“Mind Manipulation” Part 1
This is a click bait. The content has nothing to do with superpower. 2020-01-31

First thing first, I’m not going to talk about controlling other people’s mind.

I’ve always been wondering

• how does human’s mind work
  
• how it affects our daily decision
  
• how to pick up new habit, like writing blogs
  
• how to quit bad behaviors, like smoking
  
• how to deal with procrastination
  
• …
  

From time to time, I read about different studies, tried out various suggestions.
But nothing has ever worked.
Frustration hits me often.
Giving up is my daily routine.

After a long time fighting with my own bad habits,
I recently have taken a deep look into my own thought process through a thorough self-retrospection.
I’ve done quite some googling, and started to realize something meaningful.
Interesting ideas keep coming into my mind, and it is delicately changing me.

I feel the urge to write it done.

It’s going to be a long article, I will try to organize it in a series.
By the time I’ve done, I think I will have the confidence to say
what I’m going to share now works on me at least.

• My personal understanding about how does human’s mind work
  
  • Pro-active reaction
    
  • Passive reaction
    
• Two levels of brain processing
  
  • Fast processing (reflex)
    
  • Slow processing (logical thinking)
    
• Mind, like muscle, needs training and maintaining.
  
  • It’s definitely not a switch
    
  • Meditation might be a good way for mind training
    
• When you procrastinate, how does the decision process look like
  
  • Rational part
    
  • Unconscious part
    
  • Pressure
    
  • When there is no pressure or short-term feedback
    
• Techniques are important
  
  • we need to find the ones suit us the best
    
  • no silver bullets work for everyone
    
• Importance of environment and making a comfortable environment
  
• It’s a marathon not a one-time deal
  

First, let’s talk about some physics.

The whole universe is made by a single lonely electron.

// off-topic
The 4 fundamental interactions are

• Gravitational interaction
  
• Electromagnetic interaction
  
• Strong interaction / strong nuclear force
  
• Weak interaction / weak nuclear force
  

In daily life, we can ignore the 3rd and 4th.
When it comes to human’s mind,
I really don’t believe it has anything to do with gravity.
So the only important thing to discuss is Electromagnetic Force
// end of off-topic

All the emotions and feelings have been proven to be related to complicated
chemical interactions inside human’s brain.
With that being said, any of that complicated processes can be simplified as
electromagnetic interactions:

• Attraction
  
• Repulsion
  

Starting from atoms, attractions and repulsions are the key forces to build
any living beings.

Combine it with Darwin’s theory, an extremely long period of evolution has
built up two patterns

• Living beings will be attracted by
  
  • basic needs
    
  • safety
    
  • …
    
• Living beings will be repulsed by
  
  • danger
    
  • insecurity
    
  • …
    

Life will be much easier, if it were that simple.
As human beings, we are making our way to escape from natural rules to some
certain extent, that’s where our greatness lies.

Positive/negative feelings and emotions also follow the rules above,
but way more complicated.
We can think them as a complex combination of attractions and repulsions
which make up some certain states.

But still there are more questions,
we know something is bad for us, say smoking is harmful to our health.
But we still ignore those patterns.
Actually smokers feel the need to have one another cigarette.
In this particular case, humans are not repulsed by bad things(smoking),
but are attracted insteadly.

Why is this happening?

Fast thinking (reflex) and slow thinking (logical thinking)

This video shares a good explanation about this.
This is how your brain works

(more to be added here)

Daily routines, experiences, environments, and etc.
will shape our fast thinking process.
To be more specific, they will build up patterns in our brain.

How does our brain react to those patterns?
We will

• be attracted when it’s a familiar pattern (attraction)
  
• feel uncomfortable when something is not common (repulsion)
  

Think about why horror movies scare people.
Those scary images, sudden sound effects, dead silence are out of our brains’
expectation. The breach of familiar patterns make us want to get away by
instinct.

Logical thinking is not applied here. We feel a blood strike immediately when
a scary face pops up in the screen.

Moreover, after watching many horror movies, we can build up the patterns in
our brains. “That door looks so suspicious, I bet something will jump out from
there.” And when it does, we will not be that much scared any more, because it
fits the pattern. Most of the time, we will not talk to ourselves like that,
we just feel the thing is coming. It’s a fast thinking process, or a reflex.

Before we move on to the logical thinking part,
let’s connect the dots we have so far.

Concepts we have:

• States consist of complex combination of electromagnetic interactions
  
• Attraction and repulsion
  
• Patterns
  

Here is the “workflow”:

• Ongoing event triggers a certain state of complex electromagnetic
  interactions in brains
  
• This state is mapped to existing patterns
  
  • built by nature/intuitions
    
  • formed from evolution
    
  • shaped by past experiences
    
• Our brain may send out attraction or repulsion signals,
  and further followed by our feelings/emotions/actions.
  Or sometimes our brain choose to ignore.
  
• Past events become experience which serves to adjust existing patterns.
  
• and so on so forth
  

(to be continued)