Covert Persuasion Tactical Power

What do YOU want them to think?!

At least a dozen times I've asked hundreds of people in an audience to look around a room identifying everything that is brown and instruct them to remember what they see because this is a very important experiment.

Then I ask everyone to close their eyes.

Everyone knows where everything brown is because each of their brains have been instructed to focus and find all brown...and they have been told that this is an important task.
"Now, point to something green."
No one can do it.
Those that point somewhere inevitably fail.
No doubt you may have participated in this fascinating experiment in the past as well.
The Fascinating Human Brain
It's an amazing thing about the human brain. We can retain an unbelievable amount of information.

But in this case, we can't remember where *anything* green might be...
We weren't told to look for it...
Imagine your friend teaches a grade school class and little Billy is acting up in the back. Your friend tells a fellow teacher about the experience.
"The kid is always acting up. He's probably 'ADD' and I wish he was on his way out. He's driving me nuts."
"Huh. I guess I've never seen it in his behavior. He can be talkative but he never misbehaves in my class and he's a pretty sharp kid. Sometimes even helpful to the other students."
Your friend looks at the fellow teacher as if he has lost his marbles.
Your friend will not likely ever see the student in any way other than he has and the other teacher will likely not change his view that the student is a pretty good kid.

Here's what happens when the second teacher visits the first teacher's class to observe...
Weeks later, the teachers agree to exchange notes on the student again. They've both retained their original opinion.
Today, the second teacher decides to sit in with your friend in his class. He sits at the back of the room and takes careful experimental notes on the young boys behavior noting anything that diverges from sitting and being quiet.
At the end of the day, the student had contributed four answers to questions for the class, spoke out of turn once, helped another student once, stopped an argument another time and laughed ridiculously loud once at a joke another student told.

"Did you see him today? The kid was back at it again. He was smarting off and disrupting the class again."
"Actually, he was pretty well behaved."
"You've got to be kidding!"
"No. I recorded everything he did today."
Your friend looked at the record and simply couldn't believe they were talking about the same child.
Your friend saw what he expected while the actual record showed a very different picture of what really happened.

KEYPOINT: You remember what you expect to see.

And don't worry, your friend isn't crazy.... He also looked for everything that was brown and saw what was brown.... and nothing else.
As soon as you have an attitude, opinion or emotional connection to something or someone else, you immediately filter your awareness of that stimulus through those attitudes, opinions and emotions.
It's how the brain operates. It's how the brain must operate or it would see something new and have to start from scratch analyzing what "is" and what causes what attitudes, emotions and opinions.
That would be incredibly time consuming and cause the destruction of the human race. (I'll come back to this.)
Unfortunately as helpful as this "filtering" is in general, it creates a very interesting life for each of us.

FACT ONE: We see what we expect to see.

FACT TWO: We don't see what we don't expect see.

FACT THREE: We see what we are told to look for...and not much else.

This week we found out something even more incredible. When a person drinks a drink of alcohol something amazing happens when it comes to people seeing what you want them to see...

To read more articles about Covert Persuasion Click Here!

Part 2 of this article coming soon!