Which Came First, The Chicken Or My Fist?

Fri, 10/10/2008 - 16:20
Submitted by Adam
Functional magnetic resonance imaging provides...

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What do you do? That question comes up a lot when meeting new people. My answer can be confusing to some. First you have to understand what I am not. I am not a digital anthropologist or social networking consultant. I do not fix it for you.

You could say that I write custom memes for people, or that I affect my client's thought processes, changing people’s perception of reality for a small fee. You could say that I have no morals or ethics and will use whatever will work with the most efficiency. Okay, I'm not a saint, but I'm no trickster.


Using techniques extrapolated from cross-cultural studies, I identify the components of a meme that make it persistent and gregarious. Then I apply my knowledge of sensory perception illusions, neuro-linguistic programming, complex adaptive systems, and how to fool retards to accomplish the task my client chooses. To call me a social engineer or 'reality hacker' would also be misleading, because I don’t engineer or 'hack' anything. White Hat Con Man is equally as offensive because it is not all about money, power, control, or immature shenanigans.

Obviously these appellations don’t adequately define me because I’m a specialist in a relatively new field of thought. I help people recognize their own behavior patterns and how they are influenced by their social interaction. I also train people to do what I do. More than just a Human Debugger, I can show how to eliminate unnecessary and negative thoughts through better understanding of the mechanisms involved, sort of like anti-virus, but without the insane resource overhead.

This is all new stuff, and I’m not a tenured professor, so I’ve had to resort to various open source computer programming jobs to kill time between clients. A recent client was a Mixed Martial Arts fighter who wanted to know if there were any ways of thinking that would improve his performance in the ring. He wanted to try hypnosis or something like it. So the MMA fighter is saying all this out loud as he is playing blackjack in Las Vegas. He says he’s seen the movie ‘21’ about the kids who outsmarted the Casinos and he figures that any contest can become lopsided by focused attention and preparation. Because I have done some similar consulting for the Casinos, my contact information made its way into his room.

I can’t tell you everything because secrecy is part of my overhead, but I can tell you one thing I taught him. In the article “Motor-Sensory Recalibration Leads to an Illusory Reversal of Action and Sensation” in Volume 51, Issue 5 of ‘Neuron’, the summary reads:

“To judge causality, organisms must determine the temporal order of their actions and sensations. However, this judgment may be confounded by changing delays in sensory pathways, suggesting the need for dynamic temporal recalibration. To test for such a mechanism, we artificially injected a fixed delay between participants' actions (keypresses) and subsequent sensations (flashes). After participants adapted to this delay, flashes at unexpectedly short delays after the keypress were often perceived as occurring before the keypress, demonstrating a recalibration of motor-sensory temporal order judgments. When participants experienced illusory reversals, fMRI BOLD signals increased in anterior cingulate cortex/medial frontal cortex (ACC/MFC), a brain region previously implicated in conflict monitoring. This illusion-specific activation suggests that the brain maintains not only a recalibrated representation of timing, but also a less-plastic representation against which to compare it.”

Using this and other techniques and information we developed a training strategy to both compensate for the effect and use it offensively. There is no guarantee. There is no safety net. The Olympic Anti-Doping Committee isn’t passing out an IQ test, but if they met me they would.

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