resistance and shake models of the world that hold people within the walls of their own limitations.

Want to build up your communication skills, click here to TheMasterMinds schedule of all courses webpage, and read about the certification courses we offer in NLP, Hypnosis and communication. Click here to join The MasterMinds Member’s list.

Enjoy the video, and post any comments below.

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In a few years time, this will be our daily reality.

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A changing environment puts pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to reshape its business model.

NY Times Drug Firms Face Billions in Losses as 2011 Patents end.

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