Subconscious Manipulators: Take Your Life Off Autopilot

Subconscious Manipulators: Take Your Life Off Autopilot

October 18, 2014 By davidjones
By NICK PARKINS

The idea of someone or something controlling our every thought and action is so 1980s. Let’s face it, we live out our modern, technological lives with access to instant communication and information that allows us to enjoy greater control and freedoms of thought and expression than at any point in recorded human history; right?

Each of us draws comfort from the decisions we make, sure in the knowledge that we are individuals, masters of our own destiny. We mock those that aren’t as under the thumb, as easily lead, or weak. Underlying this attitude is the principle that no person or system has the right to influence or determine the free will of another. This may be true, but what if this truth was naive; that even the strong-minded could not trust the direction their thoughts were taking them?

A Fabric of Lies?

Why for instance do we accept laws that govern conduct and shunt every aspect of human experience into a narrow band of monotonous conformity? What if we were to strip society of its rules and regulations governing conduct; what then? Would we fall into anarchy? This social consensus maybe misplaced.

Consider road signs and signals. Substantial reductions in traffic incidents and fatalities have been recorded in communities that have adopted a rather novel approach to road safety by removing street clutter. If this idea of so-called ‘naked roads’ seems counter-intuitive to you, just ask the resident exhibitionists of Christiansfeld, Denmark.

In 2004, local libertarians stripped traffic lights and other road markings from a notorious crossroads in a bid to improve road safety. Surprisingly this simple act of faith saved Danish bacon, reducing the death toll to zero on a road which throughout the previous decade had claimed three lives every year. It is believed the fall in casualty figures was due to uncertainty over who had right-of-way.

The late Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman did much to inspire this rethink. He devised schemes in the Netherlands that removed all traffic lights, signs and markings, and other driver instructions from the small villages of Drachten, Makkinga and town of Oosterwolde; all with great effect. Perhaps unsurprisingly removing red lights from a particular district in Amsterdam has yet to catch on.

Interestingly, naked road studies like those in Christiansfeld suggest a re-think; that road signs, in some instances, offer about as much protection to the elements as the Emperor’s new clothes. Of course the Danish subjects in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale who saw through the head of state’s veiled attempt at modesty were considered subversive. So are road signs as useful as non-existent clothing? Does that make me subversive?

Laws operate as a strong arm of social conditioning, in so much as they slowly undermine the ability of the individual to assess situations and make judgements based on past experiences. Laws make us passive; we look out to authority for answers rather than to ourselves within. The danger is we become easily manipulated and no longer able to question authority; not only because we have been conditioned to, but because we are being slowly stripped of the tools and acuity with which to do so.
This point is telling when put under the microscope with other basic freedoms that have been removed on the back of trumped up, often unfounded fears over public safety.

If this study asks us anything, it questions the extent to which we walk through life with little conscious free will at all. And that is not as stupid as it sounds according to some experts.

‘I’ is the One Per Cent

Dr. Bruce Lipton is a stem cell biologist and bestselling author who believes that the conscious mind governs less than it would like to think it does. “The major problem is that people are aware of their conscious beliefs and behaviours, but not of that belonging to the subconscious,” says Lipton.

The conscious I might take credit for decisions, computations, realisations and reactions, but in reality credit must go to the subconscious. Neurological experiments carried out by the late pioneering scientist Benjamin Libet suggest that conscious recognition of a pain event, in this case a pinprick to the finger, lags up to half a second behind the prick itself. It takes half a second for us to become conscious of stimulation of the sensory cortex. In other words our conscious experience of pain at the moment in time that the prick occurs is a temporal fraud. Essentially we feel a prick after the event.

In his bestseller The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders compares this fraud: that conscious experience is projected back in time in exactly the same way as a direct stimulation of the sensory cortex can be shown to project out onto the body. There is a good reason for this, he suggests: what we need to know is when our skin was pricked, not when we became conscious of it.

Of course, in reality we can’t be half a second behind the eight ball and expect to stay in the moment, let alone in the game. Take, for example, the football midfielder that whips in a free-kick; he does not consciously calculate the angular projection and speed; he just whips, period.

Pythagoras he is not. To perform, successful sports stars rely on instinct, automatic reactions based on subconscious programs ingrained by hours dedicated to practice and training. Conscious thought here is the bane of instinct, which experts say is not just left on the sports field.

“Most people don’t even acknowledge their subconscious mind, that it is at play, when in fact this mind is a million times more powerful,” says Lipton. “We operate up to 99 per cent of our lives from subconscious programs.”

In short, your conscious I, the ego, might not like it, but it’s under the thumb. Truth is it’s only let out to play when time permits. And even then our thoughts and actions are often simply the result of consciousness fielding thoughts and ideas pitched from the infinite depths of the subconscious mind. Slip of the tongue? Ah, that would be a curve ball. More often than not consciousness doesn’t even get to use what Nørretranders (and Libet) term as its veto, to otherwise accept or reject a choice or urge that the subconscious mind has already made. Many decisions and actions bypass our conscious mind altogether.

Should we give up on the idea of conscious free will? It has its veto, but on the whole the numbers are not encouraging. According to Nørretranders, every second our senses pass on and process about 11 million bits of information to our brain. The vast majority, 10,999,984 or so bits of information, we remain unaware of, processed as it is by our unconscious, or what I refer to herein as subconscious mind. Such events are disconcerting for an ego; it likes to think of itself as solely in charge. But how can it be? It has no eye for a ball and can’t even hold down a job as a bouncer.

Truth is our subconscious is open to suggestion. Subliminal messages easily bypass conscious perception. During the 1920s when radio first aired in the UK it was unpopular and seen by many as a sinister intrusion. To persuade would-be listeners the BBC planted a backward message in its jingles. The message when played forward was hidden, but when reversed could clearly be heard to say, “This is not a noose, no really it’s not.” In normal play the subconscious picks up on what the conscious cannot. Audible messages can also be played beyond the normal frequency range of human hearing. In both instances the subconscious mind may be programmed beyond conscious perception or approval.
And it’s not just on radio.

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[link to www.newdawnmagazine.com]