How The Mind Works - The Truth About The Fiction Of Reality

By Jordan R. Masten


When we hear the term "mind" we often think of the brain, but the mind is much more than the brain. The brain is the hardware while the mind is the software it runs. When you are dead, your brain will still be there (for a while), but your mind will not.So just what is the mind? If we are going to get any use out of the mind, we need a definition that is useful. Although the word "mind" leads us to believe the mind is a thing, it is not. The mind is label we have given to an active and dynamic process of thinking, perceiving and experiencing. The term "mind" refers to a never-ending flow of information processing. The mind is never static. It is a constant stream of sensory input, thoughts, ideas and perceptions. It's a continuous dance of information, a ceaseless stream of awareness in which almost anything can be swept up.

Those words can still apply today. It depends on the internal representation that we have of the world in which we live. There is an objective reality but we cannot see it. All that we can grasp is our own perception of that reality and that perception differs with each individual.

Your right brain works with emotions, pictures, wholes and how all the parts all relate together, putting stuff together (that AH-HA moment), and simultaneous/holistic thinking. This side of the brain doesn't wear a watch like the left side does, and in fact can lose track of time. And like the left side of your brain, the right side governs/runs the left side of your body.

For thousands of years we have believed that the mind was complicated and elusive; a mystery waiting to be unraveled, a cipher waiting to be cracked. We now know that the mind is much simpler than we once thought. When we know the building blocks of human subjective experience, the elements that make up what we call "mind," we can change them.The components of a system can be reorganized. The processes we use to encode information and the sequence data can be optimized to produce desired results. When we know the elements of a system we can change the system so it functions more effectively and efficiently. When we know what is going on behind the scenes of behavior and emotion, we can change it and transform our experience.

We've all heard about limited attention span, and in marketing that sometimes seems to be the norm for customers. What this means is that only part of your memory can be activated at any one time and it will be a single area located in the most easily activated part of the memory. This will also be the most familiar one, the one used most often. The more often it is used it becomes even more familiar. Think repetitive marketing campaign, top of the mind awareness, copy crafted to appeal to certain senses that becomes familiar to your customer over time. People need to be told about a product or service at least SEVEN times before they buy it/try it. Think repeat customers here.

Those beliefs can be accurate, irrelevant or simply false but they have an almost total hold on the way that we comprehend our reality. It's as if we had been hypnotized to accept those beliefs and forced to see a reality that is in complete concordance with those beliefs.

OK now you have a pretty fair idea of how the mind works. Let's go just one more step further. You already know about the language of the brain being pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells - in other words input from your senses that is your imagination when it is processed. Your brain can only work with positive information that it receives from your five senses. Your brain can't work with inputs you haven't experienced or otherwise called negative information.Here is a very important point to remember when thinking about your customers. They can't reflect and act at the same time. They need to be focused on one thing or another (reading your website copy, email etc) and thinking about it or taking action and buying something. Trick is to be able to switch them from one to the other quickly and effortlessly. Good thing you know about Neuro Linguistic Programming and how the mind works.

After the objective reality has finished being distorted by our previous references and our fundamental beliefs it has to contend with the ubiquitous mediatic barrage, most of which is taken at face value. What shreds of truth could maintain its integrity once it has been through all these distortions? No wonder that most of us are walking contradictions.

If you open the task manager on a computer you can see all of the applications running. When you look at this list you see precisely the programs that you know are operating. In your mind, these would correspond to the things you are aware of at any given moment. However, click on the list of processes and you get a whole array of programs running behind the scenes. There are far more in this list than in the list of applications running and when you look at this list of processes, you can't even identify what most of them are. They are operating in the background, out of awareness, permitting you to think, feel, act and react to your experience of life.In order to reprogram our minds and upgrade our mental software to produce superior results, we must begin by bringing those hidden programs to the surface. Once we know what is operating in the mind we can run some antivirus software, uninstall outdated programs and upgrade where possible. Most of us race to have the latest cell phone and the newest gadget, but why do we keep running obsolete mental software?Don't worry, when you begin to explore your mind you won't find inner demons waiting to be freed or terrible things wanting to bubble up as Freud would have you believe. You will, however, very likely find some old programs that you may no longer want. Remember, they are just programs and if you installed them, you can uninstall them.




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