The Success-Seeking Satnav Embedded in Your Brain…
What’s this got to do with success?
Be patient, we’ll get there — and just to make it more fun, we’ll take in nightclub bouncers, the Law of Attraction, itchy jumpers, barking dogs, four-leaf clovers, posing gorillas… and a really creepy little experiment on the way.
Go on then, what’s happening?
You live in the middle of a colossal blizzard of information. Masses of it. Incomprehensible amounts of it. Completely mind-blowing quantities of it. Just think about it — your skin has around a million nerve-endings constantly detecting miniscule changes in pressure and temperature. Your eyes capture more than 300 megapixels of visual information — every second.
In order to stop your brain frying from sheer overload, you have to have some way of ignoring the tsunami of information that comes into your head every second of every day. And at any given moment, your conscious mind is busy ignoring nearly all of it.
You can thank your reticular activating system — RAS — for the fact that your brain hasn’t melted yet. Okay, it’s not the whole story, but for the most part it’s this little tangle of neurons that acts as the gatekeeper between your unconscious and your conscious mind, and stops you having to deal with way more information than you can handle.
About the size of your little finger, all your senses — except smell, which is linked directly to the emotional centre — are wired straight into it, and it acts as a sort of nightclub bouncer between what comes in and what gets through the velvet rope into the VIP area of your consciousness. It selects what you get to pay attention to.
Hang on… it selects?
Oh, you thought you were in charge? Just wait until we get to that creepy experiment, you’re going to love it…
There’s a huge amount of whittling down that has to take place between all that information coming in, and what’s actually passed on to your conscious mind. You can juggle around five to seven things in your conscious mind at any one time and everything else is dealt with by the parts of your mind that are outside your conscious awareness. So it’s your RAS that gets to decide what’s relevant and important, and what isn’t.
Some things always get through
There are some things that this nightclub bouncer always lets through — the sound of your name is one of them. You can be in the middle of a party and straining to hear what the person next to you is saying, but you will hear someone mention your name several feet away. The sound of your name is always important to you. In the same way, anything that threatens danger or promises sex always gets through, too.
What else gets through? Well, it depends… and it changes, too. You know when you first put on an itchy jumper how you feel every prickle? That’s your RAS deciding this new, uncomfortable sensation is something you need to be aware of. Leave it five minutes though, and your RAS gets bored and stops letting that information through. And the jumper stops itching. After ten minutes, you’ll probably forget that it ever did.
The opposite happens with that barking dog that’s annoying you. The dog has actually been barking for some time only you didn’t notice it at first because your RAS didn’t think it was important. Now, for some reason it does and suddenly the noise is irritating the hell out of you. It’s become important — your RAS thinks you should do something about it.
It’s the gorilla in the room
If you think forgetting about an itchy jumper is a good trick, you’d be astonished what your unconscious mind manages to screen out for you.
In a Harvard University experiment, participants were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and told to keep count of the number of passes made by the team in the white shirts.
They all did so with remarkable accuracy. However, more them half of them failed to notice the man in a gorilla suit who strolled in, thumped his chest in full view of the camera, and strolled out again.
Without a doubt, their unconscious mind saw the gorilla — it just didn’t think it was important enough to mention to the conscious mind. ‘Nope, white shirts and passes only — gorillas aren’t on my list, sorry.’
You have to wonder what else we’re missing with absolutely no idea that we’re missing it.
The VIP pass
So, you only know what your RAS lets you know, and your unconscious filters out everything else it believes is unimportant — even a gorilla on the basketball court.
The information that it does let through into your awareness tends to be what it’s let through before — the nightclub bouncer always gives a VIP pass to the faces it recognises. One result of this is that we all suffer from something called confirmation bias. We get to see only the information that supports our existing beliefs — especially when those beliefs are ideologically or emotionally charged.
In one Stamford University study, participants were given a report on capital punishment to read. The students who approved of capital punishment believed they had read a report that supported it. The students who were against the death penalty believed that they had read a report condemned it. In fact, both groups had been given exactly the same report. Each group saw only the evidence that supported their views.
Their RAS saw all the information but held back the parts that didn’t support their beliefs, filtered it out. It wasn’t important. The information that supported their views was important, so it passed it through into their awareness.
And the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?
It’s this combination of selective attention and confirmation bias that fools you into thinking that something strange is happening — that because you’ve bought a red car, so has everyone else all of a sudden. They haven’t of course. There were always lots of red cars on the road, it’s just that now you notice them.
Before, your RAS was seeing them but holding them back, filtering them out. Now that you have a red car, red cars are important so it’s passing them through to your awareness — and suddenly you see red cars everywhere!
Ahh… are we getting to the success bit yet?
Well, here’s where it gets interesting. Suppose you could give your nightclub bouncer a guest-list?
What if you could train your RAS to pick out the information you wanted? What if you could programme it to pass exactly the right information on to you? It would be like programming a satnav to lead you exactly where you wanted to go. Even better, it would actually take you there — like being on autopilot. Unprogrammed, your RAS is like a nightclub bouncer screening out what it considers to be the undesirables. Programmed, your RAS is like a satnav giving you directions directly to your goals.
Except that you can’t do that — can you?
Let’s talk about four-leaf clovers
Four-leaf clovers are very lucky, but very rare. So a few years ago, the newspapers were intrigued when a young girl appeared to have a magical gift for finding them. Thousands of them. She had stacks of them.
After examining them carefully to make sure they weren’t fakes, a reporter asked if she could find one for him, right then and there? Of course she could — and after staring at a patch of clover for a couple of minutes, she picked one. Then another one. Then another one. Was it magic, wrote the reporter, or merely a skilful conjuring trick?
Neither. It was her RAS, of course. Four-leaf clovers are rare — roughly one in ten thousand. But clovers are also very small — ten thousand covers an area about the size of a desk-top. By scanning an area that size, you will almost definitely see a four-leaf clover — but you’ll only find it if you’ve programmed your RAS to pass that information on to you.
Which is what she’d done — and she trained the reporter to do it too. By the end of the afternoon, he’d found all the lucky clover he’d ever need.
Still waiting for the success bit…
This girl created a filter for her RAS which then did what it does best. It sifted through 300 megapixels per second of visual data to present the one piece of information she wanted — the image of a four-leaf clover.
Okay, you could take a magnifying glass and laboriously inspect 10,000 clover plants to find the one lucky one. That would work, and it’s the way most of us would do it. But you can also do it automatically, rapidly and unconsciously the way this girl did it — the way your RAS does it.
And that could make your life pretty… interesting.
What if, instead of four-leaf clovers, you programmed your RAS to look for opportunities? Trained it to sift through billions of pieces of data to present you with exactly what you needed to know. Maybe that sounds like some kind of superpower, but suddenly the whole Law of Attraction thing begins to look a lot less magical and a lot more plausible, doesn’t it?
There are always lots of red cars
The Law of Attraction is the belief that positive thoughts bring positive experiences into your life, changing your health, wealth and personal relationships for the better.
Of the people who have tried it, some find it works really well for them. Others… not so much. But reframed as a task for your RAS, it possibly starts to make more sense.
Remember the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? Just as there are always lots of red cars, there are always plenty of opportunities to achieve your goals. Your RAS is seeing them but holding them back, filtering them out, doesn’t think they’re important — a nightclub bouncer screening out undesirables. Make them important and your RAS becomes a fully programmed satnav. It will pass them through to your awareness so you notice them — suddenly you’ll see opportunities everywhere.
And if you don’t think your RAS is that powerful, you haven’t been paying attention — it can hide a gorilla from you, for heaven’s sake…
So, how do you programme your RAS for success?
Well, that’s where it gets more difficult, because there’s currently no research that’s been done into any of this — it’s all a bit new.
What we do have though, is plenty of experience from therapists who have helped people achieve the results they want, and we can see how this could be used to train your RAS.
This is one way…
As we saw in the Stamford University capital punishment study, we get the information that supports our beliefs, especially when those beliefs are emotionally charged. So it seems reasonable to expect that you could programme your RAS by believing in your goals passionately and enthusiastically.
Believe in them, commit to them, get excited about them and make them the centre of your attention and you could get your RAS interested in them too.
Think about them, talk about them, write about them intensively. Put time and energy into them — make them your number one priority and put them at the top of your agenda. Putting a high value on your goals in this way, communicates to your RAS that this is something important and meaningful that it needs to take notice of.
Hammer the significance home — dream about your goals, use affirmations, make vision boards. Do everything you can to impress upon your RAS that this is really important.
Try these as well…
And as we saw with finding four-leaf clovers, your RAS can give you laser-sharp focus once it knows exactly what you’re looking for. So concentrate on getting a clear, focused image of what you want to achieve — visualise what you want, clarify it and get rid of any unnecessary clutter around it.
Of course, you could also get a trained brain-hacker — otherwise known as a therapist — who really understands the unconscious to programme your satnav properly and maybe have a word with your internal nightclub bouncer to get them to update their VIP list.
Because, just in case you still hadn’t realised it, it’s your unconscious mind that’s in charge of all this. That’s the one you have to convince. Making up your conscious mind to do anything is of no use at all unless your unconscious mind agrees to it. Because it’s your unconscious mind that makes the decisions — not your conscious one.
Not convinced? Here’s the creepy little experiment I promised you.
The mystery of the moving finger
In a series of tests in California, Benjamin Libet monitored finger movements while recording brain activity at the same time. Participants were asked to make a spontaneous, voluntary movement at a time of their choosing, the only thing was that they had to take note of the time they decided to make it.
As expected, participants made the decision to move about half a second before the movement was actually made.
What was not expected, however, was the recording that showed a clear signal to move significantly before the participant consciously made that decision. It looked exactly as if it was the unconscious mind that decided when to move the finger — and it then told the conscious mind, which just went along with it.
Participants were adamant that it was their conscious choice, made of their own free-will, about when to move. The EEG recording showed otherwise.
More mysterious fingers
In a similar experiment at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, participants could choose to use either their left hand or their right to press a button. Their choice — no pressure. They just had to indicate when they made the decision.
This time, using more sensitive fMRI, researchers could predict a full seven seconds before the subjects decided, which hand they would use. By the time they made their choice, their unconscious had already decided — there was no actual decision left for the participants to make. Their impression that they had made a conscious choice of their own free will was pure illusion.
So there you have it — sorry. It really looks as if it’s your unconscious mind that’s calling the shots — and hiding the gorillas. But you can do a lot to influence the decisions it makes. Hack into your RAS and programme your internal satnav. Put your success on autopilot and get all that fabulous decision-making power working for you rapidly, automatically, effortlessly and above all, unconsciously.
And finally, here’s an interesting thought to leave you with — was it you who made the decision to read this, or are you just going along with something your unconscious mind had already decided to do…
