To more information about the TDD-based mind hacking that you mentioned.
Well, at the moment that’s mostly in not-publicly-available stuff, though there are bits and bobs in my blog, and a bit in chapter 4 of the first draft of Thinking Things Done. Most of the meat is in audios and videos of recorded workshops for the Mind Hackers’ Guild, though.
Short version: notice what happens in your body in response to a thought. Notice what flashes through your mind right before the response in your body. Observe whether these reactions are both spontaneous (i.e., “you” aren’t doing them) and repeatable (i.e., you get roughly the same response to the thought each time).
This is now your “test”. To borrow TDD language, you now have a test that’s “on red”. You can now use any method you like to try to change the output of the test, except for consciously overriding the response. (Since you would then have to do it every time.)
You can make a test for any behavior or circumstance, by thinking about a specific instance of that behavior or circumstance. The key is it has to be near-mode (experiential) thinking, not far-mode (abstraction, categories, not sensory-specific).
Our behaviors are generally driven by our emotional (and physical) anticipations, so if you can change (via memory reconsolidation) the anticipations in question, then the behaviors will generally also change.
Keys to change:
You must notice what memory/anticipation is flickering past, in order to alter it (see e.g. Eliezer’s getting rid of his anticipation of a serial killer in the bathroom) -- this is a general principle known as memory reconsolidation
To observe the fleeting memory or anticipation, it is generally helpful to intensify it, or connect it to its ultimate consequence, e.g. by asking, “What’s bad about that?” (Sometimes you will get a flicker of something that seems like a neutral or not-too-bad anticipation, yet it is accompanied by a negative physical response… Often you can pull up the actual anticipation by focusing on the feeling itself.)
Sometimes the anticipation is about what happens if you fail. Sometimes it’s about if you succeed. Sometimes, it’s about something good you’ll get by failing, and lose if you succeed. Sometimes, it’s the kind of person you think you’ll be, or that others will think you are. And not a one of these anticipations will make a lick of sense to your conscious mind, which will insist that these ideas are not yours at all. And that, is the best possible evidence that what you’re doing is actually working. If you are not surprised by what you discover, you are probably doing something wrong.
Corollary: real change is also surprising. When you successfully mindhack, two things usually happen: first, you will surprise yourself by acting differently in some area where you didn’t expect it, and then realize that there’s a connection you didn’t see to the thing you changed. Second, you will begin to forget that you ever did things differently, and what it was like to think the way you did before.
There are only a handful of techniques that work, but they are dressed in many superficially different outward forms. ALL of them appear to work via some kind of memory consolidation; they mostly differ in the details of how they get to the memory, and how they get you to either disrupt the trace or lay down a new one. The epistemology of all these techniques is 100% horseshit: nobody really knows how or why they work (even my reconsolidation hypothesis is just that: a hypothesis), so don’t let a stupid theory stop you from actually doing something.
To get good at this, you need one physical technique and several mental ones. Physical techniques like EFT or the Matherne Speed Trace are good for dealing with strong reactions, and will fix a lot of things. Pick one, and learn it cold by testing. If you can take, say, a physical reaction you get to seeing, smelling, or just imagining a food that disgusts you as your test, and you can make it go away using a physical technique, then you know you learned the technique. If you use it on something else, and it doesn’t work, this is now evidence that the technique won’t work for what you’re trying to fix, rather than evidence that the technique is bad or you don’t know how to do it.
When you have tried the physical technique on everything you want to change in your life that you can successfully get a strong spontaneous reaction to, you’re ready to move up to mental techniques. The physical ones are not so good at changing things like misplaced moral judgments, warped values, crazy definitions, and other kinds of broken brain patterns that you currently don’t know you have. (Side note: if you’re not a mind hacker, chances are good you have no idea just how crazy your own brain is by default. Just because you have the logical side of things wrapped up tight, doesn’t mean your emotional brain isn’t a fucking basket case!)
For a first mental technique—or at least, of the ones you can learn inexpensively—I suggest either the Work of Byron Katie, or the Lefkoe belief-change process. To successfully learn either, though, you need to be rigorous about testing. Identify a response that you have (that your physical technique failed on), and attempt to change it using the technique you’re learning. If you can’t get that one to change, try another, until you learn the technique itself. Katie and Lefkoe are good examples of intermediate-level mental techniques; I have a few easier-to-learn ones, but the learning materials are more expensive compared to K&L. ;-)
That’s pretty much the gamut of what you can do with free or nearly-free materials out there. (Katie and Lefkoe may both be in your local library, while EFT and Matherne are just a Google away.) This is (sort of) the path I followed myself, except that I’m cutting out lots of dead ends and leaving out all the good bits I personally discovered, tweaked, or adapted, but which require too many details to describe here.
(There’s also a good reason that the mental-level techniques are generally taught in workshop form, or as workshop transcripts; many things are difficult to grok except by experience, or at least the vicarious “experience” of seeing how someone else’s bug or blind spot resembles your own. Even Katie and Lefkoe put a lot of session transcripts in their books.)
A final note: the information in this comment, even if combined with the sources I’ve mentioned, is not sufficient to prevent you from going down a thousand blind alleys. The only thing that will get you out of them is an absolute desire to succeed, combined with an implacable determination to rigorously test, and to assume that anything that doesn’t result in a clear “red” or clear “green” is just confusion and time wasting.
Always define the test first, and get a repeatable red before you try to change. Always recheck the test after you “do” a technique. Assume that if you can’t get any test to change using a given technique, it probably means you haven’t learned to do the technique correctly. Once you have successfully made some tests change using a given technique, you can then assume that it not working on something probably means you’re either applying it to the wrong part of the problem, or it’s not applicable to that problem… but only experience will let you discover which is the case.
The changes you make will sometimes “stick” with one application of a technique, just often enough to make it really frustrating when you have a “bug” that keeps coming back. Generally, though, you’ll find that your original “test” is still passing, but there is now a problem at some other part of your thought process. Either you missed it the first time, or your brain is generating new bugs in order to address a higher-level need.
If something keeps coming back, you generally have some emotional need for your problem, that has to be addressed with a different level of analytic technique; plain old K&L will probably not cut it. I spent almost two years in hell after deciding to write Thinking Things Done because I had mastered everything I just told you above, except for this final level of technique.
To more information about the TDD-based mind hacking that you mentioned.
Well, at the moment that’s mostly in not-publicly-available stuff, though there are bits and bobs in my blog, and a bit in chapter 4 of the first draft of Thinking Things Done. Most of the meat is in audios and videos of recorded workshops for the Mind Hackers’ Guild, though.
Short version: notice what happens in your body in response to a thought. Notice what flashes through your mind right before the response in your body. Observe whether these reactions are both spontaneous (i.e., “you” aren’t doing them) and repeatable (i.e., you get roughly the same response to the thought each time).
This is now your “test”. To borrow TDD language, you now have a test that’s “on red”. You can now use any method you like to try to change the output of the test, except for consciously overriding the response. (Since you would then have to do it every time.)
You can make a test for any behavior or circumstance, by thinking about a specific instance of that behavior or circumstance. The key is it has to be near-mode (experiential) thinking, not far-mode (abstraction, categories, not sensory-specific).
Our behaviors are generally driven by our emotional (and physical) anticipations, so if you can change (via memory reconsolidation) the anticipations in question, then the behaviors will generally also change.
Keys to change:
You must notice what memory/anticipation is flickering past, in order to alter it (see e.g. Eliezer’s getting rid of his anticipation of a serial killer in the bathroom) -- this is a general principle known as memory reconsolidation
To observe the fleeting memory or anticipation, it is generally helpful to intensify it, or connect it to its ultimate consequence, e.g. by asking, “What’s bad about that?” (Sometimes you will get a flicker of something that seems like a neutral or not-too-bad anticipation, yet it is accompanied by a negative physical response… Often you can pull up the actual anticipation by focusing on the feeling itself.)
Sometimes the anticipation is about what happens if you fail. Sometimes it’s about if you succeed. Sometimes, it’s about something good you’ll get by failing, and lose if you succeed. Sometimes, it’s the kind of person you think you’ll be, or that others will think you are. And not a one of these anticipations will make a lick of sense to your conscious mind, which will insist that these ideas are not yours at all. And that, is the best possible evidence that what you’re doing is actually working. If you are not surprised by what you discover, you are probably doing something wrong.
Corollary: real change is also surprising. When you successfully mindhack, two things usually happen: first, you will surprise yourself by acting differently in some area where you didn’t expect it, and then realize that there’s a connection you didn’t see to the thing you changed. Second, you will begin to forget that you ever did things differently, and what it was like to think the way you did before.
There are only a handful of techniques that work, but they are dressed in many superficially different outward forms. ALL of them appear to work via some kind of memory consolidation; they mostly differ in the details of how they get to the memory, and how they get you to either disrupt the trace or lay down a new one. The epistemology of all these techniques is 100% horseshit: nobody really knows how or why they work (even my reconsolidation hypothesis is just that: a hypothesis), so don’t let a stupid theory stop you from actually doing something.
To get good at this, you need one physical technique and several mental ones. Physical techniques like EFT or the Matherne Speed Trace are good for dealing with strong reactions, and will fix a lot of things. Pick one, and learn it cold by testing. If you can take, say, a physical reaction you get to seeing, smelling, or just imagining a food that disgusts you as your test, and you can make it go away using a physical technique, then you know you learned the technique. If you use it on something else, and it doesn’t work, this is now evidence that the technique won’t work for what you’re trying to fix, rather than evidence that the technique is bad or you don’t know how to do it.
When you have tried the physical technique on everything you want to change in your life that you can successfully get a strong spontaneous reaction to, you’re ready to move up to mental techniques. The physical ones are not so good at changing things like misplaced moral judgments, warped values, crazy definitions, and other kinds of broken brain patterns that you currently don’t know you have. (Side note: if you’re not a mind hacker, chances are good you have no idea just how crazy your own brain is by default. Just because you have the logical side of things wrapped up tight, doesn’t mean your emotional brain isn’t a fucking basket case!)
For a first mental technique—or at least, of the ones you can learn inexpensively—I suggest either the Work of Byron Katie, or the Lefkoe belief-change process. To successfully learn either, though, you need to be rigorous about testing. Identify a response that you have (that your physical technique failed on), and attempt to change it using the technique you’re learning. If you can’t get that one to change, try another, until you learn the technique itself. Katie and Lefkoe are good examples of intermediate-level mental techniques; I have a few easier-to-learn ones, but the learning materials are more expensive compared to K&L. ;-)
That’s pretty much the gamut of what you can do with free or nearly-free materials out there. (Katie and Lefkoe may both be in your local library, while EFT and Matherne are just a Google away.) This is (sort of) the path I followed myself, except that I’m cutting out lots of dead ends and leaving out all the good bits I personally discovered, tweaked, or adapted, but which require too many details to describe here.
(There’s also a good reason that the mental-level techniques are generally taught in workshop form, or as workshop transcripts; many things are difficult to grok except by experience, or at least the vicarious “experience” of seeing how someone else’s bug or blind spot resembles your own. Even Katie and Lefkoe put a lot of session transcripts in their books.)
A final note: the information in this comment, even if combined with the sources I’ve mentioned, is not sufficient to prevent you from going down a thousand blind alleys. The only thing that will get you out of them is an absolute desire to succeed, combined with an implacable determination to rigorously test, and to assume that anything that doesn’t result in a clear “red” or clear “green” is just confusion and time wasting.
Always define the test first, and get a repeatable red before you try to change. Always recheck the test after you “do” a technique. Assume that if you can’t get any test to change using a given technique, it probably means you haven’t learned to do the technique correctly. Once you have successfully made some tests change using a given technique, you can then assume that it not working on something probably means you’re either applying it to the wrong part of the problem, or it’s not applicable to that problem… but only experience will let you discover which is the case.
The changes you make will sometimes “stick” with one application of a technique, just often enough to make it really frustrating when you have a “bug” that keeps coming back. Generally, though, you’ll find that your original “test” is still passing, but there is now a problem at some other part of your thought process. Either you missed it the first time, or your brain is generating new bugs in order to address a higher-level need.
If something keeps coming back, you generally have some emotional need for your problem, that has to be addressed with a different level of analytic technique; plain old K&L will probably not cut it. I spent almost two years in hell after deciding to write Thinking Things Done because I had mastered everything I just told you above, except for this final level of technique.