(outlink) Complete vibing framework

Over on mASF, Jon King (jonking69@yahoo.com) just posted on VIBING: One Framework- 260 Questions, which gives you a nice framework for full

The post gives a series of canned, open-ended questions that can be used to keep a conversation going, and going, and going. These are also mostly questions that come up from time to time to all of us. By having them written down beforehand, you can spend time making up good answers to each of them - helping with conversation later.

Previous vibing post: Complete guide to vibing

(outlink) "Drug of Choice" induction - get drunk for free!

This is something I've been looking for for a long time: The Drug of Choice induction. Get high, get drunk, get whatever - for free.

Actually, it turn out to be a variant of something I already do: Basically, pace the experience from the start, going through different sense modalities to call up past memories clearly, then repeat to reinforce. It's probably possible to make this even stronger by fractionating (going out of the experience and back again.)

Different eye usage patterns between east and west?!?

Easterners and westerners use their eyes differently? Huh? Sounds like another thing to learn - and something that might give a valuable different perspective...

Article in from National Geographic: Chinese, Americans Truly See Differently, Study Says

(outlink) A Complete Guide to Vibing

Thundercat just reproduced Spirit Fingers' post A Complete Guide to Vibing, which seems like a must read. The article covers

1. Beginning vibing: Always having spontaneous conversational material, and solving the problem of “stalling out.”
   
2. Set-up questions: How to vibe when the girl gives you nothing to vibe off of.
   
3. Timing: How to be completely spontaneous by vibing only off currently relevant topics.
   
4. Advanced vibing: Leading the conversation away from negative and boring topics, and towards emotionally powerful topics.
   

This might be just the thing for those that don't always know what to say or how to say it.

Next post on vibing: Complete Vibing Framework

Using deletion for influence

Dan O'Day has just (?) published a great PDF on using deletion to make a message stronger. It's targetted at advertising, and is probably true everywhere.

Salute to Seducing The Buyer for the heads up. A blog always worth reading. (I disagree with the quote about neurological influence, though - it's irrelevant and lacks a reference in the original source cited.)

(book w/free chapters) Transforming Your Self: Becoming who you want to be

Transforming Your Self: becoming who you want to be by Steve Andreas seems quite interesting. The topic is how to change your view of yourself, and what views to chose to get a positive result.

The parts of the free chapters I've seen are not particularly radical, yet the techniques used is simple, good NLP work. "Creating a New Quality of Self-concept" (chapter 9) goes through a real-life example of building the concept "Lovable" by finding the internal sensory representation and pulling up examples.

The writing isn't the best I've seen, either. Worth reading if the topic is one that resonates with you, though. (NLP knowledge may be needed, though.)

(outlink) How to do a doyletic Speed Trace

NOTE: I am only cursorly aquianted with neurophysiology, so parts of the below may be my misunderstandings. Consider every sentence to be prefixed with "As far as I know".

Never heard of "doylectics"? Neither had I, until five minutes ago. Then I came across How to do a doyletic Speed Trace.

The theory is sort of interesting, albeit it seems to be based on incorrect premises. The amygdala does not "stop recording memories at age 5"; it attach emotion to memories through the ventral amygdalofugal. It keeps attaching emotion to new memories throughout life (check the box at the bottom of this page.) For young kids, however, the cortex and the connection between the cortex and the amygdala is not yet fully formed. The cortex can have inhibiting effects on the amygdala, and the lack of inhibition mean more numerous and powerful memories are usually linked to the amygdala in childhood than later.

Also, the brain works by association. Every time two things happen at the same time, they're linked together, and the links work both ways. Hypothesis on how that will end up working (which mostly match my experiences): New memory include specific feeling. Specific feeling trigger part of old memory. Old memory get linked to new memory. Triggering new memory will also trigger old memory, and may mostly increase the emotional level through the old memory. As a such, old memories can sort of work like "doylectics" predict, yet this is a side effect of the way the brain works. There is no particular cutoff at five.

I've worked with something similar to the "doyles", by isolating specific memories, and then repeatedly triggering them and relaxing (basically, repeated desensitization.) The isolation techniques I use are based on physical response. Usually, I use the O-ring test from kinesiology, without believing in the hocus pocus. I get similar results from just free-lifting a finger (asking myself a question and adjusting so my subconscious lift the finger on the "correct" answer.) Memories have turned out to be interrelated, blocking for release of each other and "feeding each other emotions". This has also turned out to be tied into muscle tension.

Little of this is surprising in retrospective, of course. As described above, it's reasonable to expect the result from the structure of the brain. The blocks of certain memories is also reasonable to expect: When another memory occupy "too much of the same pattern recognizer" and is stronger, that memory will be triggered instead - blocking the release of the original memory.


[1] More often called episodic memories.

(outlink) McGill University's The Brain From Top To Bottom

McGill University has an exceedingly interesting site up: The brain from top to bottom.

This is the web as it should be. The site goes through present knowledge of brain and knowledge, with 5 articles and 3 variants per topic. And it's all interconnected - there's links all over the place.

Wonder how fear works? Well, here it is in it's full glory: What molecules are released, how each cell responds to that, which areas of the brain are involved, how people react psychologically to that, and how societies are built using and avoiding fear. Oh, and there's articles for beginners, intermediates, and advanceds - on each of these.

Of course, fear influence memory - so you'll find links to how memories form, and how our cognition work. Etc, etc, etc.

I love this site.

(outlink) Body Recomposition - Lyle McDonald

I've forgotten to make recommendations for where to get good info on dieting. Body Recomposition is Lyle McDonald's website with all manner of background info, including e-books. He's one of the best researchers in the area. If you're into ketogenic diets - going into ketosis a la Atkins - his The Ketogenic Diet - A Complete Guide for the Dieter and Practitioner is the best resource I know of. Beware, though - it keeps the details in place, including a ton of figures and references. Not for the faint of heart.

If you really want to crash diet - losing weight quickly instead of letting it fall off at the body normal pace of 0.5lb per week - his techniques are the best I know of. I personally prefer slow dieting through lifestyle changes, though.

Example of language patterns

In a social anxiety group I run, I just had the following exchange:

[Somebody]:I just don't like people, they annoy me, unless <snip>

[Eek]: Why do you choose to make people annoy you? Which need does that fill? Can you fill that need some other way?

Even in such a simple little phrasing, there's quite a few different language patterns coming into play, and I thought an analysis might be interesting:

• The statement attempt to reframe the feeling as an active instead of passive, by presupposing ([1] that [Somebody] actively create the annoying behaviour. The intention is to give [Somebody] the feeling that the feeling of being annoyed is an active choice, thus being both more work and less natural than not being annoyed.
  
• I try to be ambigious, making it possible to interpret the annoyancegeneration both as a feedback loop between [Someone] and the people that make her feel annoyed (through body language and other feedback forms) and as an internal feedback loop in her mind. By making the statement cover both possibility, I hope to give the broadest possible change potential, letting her change both external and internal feedback loops as appropriate.
  
• I try to make her see the annoyance behaviour as having a positive intention for her self. This both let her find anything that keeps the behaviour around, and allows her to feel that she's replaced those dependencies.
  
• I introduce several transderviational searches. These are intended to minimize conscious reflection over the presupposition, and focus [Somebody]'s attention elsewhere. There's transderviational searches in 'Why', 'people', 'which need', 'that' (immediate resolution yet spending one memory slot), 'that need', 'some other way', plus a search for example situations to apply 'make people annoy you' to. In sum, these overload the mind somewhat, and should allow [Somebody] to open up for change while looking for meaning to resolve the questions.
  

On depression

It's OK to be depressed - it's a natural reaction to various forms of stress. Just accept it, and relax about it, and you'll find that you'll get out of it again.

Here's my take for myself: To get out of it, you have to choose. You have to choose to see the good side of each moment - does the green tea taste good? Enjoy it. Ignore the rest, just enjoy it. It's sunny outside. Look at the intricate green detail of the trees, the flowers towards the end of their season, yet still flowering. Hear the sounds of life around you, how every little movement creates a sound, a little part to the beating of the world's heart. Feel the warmth in the room, and wonder at it - wonder at your senses, how they can be, how they can make every moment contain some good, as you just notice and discover it.

It's all about the moment. As you get into each moment, you'll find that it can be good. Sometimes it can be a challenge, yet every single moment will have good things when you learn to notice them. And as you learn that, you'll learn to rise out of depression. Every time you do it, it'll get easier. The more you pull back to the moment, the more times you'll be ready to be able to find the good in the long view, too. This may happen for you shortly, or it may take some time - it's up to you. You're allowed to ask others for help, too - and they want to help you.

(outlink) New blog - "seductionhome.com"

Intuit has started a new blog with a combination of workshop reviews and articles picked up from elsewhere (or at least I think they're picked up from elsewhere). The site is available from http://www.seductionhome.com/. Worth a visit.

Banana and milk or melatonin as a sleeping aid

One of the most important things for quality life is getting enough and good quality sleep. A natural sleeping aid is a mixture of (preferably warm) milk and bananas. Somebody asked me why this worked - here's my answer:

Either of them by themselves will also work somewhat, though there's a positive interaction. Note that this will pull towards increased weight - but bad sleep patterns will usually push even more in that direction.

Background: Bananas is a good source L-tryptophan and simple carbohydrates. L-tryptophan is an amino acid, and it gets converted to 5HTP in the brain, which again gets converted to serotonin (a calming neurotransmitter) which again gets converted to melatonin (which is the natural controller of hormonal rythms in the body, especially sleep).

There are several interactions with milk. One is that L-tryptophan only cross the blood-brain barrier if it is not in competition with too many other amino acids. When you drink milk, your body release insulin (milk sugar is quite effective at this), which "push" most amino acids from your blood into storage (in lean body mass - this is OK). That makes the tryptophan available for the synthesis above. In addition, milk contains calcium (which is calming.) Oh, and warm milk is a source of L-tryptophan in itself.

Note that the rate-limiting step of the serotonin to melatonin conversion is hypothized to be the availability of noreniphrine (noradrenaline), so drinking green tea in the daytime might help. Possibly even better with caffeine free green tea extracts at night.

What's the pull towards increased weight? You're getting high GI carbohydrates fairly shortly before bedtime[1], so your body will be going through an insulin/blood sugar swing, and you'll burn less calories during the night. This can make a difference.

Referring to another post: I agree that melatonin is an excellent natural sleep aid - I often recommend it. And while it is probably the sleeping aid in existence with least side effects, people should still know how to use it. Extreme doses will work as a reliable contraceptive, and if you start off with too high doses, your body will sort of adapt and high doses will *stop working*. I was stupid enough to start at 3mg, and had a slightly mixed up hormonal balance for at least half a year afterwards. When I use it now, I use about 1mg - but the effect isn't as good as it probably would have been if I'd never overdosed.

Melatonin is primarily a sleep rythm restorer. It's best to take it depending on when you're going to get UP, not when you want to fall asleep, and it should preferably be taken at the same time every day. For getting up at 7, I usually took melatonin at 23:30, and went to sleep at 00:00 to 00:10. You'll find that you get unbelivably tired, and then you just fall asleep as you lie down. For many, there's a fairly short window, though - and at least I had the effect that if I fought off the sleepiness from melatonin ("I'm just going to finish this chapter"), I couldn't get to sleep at all. One expert I discussed this with thought that was due to me using too high doses, though.

Oh, and the natural trigger for melatonin is lowered light levels. This is messed up by electric lights and living "in the wrong place". Where we were made to be - just about the equator in africa - there's just 15 minutes of sunset as the sun goes from "high day" to "night". Then, a few hours after this, you get tired. And sleep. And it all feels just right.

Instead, we keep on electric lights, which are way too dim and stay around too long. This mess up the melatonin system.


OK, I'm finished babbling now.


[1] Actually, from theory I'd recommend taking milk+banana 1 to 1.5 hours before bedtime - as I said, there's about 45 minutes from intake of melatonin until full sleepy effect, and there should be time for the other reactions to occur to produce the melatonin.

(outlink) Health 24 - Diet and your mind

Just stumbled over a set of articles on Diet and your mind.

A set of short and simple articles covering the topic. These seems to be fairly up to date, and avoid some of the common pitfalls. As always: Use several sources.

Breaking up - the right way.

Is there a right way to break up? Sure. Or at least, there is a right goal for breaking up: Give the other person closure.

Foremost, this means you must break up face to face. This is as close to an absolute as you can get. You get depressed for a week from breaking up face to face? Low cost. Do it face to face anyway. You live 2000km away? Buy plane tickets. Preferably with open return, or just buy two with enough time between.

That brings us to the next point: Time. Go in with enough time to have a long talk - this can take hours or seconds, depending on the other person.

There's also the question of location: Take it somewhere "disposable". He or she will get a lot of memories attached to that place, and they may be negative. As long as this is a place where the person does not need to go again, that's OK.

And when it comes to place, this should preferably be a place where you can have sex and cuddle and where you can show that you're NOT doing this because you do not care about him/her - you're doing it because you have to even though you still love him/her.

If possible, make sure that your (soon to be ex) partner has their support network available, and is reasonably rested when you break up.

And when you've broken up, STAY AWAY. Take at least a six month period apart, with no contact. If you want to build a friendship with the person, do it after the resting period.

One part of a good breakup is preparation. A trick: Make sure you don't store stuff at your partners' place that you do not want to abandon. When you have done the breakup and are leaving, it's best if can walk out the door and not have to meet again.

Update: Do not tell the person that "There is someone out there for them" or similar. This is either (A) obvious to the person, or (B) hurts the person by feeling completely untrue, and pushing them through feeling misunderstood, feeling that the other person don't know their world at all, worthless because everybody assumes this and it doesn't work, etc.

If you're good at this sort of thing, you can use the fact that they'll find somebody else as a presupposition. Telling outright will tend to just hurt, though.

Update:

When breaking up, it's important to keep communication going. That means you have to keep part of the relationship going even in the meeting where you are breaking up. If communication becomes difficult, slow down and introduce "chit chat" - getting into rapport, talk briefly about a funny anecdote, point out something around you - anything that takes the tension off. While your goal is to get things across - you may need to detour in order to communicate, so you can actually get the things across.

(outlink++) The Stress of Life

The Stress of Life is a website about stress, with a number of short articles on the topic and tracking news articles that sometimes are useful.

I found the pages on relaxation techniques and traits that promote resilience to be worth pointing out separately. Someday, I might use the latter as a self-development checklist.

Trivia: Though not (obviously, at least) acknowledged on the site, the name "The Stress Of Life" is taken from the classic book by Hans Selye. The book is interesting reading, giving background on the development of the stress concept, various hormonal reactions, how the body handles injury, etc. Alas, it is though going, and it will not give you any direct techniques - just a frame of reference for thinking about stress on a medical level. You should also be aware that the "New and updated with all the newest research findings" on the cover is slightly misleading - that was true when it was updated in the mid 70s. For something that's up to date and easier to read, you might try Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert M Sapolsky.

(discussion) Give expensive but worthless gifts?

Trawling recent publications, I found the following little piece of research: Expensive but worthless gifts may help facilitate courtship (in various incarnations - for instance, in
New Scientist's "Worthless' gifts get the good girls").

Summary: Based on a mathematical simulation, researchers have shown that the strategy of females demanding gifts that are expensive for the man but has no (or preferably slightly negative) value to the woman, both men and women gain advantage. Examples of these are taking a woman to the theatre or to an expensive dinner (negative value if she does not enjoy time with the guy.) Women get to test the men's commitment, while men avoid economic exploitation.

This strategy also mirrors a number of cases found in nature. (These cases also include women cheating with "More attractive men" to get better genetic material.)

The question: Does this strategy seem to work in practice? Does men that just pick a woman and start buying her expensive but worthless gifts, often get her as a mate?

I can argue the theory either way - how is your experience?

(outlink) Mind Hacks

For those of us that try to understand the mind, Mind Hacks is an interesting blog. It's the offspring of the book Mind Hacks: Tips & tools for using your brain, and tracks psychology/psychiatry for a large part from a popular scientific point of view. Many good reads.