AFFIRMATIONS - NOW!

Much has been written about affirmations over the years, but do we really understand just how beneficial they can be and how best to implement them?

Why not write a positive affirmation for each of the five most important areas of your life. Typically, this may be health, work/finances, family, love/relationships and a particular cherished dream.

Jack Canfield, co-author of the ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ series of books, identifies these guidelines when framing your affirmations :

Start with an “I am” to bring the statement into the present tense.

Make a positive statement.

Use an action verb.

Keep the statement brief and concise.

Include at least one ‘feeling’ word that reflects the emotion of having achieved the goal.

Say your affirmations out loud, with real feeling and emotion, at least once a day for a month. You will feel what it is like to experience the outcome you want as if it is already achieved. Your affirmations are made for yourself - not others.
What is known as the reticular activating system of your brain is a remarkable ally, filtering out what you don’t need, while letting in the avenues of information and resources - ideas, appropriate people, inspiration - that will bring about the realisation of your goals.

You owe it to yourself to make this commitment for a month and look at the progress you will make. What have you got to lose?

Many looking at issues involving the mind and optimising their mindset are drawn to internet marketing. Here's a real common sense article for people looking at starting online businesses :

Are You Swimming With The Sharks
by Charlie Page


A number of years ago an incredible businessman named Harvey Mackay wrote a book called “Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive”.

The Internet is a lot like the title of that book.

The water is certainly full of sharks, all ready to take their $37 or $97 or $2000 bite out of YOUR wallet!

Before you become some online shark’s next snack and make your credit card scream “Not again!” let’s look at the things you will really need to succeed this year and beyond.

I believe you can make a living online, pretty much without regard to your age, experience or education level. I have seen 20 year old people do well and people in their 80s do well too.

And I think that having a successful online business can be a pretty simple thing to do if you have a great plan, make a strong start and maintain focus.

Let me also add that I’m not going to recommend anyone’s product or service, even mine.

Will you need to buy products and services along the way?Probably yes. But far too many today have spent their hard-earned money on junk products that promise the moon only to deliver yet another disappointment.

It’s a cycle that needs to end, and end fast.

So what DO you really need to succeed online?

The FIRST thing you need is knowledge, and plenty of it. But the trick is getting that knowledge without falling into information overload. That can be a difficult balance to achieve.

Please notice I said knowledge and not just information. Getting information is oh so easy. Knowing what to do is a different matter.

Fortunately, there are great resources you can tap that won’t cost a dime. This blog is one of those resources. Many other people share openly on their blogs and websites and in special reports as well.

Getting this free learning can help you make a solid start.

I think that when it comes to consuming free information one key is this – is the person trying to sell something or trying to share from their experience?

Most good business people know the value of giving helpful free information so that people can get to know and trust them. This can create an excellent free education for you!

Do these people want to sell things? Yes. Nothing wrong with that. Is that why they are giving out the free information? Probably. Nothing wrong with that either. We all have to eat.

But you really can get a very good basic education by doing nothing but carefully reading and listening to the right free resources.

That’s what I did when I started online. I can’t even count how many “how to” articles I read back then. I learned a lot, including what good article writing looked like! I went on from there to end up writing over 1000 articles and even teaching a course on article marketing! Learning by doing worked well for me. I believe it can work for you too.

So with that bit of background, here are the things I would tell any person wanting to “make it” online.

1. Know the Language

Imagine being dropped by helicopter into the deepest, darkest jungle you can imagine. The natives don’t speak your language and you certainly don’t speak theirs.

Welcome to the Internet!

The first thing you must understand is the language of the Net. You must become familiar (not an expert, just familiar) with things like …
• Autoresponder
• CPM
• CPA
• Ebooks
• Ezines
• FAQ
• HTML
• PHP
• ROI
• USP
• MLM
• Opt-In
• PDF
• And more!

The more you know, the more time you will save sifting through the offers you receive and the less money you will waste buying something you really didn’t want.

Here’s a tip — When you find a site that defines terms well, write down the definitions and create an “Internet Dictionary” for your own personal use. Soon you will know the language which will help you save time and avoid confusion. And that’s a good thing.

The truth is that nothing we do offline prepares us for working online. Just the language of doing business online — terms like CPM and CPA and solo ads — can be strange and confusing at first.

2. Avoid Confusion

Succeeding online requires some basic skills. Most people who really succeed online (and by “really” I mean they last longer than a few months) have learned how to do these things.
• Choose profitable products to promote
• Get traffic to the sites they promote
• Place ads
• Write articles to get free traffic
• Create blogs to develop a loyal following
• Build a mailing list
• Using autoresponders to follow up

The problem is that there are endless web sites and “gurus” who are all saying different things about how to do these things. No wonder most people are confused!

Here’s a great way to avoid confusion. Make a list of the things you will need to succeed. Start with is the list above if you like. Once you make your list pay careful attention to the material you find about that topic and ignore everything else!

Yes, I said ignore the rest for a while. I call this “careful neglect”.

This means reading email once a day and not once an hour. It might even mean getting a new address for email you really want to receive. It means not clicking the links in emails and reading every sales letter. Sounds like blasphemy coming from an online marketer but it works and you deserve honest advice.

YOU set the agenda. Don’t let the email you receive or the latest product launch set it for you.

It takes a laser focus to succeed online. In fact, focus might just be the #1 skill needed.

So make your list and choose what your focus will be for the next week and then let everything else wait. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how much progress you can make in one week if you focus.

Here’s a tip that works – Find one eBook, eCourse or ezine that deals with the subject you chose as your first area of focus.

Now, here’s the really hard part … you have to READ it. Read it all. From cover to cover. Pretend you are going to make a book report on it.

My best advice is this … never let yourself buy a product, book, course or webinar and then not use it. Use what you buy every time, and use it to the fullest extent possible. You will learn the skills you need and save money too. Now that’s a win-win!

3. Understand the Cost of “Cheap”

We would all like to believe that you can get everything you need for $37 and go on to make millions on the Net.

But that’s not the real world.

The fact is that you will need to spend money at some point. The real key here is to buy only those things that you really need and that have a good reputation online.

Another key is to avoid committing so much time to cheap “shortcut” methods that you end up not having time to learn what you need. If something you have been doing is supposed to work quickly but is not working for you then you are probably not the problem!

The good news on the low-cost front is that there are things that really do work and don’t cost a dime. Article marketing and social media are two great places to start. They work now and have worked well for a long time. There is no reason they won’t work for you too.

4. Avoid the Hype

If there were a magic formula, a “shortcut to success” or a way to make millions in 90 days everyone would be doing it.

The next time you get a “too good to be true” offer ask yourself if it makes sense for someone who makes a million dollars a year to be spending time sending YOU an unsolicited email. Or why they would be selling their secrets for $37.

Then hide your credit card for the next 24 hours. If you still want the product after cooling down, go for it!

5. Have a Plan

I’m NOT talking New Year’s Resolutions or time management here. I’m talking about sticking with something until you have the chance to succeed.

SO many people on the Web join a program, don’t make a dime in the first couple of months and then quit that program to do another.

No one can succeed this way.

If you opened an offline business you would not expect to succeed wildly in the first 90 days. Some offline businesses don’t make a profit in their first year!

Doing business online IS different that doing business offline.

People can and do succeed much faster online and with much less start-up cost. But the pie-in-the-sky situations where you make six figures a month just by copying what someone else is doing are not real. Never have been. Never will be.

The best advice I know is to find something that interests you, investigate it well, make sure real people (not just the super-promoters) are making real money and then make a commitment to it. How long to commit will come out as you investigate it.

Want to make this year your best year ever?

Focus on the basics of success, learn the skills we all have to learn, be persistent and I believe success will be yours!

Charlie Page owns the Directory of Ezines as well as four other membership sites.He has written over 12 books on marketing and has collaborated on projects with such marketing stars as Bob Allen, Jay Conrad Levinson, Alex Mandossian, Yanik Silver, Jim Edwards, Jack Humphrey and many more. He helped Bob Allen write his highly successful “Multiple Streams of Internet Income” book which you can find on Amazon.com or in your local bookstore.

Much of the time, we need reminding about things we basically know, but don’t always embrace in everyday life. Here’s a simple, but excellent example from Tony Robbins :

Think of a major mistake you've made in the last year... you can zero in on what you did wrong, or you can reframe the experience in a way that focuses beyond it to what you may have learned.... One of the keys to success is finding the most useful frame for any experience so you can turn it into something that works for you rather than against you."


From "Unlimited Power" by Tony Robbins - p.296-297

Tony Robbins is one of the world’s leading life coaches and writers on personal development. His practical insights into human nature, why we behave in certain ways and how to bring about lasting change are superbly explained in his monumental book “Awaken The Giant Within”. Make no mistake, this is about as far away from the realm of dreamy, psychobabble as you could wish to find.

Today, I want to focus on what Tony Robbins refers to as ‘the force that shapes your life’. (The passages below from Tony are in purple, with my own concluding comments after in black).
One thing is clear to me : human beings are not random creatures; everything we do, we do for a reason. We may not be aware of the reason consciously, but there is undoubtedly a single driving force behind all human behaviour. This force impacts every facet of our lives, from our relationships and finances to our bodies and brains.

What is this force that is controlling you now and will continue to do so for the rest of your life? PAIN and PLEASURE! Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.

Understanding and utilizing the forces of pain and pleasure will allow you once and for all to create the lasting changes and improvements you desire for yourself and those you care about. Failure to understand this force dooms you to a future of living in reaction, like an animal or a machine. Perhaps this sounds like a complete oversimplification, but think about it. Why don’t you do some of the things you know you should do?

After all, what is procrastination? It’s when you know you should do something, but you still don’t do it. Why not? The answer is simple: at some level you believe that taking action in this moment would be more painful than just putting it off. Yet, have you ever had the experience of putting something off for so long that suddenly you felt pressure to just do it, to get it done?

What happened? You changed what you linked pain and pleasure to. Suddenly, not taking action became more painful than putting it off.

Our behaviour, both conscious and unconscious, has been rigged by pain and pleasure from so many sources: childhood peers, mums and dads, teachers, coaches, movie and television heroes and the list goes on.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that what you link pain and pleasure to will shape your destiny. As you review your own life, can you recall experiences that formed your neuro-associations and thus set in motion the chain of causes and effects that brought you to where you are today?

What meaning do you attach to things? If you’re single, do you look upon marriage wistfully as a joyous adventure with your life’s mate, or do you dread it as a heavy ball and chain? As you sit down to dinner tonight, do you consume food matter-of-factly as an opportunity to refuel your body, or do you devour it as your sole source of pleasure?

Though we’d like to deny it, the fact remains that what drives our behaviour is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation. We’re not driven so much by what we intellectually know, but rather what we’ve learned to link pain and pleasure to in our nervous systems.

It’s our neuro-associations - the associations we’ve established in our nervous systems - that determines what we’ll do. Although we’d like to believe it’s our intellect that really drives us, in most cases our emotions - the sensations that we link to our thoughts - are what truly drive us.

Many times we try to override the system. For a while we stick to a diet; we’ve finally pushed ourselves over the edge because we have so much pain. We will have solved the problem for the moment-but if we haven’t eliminated the cause of the problem, it will resurface.

Ultimately, in order for a change to last, we must link pain to our old behaviour, pleasure to our new behaviour and condition it until it’s consistent. Remember, we will all do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Going on a diet and overriding our pain in the short term by pure willpower never lasts simply because we still link pain to giving up fattening foods.

For this change to be long-term, we’ve got to link pain to eating those foods so that we no longer even desire them and pleasure to eat more of the foods that nourish us. The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviours.

With smoking, for example, all you must do is link enough pain to smoking and enough pleasure to quitting. You have the ability to do this right now, but you might not exercise this capability because you’ve trained your body to link pleasure to smoking or you fear that stopping would be too painful. Yet, if you meet anyone who has stopped, you will find that this behaviour changed in one day; the day they truly changed what smoking meant to them.

In the extracts I selected, Tony Robbins mentioned dieting and stopping smoking as two areas where people frequently do the opposite of what their intellects determine they should do, but obviously there are numerous examples in all spheres of life.

I can illustrate what he’s talking about with my own experience of smoking. When I was a small boy, my uncle lived with us for a while. Both he and my dad were heavy smokers, favouring the strong, untipped brands that were prevalent at the time. My abiding memory was of both of them going through a prolonged coughing ritual each and every morning. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I just knew that this wasn’t good and was extremely unappealing.

In fact, all my associations with smoking at that time were negative. I found it bizarre and off-putting that both of them had dark brown stained fingers, I also intensely disliked the smoke that hurt my eyes and especially the all-pervading stench that seemed to accompany them everywhere, particularly from the ubiquitous full ashtrays.

Many youngsters start to smoke, because they think it makes them look cool or grown-up. I fortunately suffered no such delusions. I recall the Consulate commercials on TV using the slogan “Cool as a mountain stream”. Even as a small boy, I always found it baffling that the adjective ‘cool’ should be used to describe something that was basically on fire.

Needless to say, because of these early neuro-associations, I have never wanted to smoke and feel grateful that I have not jeopardised my health in that way. Mind you, before I sound too pious, I have developed other bad habits, where my experiences, perceptions and subsequent neuro-associations were different.

I consider Tony Robbins’ comments regarding pain and pleasure to be spot on and something that we should all consider, firstly to understand why we do things and secondly, to bring about the changes we desire.

Next time, we shall develop this further, looking at how we are affected by the advertising industry.

Another person well worth investigating is Dr John Demartini. Here is a short example of his insight.

Beyond Cause And Effect
by Dr John Demartini


Put your thinking cap on for a minute and read carefully as you take a journey through the labyrinth of cause and effect.

You consciously or unconsciously seek the mysterious connection between any cause and effect ever perceived. One of your higher objectives is to solve this underlying mystery and to unify the apparent space and time separations that give rise to their illusive distinctions. Anytime you assume that you are a victim and claim that someone else has done something to you, and that you’re right and they’re wrong, guess what your brain does? It keeps creating ‘distracting brain noise’ until you dissolve this illusion.


As long as you have a perception that someone outside you did something to you, your brain will not be set free from such noise as well as its associated future imagined fear and past remembered guilt. The fear and guilt occurs because you are actually misinterpreting about the cause and effect, since it is ultimately your perception of what happened to you that is the true source or cause of your effect.


It’s all within your perception. When you change your perception to one of synchronous balance, where pain is instantaneously balanced by pleasure, drawbacks balanced by benefits, or losses balanced by gains, your brain noise becomes cleared. That’s why you can take a so-called victim of any event, have them balance their perceptions and identify their own cause and effect, and their brain noise will be cleared and their fear and guilt dissolved. Clear consciousness results. But as long as you blame someone outside yourself, separate your cause and effect, and create the mysterious void and noise in the brain, your brain will do whatever it can to seek the answer to that mystery, to find the true, synchronous and underlying balance. Your brain acts as a love-seeking, balance-seeking, quest-ion dissolving organ. Your genetic code assists your brain in its search to elevate your consciousness awareness quantum by quantum.

You are innately motivated to learn the many lessons arising from separated causes and effects. Therefore you are motivated to fulfill your many voids? (Voids are another way of saying separations of cause and effect). Your mind functions with the assistance of your brain. It perceives positive and negative events in space, and future and past events in time. The second you are in the future or past, exaggerating or minimizing, attracting or repelling, your illusion creates a void since you are separating space and time events. Any time you separate space and time, because you can’t do one without the other, you create a mental void, which drives the mysterious search.


Your mental void is actually an illusion, which drives your full-filling value. Whatever is perceived as most separated, voided or missing becomes most important, and therefore you are motivated to dissolve lopsided perceptions that create these voids. The hierarchy of your values determines your destiny so your destiny is based upon the hierarchy of your voids. Ultimately the truth is that no therapy is complete until cause equals effect in spacetime, since nothing is truly missing and space and time are perceptual illusions. Love is all there is and all else is illusion. Love transcends space and time and fulfils voids.

How is that for putting on your thinking cap? If you don’t understand it all, that’s OK. The main point is to just balance your perceptions when you feel unclear and this will clear your distracting brain noise. The feelings of order and gratitude are signs you are present and balanced.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Introductory chapter - provides an overview of the book

“Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los Angeles police officers a year earlier. The entire nation had seen a videotape of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Fifty three people were killed and more than seven thousand buildings were torched. Much of the mayhem was carried live by news cameras from helicopters circling overhead. After a particularly horrific act of violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for peace.

King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become cultural kitsch, a catch phrase more often said for laughs then as a serious plea for mutual understanding. I therefore hesitated to use King’s words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two reasons.

First, because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question, not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is sent to us from helicopters circling over the city–dispatches from the war zone.

The second reason I decided to open this book with an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely, something rarely quoted. As he stumbled through his television interview, fighting back tears and often repeating himself, he found these words: “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”

This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so while we’re waiting, let’s at least try to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.

* * * * *

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything. Books have been published in recent years on the transformative role in human history played by cooking, mothering, war . . . even salt. This is one of those books. I study moral psychology, and I’m going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible. I don’t mean to imply that cooking, mothering, war, and salt were not also necessary, but in this book I’m going to take you on a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.

By the end of the tour, I hope to have given you a new way to think about two of the most important, vexing, and divisive topics in human life: politics and religion. Etiquette books tell us not to discuss these topics in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together.

My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with a mixture of awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved this complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests and savannas, and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of modern societies in just the last few thousand years. My hope is that this book will make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more common, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. My hope is that it will help us to get along.

Born to Be Righteous
I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do” morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which meant “just, upright, virtuous.” This meaning has been carried into the modern English words righteous and righteousness, although nowadays those words have strong religious connotations because they are usually used to translate the Hebrew word tzedek. Tzedek is a common word in the Old Testament, often used to describe people who act in accordance with God’s wishes, but it is also an attribute of God and of God’s judgment of people (which is often harsh but always thought to be just).

The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self-righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

What Lies Ahead
This book has three parts which you can think of as three separate books, except that each one depends heavily on the one before it. Each part presents one major principle of moral psychology.

Part I is about the first principle: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images that hogs the stage of our awareness. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

I developed this metaphor in my last book, The Happiness Hypothesis, where I described how the rider and elephant work together, sometimes poorly, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and connection. In this book I’ll use the metaphor to solve puzzles such as why it seems like everyone (else) is a hypocrite and why political partisans are so willing to believe outrageous lies and conspiracy theories. I’ll also use the metaphor to show you how you can better persuade people who seem unresponsive to reason.

Part II is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Secular Western moralities are like cuisines that try to activate just one or two of these receptors—either concerns about harm and suffering, or concerns about fairness and injustice. But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. I’ll explain where these six taste receptors come from, how they form the basis of the world’s many moral cuisines, and why politicians on the right have a built-in advantage when it comes to cooking meals that voters like.

Part III is about the third principle: morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or parasite, as some scientists (the “new atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

(A note on terminology: In the United States the word liberal refers to progressive or left-wing politics, and I will use the word in this sense. But in Europe and elsewhere the word liberal is truer to its original meaning—valuing liberty above all else, including in economic activities. When Europeans use the word liberal, they often mean something more like the American term libertarian, which cannot be placed easily on the left-right spectrum. Readers from outside the United States may want to swap in the words progressive or left-wing whenever I say liberal.)

* * * * *

In the coming chapters I’ll draw on the latest research in neuroscience, genetics, social psychology, and evolutionary modeling, but the take-home message of the book is ancient. It is one of the Great Truths found in most of the world’s wisdom traditions. It begins with the realization that we are all self-righteous hypocrites:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? . . . You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Matthew 7:3–5)

It continues with the claim that enlightenment (or wisdom, if you prefer) requires us all to take the logs out of our own eyes and then escape from our ceaseless, petty, and divisive moralism. As the eighth-century Chinese Zen master Sen-ts’an wrote:

The Perfect Way is only difficult
for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between “for” and “against”
is the mind’s worst disease.

I’m not saying we should live our lives like Sen-ts’an. In fact, I believe that a world without moralism, gossip, and judgment would quickly decay into chaos. But if we want to understand ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials, we need to step back, drop the moralism, apply some moral psychology, and analyze the game we’re all playing.

Let us now examine the psychology of this struggle between “for” and “against.” It is a struggle that plays out in each of our righteous minds, and among all of our righteous groups.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action as well as the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. His research is widely published in scientific journals, while he has also become a best-selling author.

In his extraordinary book, “Incognito - The Secret Lives of the Brain”, he basically asks the question, “If the conscious mind - the part you consider you - is just the tip of the iceberg, what is the rest doing?”

Over the coming weeks, on this blog, I am going to highlight some of Eagleman’s thought-provoking, illuminating, yet invariably entertaining insights into the workings of the human mind. Together, we can benefit from the remarkable man’s work.

As a taster, I have included here a short essay -

Elegance Of Our Brain Lies In Its Inelegance
by David Eagleman

For centuries, neuroscience attempted to neatly assign labels to the various parts of the brain: this is the area for language, this one for morality, this for tool use, color detection, face recognition, and so on. This search for an orderly brain map started off as a viable endeavor, but turned out to be misguided.

The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting: it possesses multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world. It is a machine built of conflicting parts. It is a representative democracy that functions by competition among parties who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem.

As a result, we can get mad at ourselves, argue with ourselves, curse at ourselves and contract with ourselves. We can feel conflicted. These sorts of neural battles lie behind marital infidelity, relapses into addiction, cheating on diets, breaking of New Year's resolutions—all situations in which some parts of a person want one thing and other parts another.

These are things which modern machines simply do not do. Your car cannot be conflicted about which way to turn: it has one steering wheel commanded by only one driver, and it follows directions without complaint. Brains, on the other hand, can be of two minds, and often many more. We don't know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several sets of hands on the steering wheel of behavior.

Take memory. Under normal circumstances, memories of daily events are consolidated by an area of the brain called the hippocampus. But in frightening situations—such as a car accident or a robbery—another area, the amygdala, also lays down memories along an independent, secondary memory track. Amygdala memories have a different quality to them: they are difficult to erase and they can return in "flash-bulb" fashion—a common description of rape victims and war veterans.

In other words, there is more than one way to lay down memory. We're not talking about memories of different events, but different memories of the same event. The unfolding story appears to be that there may be even more than two factions involved, all writing down information and later competing to tell the story. The unity of memory is an illusion.

And consider the different systems involved in decision making: some are fast, automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness; others are slow, cognitive, and conscious. And there's no reason to assume there are only two systems; there may well be a spectrum. Some networks in the brain are implicated in long-term decisions, others in short-term impulses (and there may be a fleet of medium-term biases as well).

Attention, also, has also recently come to be understood as the end result of multiple, competing networks, some for focused, dedicated attention to a specific task, and others for monitoring broadly (vigilance). They are always locked in competition to steer the actions of the organism.

Even basic sensory functions—like the detection of motion—appear now to have been reinvented multiple times by evolution. This provides the perfect substrate for a neural democracy.

On a larger anatomical scale, the two hemispheres of the brain, left and right, can be understood as overlapping systems that compete. We know this from patients whose hemispheres are disconnected: they essentially function with two independent brains. For example, put a pencil in each hand, and they can simultaneously draw incompatible figures such as a circle and a triangle.

The two hemispheres function differently in the domains of language, abstract thinking, story construction, inference, memory, gambling strategies, and so on. The two halves constitute a team of rivals: agents with the same goals but slightly different ways of going about it.

To my mind, this elegant solution to the mysteries of the brain should change the goal for aspiring neuroscientists. Instead of spending years advocating for one's favorite solution, the mission should evolve into elucidating the different overlapping solutions: how they compete, how the union is held together, and what happens when things fall apart.

Part of the importance of discovering elegant solutions is capitalizing on them. The neural democracy model may be just the thing to dislodge artificial intelligence. We human programmers still approach a problem by assuming there's a best way to solve it, or that there's a way it should be solved. But evolution does not solve a problem and then check it off the list. Instead, it ceaselessly reinvents programs, each with overlapping and competing approaches.

The lesson is to abandon the question "what's the most clever way to solve that problem?" in favor of "are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?" This will be the starting point in ushering in a fruitful new age of elegantly inelegant computational devices.