Blog for Carson Tang

Can you influence a frog?

PERSUASION AND INFLUENCE

Persuasion if done effectively is sub conscious – below someone’s radar. It is not right in your face, it flows like melting butter and anchors beliefs and memories into one’s un-waking state where millions of bits of information are flying through the mind and being processed for immediate action (typically 8,000 bits of information is the max we can deal with from the millions entering our mind every minute).

To prevent you from going insane your mind filters out what it believes useless and puts it where it can be easily retrieved. Since your brain believes this information important, persuasion creates bookmarks in Wernicke’s area of your brain. This is involved in and comprehension. While the Broca’s area effects speech and language output. “According to this model, when you hear a word spoken, this auditory signal is processed first in your brain’s primary auditory cortex, which then sends it on to the neighbouring Wernicke’s area. This area associates the structure of this signal with the representation of a word stored in your memory, thus enabling you to retrieve the meaning of the particular word.” - McGill, The Brain Top To Bottom. Imagine how powerful it would be for you to be able to train or influence the Wernicke’s area of your audience’s mind in how it interprets and processes language and information, while influencing the Broca’s area to process the chosen output desired. Our mind looks for answers when asked a question. If you ask yourself a question your brain will find an answer. You can embed empowering questions into a person’s mind subconsciously. For example even if I say “Don’t think of the color blue, whatever you do don’t think of the color blue!” What color do you think of?

The other area in your brain where information is used for processing information is the reticular activating system. The mind has the quantitative capacity to process 5 plus or minus 1 or 2 pieces of information at a time. This is why zip codes and phone numbers are kept to this particular number of digits. This is a generic rule of thumb where only a small percent of humans do not fit into this profile; however, the majority does.

In persuasion make sure you recognize information needs to fit into this quantitative capacity for people to recall and act on information you are sharing with them. “KISS” Strategy – ‘Keep It Simple & Stupid’. Make it memorable, relevant and emotionally powerful.

To enhance the results of persuasion even further you would access and seed impressions in the limbic system where information becomes transparent to logic. “The limbic system is involved in emotion, motivation, and emotional association with memory. The limbic system influences the formation of memory by integrating emotional states with stored memories of physical sensations.” “The limbic system is embryologically an older part of the brain. It developed to manage ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ chemicals and is an evolutionary necessity for reptiles as well as homosapiens. “– Wikipedia.

By influencing the limbic system you bypass logic and enter the subconscious through a person’s emotional gateway. You don’t consciously think about your physiology when emotions are in play, your affected mind kicks into automatic based on experiences you’ve already embedded, and the limbic system does the rest. For example, can you control your facial expression when you are surprised? or can you control when your body gets goose bumps when you are afraid? Actions follow the physiological response the limbic system creates.

Your body subconsciously tunes into the warning signs or those emotions that arise triggering your “gut” instincts. Your brain then immediately forms options for the action to take.. fight or flight, etc. In our case you have already anchored a thought connected to emotion in someone’s subconscious; therefore, their thoughts are predictable ones and the options that will arise in that person’s mind and what action they may choose to take are already anticipated. This is the power of creating experiences through multiple modalities.

Recall effectively occurs more quickly when information is readily accessible in the mind. Being associated with powerful emotions activates your limbic system and allows the firing off of synapses that command your reticular activating system (RAS) to call up select memories. This is the area where you have created short cuts to allow you to make quick decisions and take rapid action, e.g. ever drive down a road to the grocery to pick up milk and not even recall what streets you just drove down or turned on? It is your RAS creating a shortcut for you, so you don’t have process an overwhelming amount of information.

If your persuasion is subconscious it opens a dialog with Wernicke’s (input and processing) and Broca’s (production of language and output) areas; and the limbic system of the brain. This creates stickiness and powerful results including the reticular activating system. An area where your audience’s guard is down and where they are more open to suggestion and information.

Bottomline – Take advantage of all modalities subconsciously and consciously to create total recall and action using experiential persuasion. Persuasion becomes more powerful when it is done subconsciously. There are different parts of the brain involved in this dialog and the conversation becomes automatic if you learn how to activate these areas of the brain and implement the right process. All communications between two or more people is based on a process. Think of how important it would be to tap into and share a subconscious dialog with your audience’s subconscious mind.