Video Source: Shots of Awe
“To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior.” – Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics
Jason Silva talks about the 3 steps of Psycho-Cybernetics, which George Carlin credited for much of his success:
Psycho-cybernetics has to do with a way of programming your brain to exploit its pattern recognizing capacities. In other words, the brain is a goal seeking mechanism. And so he talks about creating a set of impressions and your brain; sort of pre-decide the kind of patterns it’s going to be on the lookout for.
So the first idea, of course, is to come up with an idea; think of a joke; come up with an insight. There's the initial impression – the initial creative thought. So impression number one is the moment you think of it.
Impression number two is write it down; record it; transcribe it. That's impressive number two.
Impression number three is review your notes later in the day. Go through the things you thought about. Look at the digital paper trail and everything you wrote down – everything you thought of.
Then after those three impression (the initial thought, the writing it down, and the reflecting upon later), you’ve imprinted in your brain that meta-pattern.
Then later on – that day, that week, that whatever – you going to start connecting the dots. Everywhere you go you can haveserendipitous encounters with things that are connected to that initial idea. You go to a bookstore and every book you open to any single page will reveal a clue.
Essentially you’re priming your brain to find patterns and connections to this particular thing. It's a way of cultivating curiosity and cultivating mind maps and neural networks in a way. And then again you find that the world is indeed full of clues and you can read your way through it. You just have to have to figure out what you're looking for and you’ve got to program that into your subconscious.
So that's a Psycho-Cybernetics.
