Neural Genie: mind programming
I’ve been reading “smart thinking” or self improvement books for as long as I can remember. I think it’s rather strange that the education system generally tries to get us to learn without teaching us how to learn in the first place.
Everyone is different, and the way you learn best may not work for me. However, I was lucky enough to stumble upon methods that were useful to me at the right time, for example Tony Buzan’s “mind mapping” technique and the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 5BX exercise plan. The exercise plan had been around for a long time before I began using it, but it was simple and progressive. This is relevant to my “mind coding” technique that I’m writing about here.
This “mind coding” is not complicated, it doesn’t rely on magic, it’s based on the best science I can find and it should work for everyone.
Before I begin, what others people tell us about ourselves has a big effect on us, even if we don’t think it does. So let me tell you right now that I’m sure you are a content, competent and worthy person.
So…. the self help and smart thinking books. After a while, I realised that most of them contained the same things, just packaged up in a different way, with different gimmicks. I also realised that all of the instruction books in the world are useless unless we do something active relating to them, so my first step was to create my own “smart thinking summaries”, which I may publish here some day.
While summarising my research, I realised something that seems stupidly obvious upon reflection, so feel free to think “derrrrr”! The thing is, even though I’m obviously enthusiastic about engineering and the adventures it can take us on, psychology and mastery of the mind is probably even more important.
I can create a beautiful engineering masterpiece, but I can’t necessarily sell it. Look at how John Harrison’s clocks revolutionised timekeeping, and hence the determination of longitude so that we could finally navigate safely on the high seas. Yet the minds and egos of the powers-that-be (astronomers) did not give any value to this solution because it was not based on what they thought was important – astronomy. On the other hand, someone can create something mediocre and make our minds think that it’s great. Look at Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime drinks.
I’ve been fortunate to be successful in lots of areas of my life, and to be involved in lots of adventures based around engineering, but a lot of that success has nothing to do with engineering. Winning proposals for missions is as much about “selling” the team as it is the technology and strategy behind the proposal. Of course, part of the sales pitch is having the experience of successful missions behind us, but you get the point.
And I wouldn’t even think about proposing a mission unless I can convince my mind that it’s going to be a fun, exciting and worthwhile thing to do. So there’s a benefit to understanding how our own minds work, and how we can influence others. If we can change someone else’s mind, we can help them to feel happy and successful whatever else is going on in their lives – within reason. The same is true for changing our own minds. It has been shown over and over again that it’s not our real situation that affects us, but how we perceive it. Many “successful” people are unhappy. Many people who have tough lives are content.
Mastery of minds is important. The more I researched the mind, the more I realised that it’s the subconscious that’s most important. Again, feel free to think “derrrrr”! Intuitively (ie via the subconscious!) I already knew this. I’ve used lists that have brought good things into my life. And solving treasure hunts is difficult. I’ve solved and won enough hunts to know that I certainly don’t use a logical, conscious process to crack them. I fill my head with the best information I can, memorise clues, and then forget the hunt and do something different. If the answer is in my mind at all, it pops into my consciousness only when I am not looking directly for it. It’s a bit like trying to look at an object in the sky at night. If you stare at it, you won’t see it, because it will be in your night-vision’s blind spot. You need to look to one side, and see the object with your peripheral vision. The subconscious is like your peripheral vision.
I’ve known plenty of people who just believed that something good was going to come along, and it did. There are lots of demonstrations of people successfully using affirmations. Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, is a particularly good example. However skeptical people are of these techniques, as a scientist and engineer, the only things I care about are whether they work and can be replicated. Unless these people are lying, there’s something in it, and how can Scott Adams be lying about becoming a world famous cartoonist?!
I also noticed that people who were successfully using their subconscious to bring about what they wanted weren’t all using the same technique. Again, this may be obvious to you, but it occurred to me that the only important thing is that we believe in the method that we are using.
It became obvious that if you have a special place to write down what you want and expect to happen, that would be powerful. This is like the exercise plan of the 5BX programme that I mentioned above. Additionally, like 5BX, you begin with simple, easy things that you know will happen. This trains the subconscious to look out for the things that you want, directs you towards that thing without you needing to be aware of it, and most importantly, reinforces that whatever you write in the special place will happen. As time goes by, you write down increasingly ambitious things.
This is not “manifestation”, it’s simply finding a way for your subconscious mind to work for you to help you to achieve what you want – “coding” the subconscious. Since the subconscious has a surprising effect on your mind, body and environment, it’s potentially a very powerful method. Ideally, a lot of people will try it to prove this, and I can then get feedback to perfect the method.
I wanted to get into app creation anyway, and I thought an app would be the perfect opportunity to demonstrate this technique. I worked with someone to produce a simple Android app, Neural Genie: mind programming. I have no idea about promoting things on Google Play, so it’s quite possible that that only a lucky few will find their way to it. I’m not trying to sell it here – I think that I’ve written enough about the method for you to try it using just a pen and nice notebook – though there is something secret about the app that makes it more powerful 🙂