Duly added to wishlist.

Love it when frames like this come out of the Bay Area, in this case Berserkely.  thanks, tbg.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

I have just ordered his book.

The "pull" of the paradigm!  Clear and distinct ideas.  Deductive reasoning.  On to homo-economus!  Godel's Theorem applies to axiomatic systems, but that doesn't bother many.  Fifty years after SCIENCE AND SANITY by Alfred Korzibski, few are aware of his work and its implications.  I used to tell my colleagues, when they were determined to proceed down some seemingly logical but doomed path: "You are using either/or logic in a both/and world."  They would look at me as though I were speaking in tongues.  They would use the fact that they managed to muddle through avoidable problems as vindication of their point of view.

One cannot deny the role of emotion in rationality.  Amusingly, most seem unaware that they even have a choice of  paradigmatic affiliation.  They follow Pangloss: "What ever is is right." By the time they are considered adults the chief effect of their chosen world view is its ability to enable them to manage their own self-esteem.  They are only willing to consider changing their mental habits when those habits  have demonstrably lead them into grave trouble. Today the trouble is becoming clear.  Now if large numbers can be shown that the source of that trouble is how pathetically manipulable their mental habits have left them, there might be a way out.    

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

George rocks.  I've read Don't Think of an Elephant! and Moral Politics. I do recommend the latter.  (The former is a fluffy Cliff's Notes version...)  Anyway, it made things make a lot more sense to me.  It's one of those books: I have no idea how true these theories are, but they are the first to make enduring sense of why the people around me are acting as they are.

Also, I got the chance to meet him and talk to him at Yearly Kos.  He's just so freaking nice.  He's like Santa if Santa weren't scary.  He just radiates this warm fuzzy professory vibe.  He's fab.

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

that I should step gingerly into this minefield ;-)

If you accept, as I do, that reason is after the fact, then you could also understand that what the conscious mind experiences as 'reality' is a construct made up of 'figure' novelty and 'ground' fill-in.

Figure/ground ambiguity is in constant flux at the unconscious level. Different detected patterns may trigger a 'novelty' reaction (a biochemical release or take-up). If the novelty factor is high enough it will also be shoved up to consciousness.

The 'figure' is whatever the conscious mind has been alerted to by the internal processing of external sensual information and the detection of powerful patterns that require consciousness to be awakened.

At all other times, your mind is in the 'ground', filling in from memory. You walk through the forest and what you experience is treeness, not trees. Unless something in that forest has a novelty rating, is unexpected, there will be little useful 'insightful' memory of the experience.

This effect can be experienced driving on an often used motorway. You can travel 10 kms, daydreaming, and remember not a centimetre of the journey. All you are left with is a general sensation of motorwayness. But any novelty can snap you out of it in an instant.

The frames, metaphors and narratives can also become 'ground' fill in. Routine. Habit. The progressive message has already become motorwayness for many people out there who we would like to influence.

Novelty - a new experience that cuts through the routine - is IMO one tool that we need to use for greater communication effectiveness. Novelty has a bad rap, but it is what the mind detects very well, and a little release of endorphin, testosterone, noradrenalin, dopamine et al might be all that stands between us and change.

What is novelty in the context of communicating for change? It varies greatly with audience, of course. You always try to speak in the 'language' of that audience. 'Language' often includes a lot more than words - every audience understands some part of the visual language also. Novelty comes from play with that language. A twist that remains in the mind. A new way of approaching a subject.

And "an awareness of brain mechanisms could help map effective communication".

It could indeed. But an awareness of how we are each manipulated, and how we manipulate, both as learned behaviour and as a Learned Behaviour Disorder is disturbing for some. It seems, they say, to take away the magic of being human. That magic is legerdemain. You have been fooled.

There is another kind of magic - a miracle - which is that this 600 billion neuron thing, built brain on top of ancient brain in layers like a house with illegal stories added, DIYed by lizards and felines, and with wiring installed that could pass not even a cursory inspection (Was it you who wired the cerebellum up left to left, Morrisey? I've told you again and again - left to right, right to left. Gordon Bennett! Now we'll have to put in another fusebox), is that this thing called mind actually works in some fashion. Admittedly though it is still a hundred thousand year old mind - yet we learn to live in it.

How we learn to live in it is the most fascinating question in the world. And understanding how we do that is the key to communication.

You can't be me, I'm taken

It certainly sounds interesting.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

No time...

geeee

 I have to commend him for the efforts he is doing to change the perception... of course the devils is in the details and things are much more complex than that.. but so what? this metaphor of neurobiology has more  relation with real scientific discoveries and "science" than the other ones..and it is probably more useful in our political environment..

I think it is fair and a tribute to let the wrong details or the " I would say it best" for another day... well or just to look back at what I wrote in the past since I think I proposed another slightly modified vision some time ago...and Brit improved upon it (if I a do not recall wrongly).

So far... I hope he gets to be read.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

I have more than a reasonable amount of Steven Pinker books that, while very interesting for the most part, always strike an awkward cord when he slips into politics and economy.

It was very refreshing and (pun intended) enlightening to  explore George Layoff's ideas on the subject. For those interested there are several talks on youtube, fora.tv, and of course there are the documents available in his own Rockridge institute.

Thank you, made my weekend.