Howie Mandel Describes Being Hypnotized

Interesting to watch Howie be relieved of his germophobia:

And Howie describes what it is like:

“It is kind of like you are at a party and you had drinks or Xanax, and you don’t care anymore.”

It is not entirely true, because he also was not forming memories well – something the amygdala is responsible for through salience assignation. But the not caring clearly and no memories means his amygdala was turned off. With his amygdala off, he was just a robot without his own directions to follow.

People understand hypnosis through doing it, by learning through trial and error, and experiencing firsthand how to press the buttons. But I am beginning to see it through another perspective – that of amygdala. The amygdala is the mechanism beneath the hypnosis. Howie had his amygdala turned off, and in that mode, it was as if Shatner had taken a nap on the deck of the Enterprise in Star Trek, and the crew was taking orders from whoever happened to speak.

I think an amygdala-based understanding of hypnosis may open the field to people’s understanding better than the experiential model. I am beginning to see how that little misdirection of focus can put the target’s amygdala on a sideways path, where it is disabled, and nobody is in control of the bridge. After years of self analyzing the sensations and emotions produced by amygdala as I go through life, I can begin to feel in my mind what Howie was experiencing.

The interesting thing is, as you learn the techniques, I think you actually train your own Shatner to come awake when they are attempted, because you are attaching flags to them, and those flags can focus the amygdala on recognizing the techniques, and that can turn the amygdala on and focus it when someone attempts to shut the amygdala off or focus it elsewhere.

I’m also realizing that in promoting r/K by focusing on r/K, I have been doing this somewhat wrong. Kim Kardashian has nothing to promote beyond an unusually large ass, one which is just like millions of other unusually large asses out there. But by understanding the amygdala in her audience, even indirectly through instinct, she produced an $80 million dollar a year product from that relatively common asset, and millions of followers are now cheering her every move and in doing so, filling her bank account.

In this r-world, success often has nothing to do with your product. Success is actually solely related to the actions you want taken by your target consumers. The best product is usually not going to get the consumers by itself. It may even suffer, because you devoted energy to your product which should have been devoted to manipulating your potential consumers into adopting it.

The mechanism you need to grasp is the human computer on the other end of the equation, which you want to follow a specific behavioral path. Your product can be a component of that, but like a tire on a car, it is just one part of a much larger mechanism, and cannot do the job of transporting you to your objective by itself. You need the engine, the frame, the steering wheel, the brakes, and so on. Focus on your product, and you will end up wondering why your really great tire can’t get you to the grocery store by itself.

Most counterintuitively, for an overwhelming number of potential target consumers, your product is irrelevant. When selling books, the majority of book buyers are known in the industry as “nonreading buyers.” That is actually the phrase publishers use to reference them, and they are the ones who create bestsellers. That is, Fifty Shades numbers do not come from ardent readers who want to read your book. They come from people who rarely read, and who probably will not even read your work. Make a good book for readers and pitch it to readers, and you will likely never be a great success as an author, at least by the standards of the big houses.

Thus, if you want to be a successful author, make a book of any quality and see to it that status-conscious people see buying it as a means of increasing their status, or that people who want to belong will feel belonging when they buy it. When the majority of book buyers don’t even read books, you realize that the quality of the book is irrelevant to success.

There is a parallel there to promoting an idea like r/K into the masses. The idea is great, but what about the other half of the equation? The decisions made by those people are what will decide r/K’s fate.

r/K will eventually overtake the world. The only question is when God has chosen for everything to come together.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because the amygdala is everything