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    The Priming Effect: The Neuroscience Behind the Law of Attraction
    The Priming Effect: The Neuroscience Behind the Law of Attraction
    The Priming Effect: The Neuroscience Behind the Law of Attraction
    Ebook120 pages2 hours

    The Priming Effect: The Neuroscience Behind the Law of Attraction

    By Steve Pavlina

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    About this ebook

    In The Priming Effect, bestselling author Steve Pavlina explores the manifestation process that permeates the neuroscience and Law of Attraction circles, and how together, the subtle influences of your life affect you more than you can even imagine.

    "This priming effect works [...] and its influence is usually subtle and unconscious. I guarantee that it’s operating in your life right now."
    — Steve Pavlina

    The Neuroscience-Based Approach to the Law of Attraction

    For the past two years, I’ve taken a strong interest in learning more about how the brain works. I’ve done a lot of reading and a lot of experimenting. Most of that hasn’t made it into my blog yet. There’s just way too much to blog about, and at this point I’ve been so much more inspired to explore it than to try to explain it piece by piece. I do want to share it though, but plain text isn’t the right medium. It’s better to share these ideas experientially and in person.

    Within any field, like personal development, there’s a tendency for group-think to take effect, where everyone settles into patterns of re-sharing the same ideas in different forms. The Law of Attraction is a good example. How many Law of Attraction coaches came online after the movie The Secret? I must have encountered hundreds!

    I wanted to branch out into a related but significantly different field and go looking for gems. I figured that if I understood more about the structure of the human brain, how it processes and stores information, how it thinks, and more, I could surely find some ideas that could be transplanted to the field of personal growth to help people get practical results — and of course to create new breakthroughs for myself as well. I especially wanted to look for ideas that are not so common already in this field but which are known and proven to be very powerful, as studied in other fields.

    The Priming Effect

    Neurons that fire together, wire together.

    The priming effect presents us with some enormous opportunities for personal growth. By exerting some control over our priming influences — which may involve just a few small changes that can be made within a minute or two — we can create a permanent and lasting improvement in different facets of our lives.

    By giving your brain slightly different input on a subconscious level, you can enjoy some truly significant benefits on the results side. This is easy. It works. And there are many ways you can apply this for free.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSteve Pavlina
    Release dateOct 3, 2015
    ISBN9781311718501
    The Priming Effect: The Neuroscience Behind the Law of Attraction
    Author

    Steve Pavlina

    Steve Pavlina is widely recognized as one of the most successful personal development bloggers on the Internet, with his work attracting more than 100 million visits to his website, StevePavlina.com. He has written more than 1300 articles and recorded many audio programs on a broad range of self-help topics, including productivity, relationships, and spirituality. Steve has been quoted as an expert by the New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Daily News, Self Magazine, The Guardian, and countless other publications. He's also a frequent guest on popular podcasts and radio shows. Steve's book Personal Development for Smart People was published by Hay House in 2008 and has been translated into a dozen different languages. The book hit the Amazon bestseller list three months before it was actually released, just from the pre-orders. Steve's passionate pursuit of personal growth began while sitting in a jail cell. Arrested for felony grand theft at age 19 and expelled from school, the full weight of responsibility for his life came crashing down upon him. In an attempt to overcome his out-of-control kleptomania addiction, he decided the best course of action was to go to work on himself. Since then Steve has become one of the most intensely growth-oriented individuals you'll ever know. While studying time management techniques, he earned college degrees in computer science and mathematics in only three semesters. In later years he founded a successful software company, developed award-winning computer games, ran the Los Angeles Marathon, trained in martial arts, and adopted a vegan diet. Steve has a reputation for conducting unusual growth experiments, such as his polyphasic sleep trial, during which he slept only two hours per day for five and a half months, publicly documenting his results each step of the way. By giving away his best ideas for free, Steve created one of the most popular personal development websites in the world without spending a dime on marketing or promotion. In 2010 he took the extra step of uncopyrighting his articles, podcasts, and videos and donating them to the public domain. Consequently, many people have republished Steve's work in different forms, translated his work into other languages, compiled his work into dozens of new books, and incorporated his work into their training programs. Steve currently lives in Las Vegas and travels...

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    • 5/5
      This book impacted me deeply even though I have been reading and living these concepts for years. Steve has a fresh and inviting way to approach the same material others have written about. Approach this material as if for the first time and you will feel the vibe of freedom and live as if it were true.

    Book preview

    The Priming Effect - Steve Pavlina

    Chapter One

    Inside your skull is a massive supercomputer. You own it free and clear. With its 100 billion neurons, and with a typical neuron linking to 1000 to 10,000 other neurons, your highly networked brain is incredibly powerful and capable.

    Pick up a simple object nearby like a pen or a spoon, and look at it. Turn it upside down. Spin it around. Notice that your brain is able to recognize the object no matter how you position it. You can change the lighting by putting the object in shadow. You can obscure part of it from view. You can bend or break it. And your brain still recognizes that object simply and easily. Even a child can do this.

    But what’s happening under the hood? Your visual cortex, consisting of about 538 million neurons, is doing an enormous amount of parallel processing on the signals it’s receiving from your eyes. Your visual cortex detects edges, evaluates color, tracks motion, interprets reflection, and more — all in real time.

    Your brain even does some extra processing to compensate for the blind spot on the back of your retina. Your eyes don’t actually see any data for that blind spot because there are no rods or cones there — it’s the place where your optic nerve connects to the back of your eyeball — but your visual cortex uses the surrounding information to intelligently predict what should be in that blind spot, and it fills in the missing data with its best guess. If a line crosses through your blind spot, you’ll still perceive it as a continuous line, even though the initial data coming from your retina has that line broken into two pieces.

    All of this processing happens subconsciously. You don’t feel it happening, and you aren’t consciously aware of all this computational effort. Yet that part of your brain is very active, lit up with chemical and electrical activity, consuming oxygen and sugar and other internal resources to perform such complex computations at such high speed.

    Even when you focus your attention upon it, you can’t consciously access what your visual cortex is doing. These computations are way too fast and way too complex for your conscious mind to keep up.

    Your visual cortex is only about 1/200th of your brain. Your auditory cortex is about 1/1000th. If you can’t even consciously fathom what these relatively small brain regions are doing computationally, what hope do you have of maintaining awareness of what the rest of your brain is doing on an ongoing basis?

    The truth is that this is a hopeless challenge. Your conscious mind doesn’t have anywhere close to the capacity that would be required to intelligently monitor and maintain all the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that are constantly firing inside of you. Most of the time you’re not even aware of what’s happening inside your mind.

    You may perceive the experience of thinking as a fairly linear process. Your conscious mind seems to flow through basically one thought at a time, just as you may read one word at a time. But that isn’t what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

    The reality is that different patches of neurons are processing different thoughts in parallel at all times. Your thinking is never linear and straightforward. Even when you read words in a linear order, your brain is actually perceiving and processing all of the words within your field of view at all times.

    When you listen to human speech, your brain is automatically predicting which words are likely to be heard next. It’s actually pre-loading multiple patterns simultaneously. Then when the next word is verified, your brain fires off different neuron patches to suppress the incorrect predictions and to validate the correct branch. Your brain doesn’t actually wait for words to be spoken. It processes syntax and meaning well ahead of what it’s hearing. And since it can’t predict every word with perfect accuracy, it predicts along multiple branches at the same time.

    Even if I leave a few words out of this ____, your ___ can still read the sentence just fine. It picks up the meaning. If I said this sentence aloud and paused briefly at the blanks, you may have even experienced the phantom audio effect of hearing the words that weren’t actually spoken.

    What were the fill in the blank words? Were they sentence and brain? Statement and mind? Line and eyes. It doesn’t matter. Your brain simultaneously explored multiple possibilities and filled in the expected meaning.

    The Priming Effect

    Soon we’ll get into the practical application aspects, but first let’s do a simple exercise. Let me share a few random words with you that seemingly have nothing to do with this article:

    car

    gasoline

    petroleum

    mileage

    distance

    efficiency

    Now let me ask you to fill in the blank letters to complete the following word:

    F _ _ L

    Chances are good that your brain picked a word related to the list above, even though there are many possible solutions.

    Now stretch your mind by going through the alphabet, and consider other choices you could have selected. There are lots of possibilities, but the priming effect likely got your brain fixated on one that matched the previous words.

    Now get this: The priming effect even works when you aren’t consciously aware of the words or ideas you’re being primed with. For instance, if I’d hidden those words elsewhere on this page where your eyes would have seen them, but you wouldn’t have consciously noticed them, the effect would be essentially the same. Or in a video presentation, if those words were flashed on the screen too quickly for your conscious mind to notice, but slow enough for your visual cortex to perceive and process, that would have also primed your choice in the wordplay test.

    This priming effect works on a much grander scale than word games, and its influence is usually subtle and unconscious. I guarantee that it’s operating in your life right now.

    Suppose you read the daily news from a typical news source (i.e. overwhelmingly pessimistic). So your mind gets primed with words like these (which were taken from actual Yahoo News’ headlines):

    denounce

    fight

    die

    soak

    death

    somber

    slain

    fears

    concerns

    dismissed

    defiant

    avoids

    risk

    pandemic

    handouts

    So you read the news in the morning and prime your brain with words like the above. What’s the priming effect? What other thoughts, feelings, or ideas are being pre-loaded because they’re related to the above? Danger. I’m scared. I need to play it safe and protect what I have. I can’t afford to take risks. Stress response.

    Then you check social media, and your friends are sharing the usual trivialities. Priming effect: Not important. Wasting time. Boring. Pointless. Petty drama. Feeling inadequate. Jealousy.

    You check email next. It’s mostly spam. Your inbox is filled with old junk you haven’t processed. Priming effect: Disorganized. Feeling behind. Clutter. Stress. Overwhelm. Need to clean this up. Distraction.

    You make some coffee. It’s the cheap stuff, and you drink it from a cruddy old ceramic mug that’s chipped. Priming effect: Can’t have what I want. Broken. Low quality. Ugly. Cheap.

    You start using your computer. It’s an older model, sluggish and also a bit ugly. Priming effect: Settling for less. Frustration. Wishing for better and not getting it. Slowness. Amateur. Unappreciated.

    You use pirated software on your computer. Priming effect: Criminal. Wrong. Cheap. Dishonest. Dishonorable. Hiding. Sneaky.

    And now you go to work trying to improve your life. Is that going to work out well? Probably not.

    Your brain is always bouncing around between linked associations. It does this in parallel, subconsciously, all the time. There are countless new neuroscience books sharing more and more details about how the brain does this. The simple truth is that the vast majority of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur without your conscious awareness or conscious involvement.

    The lesson here is that seemingly subtle influences matter. If your senses perceive it, your brain is processing it. And this processing is seldom isolated. One little change in input can create significant ripples throughout your neural net. And this in turn can have a significant influence on the results you get to experience.

    Conscious Priming

    Now for the exciting part: The priming effect presents us with some enormous opportunities for personal growth. By exerting some control over our priming influences — which may involve just a few small changes that can be made within a minute or two — we can create a permanent and lasting improvement in different facets of our lives.

    By giving your brain slightly different input on a subconscious level, you can enjoy some truly significant benefits on the results side. This is easy. It works. And there are many ways you can apply this for free.

    Here’s how I deliberately prime myself each day.

    I wake up and cuddle a bit before getting up. Priming effect: Affection. I am loved. Happy. Feeling lucky.

    If I make some oatmeal, I use the best oats I’ve found (Bob’s Red Mill organic oats), mixed with fresh blueberries or organic raisins. Priming effect: Having the best. Better than average.

    If I make some coffee, I use the best quality, such as 100% Kona coffee from Hawaii. It costs twice as much as the gourmet stuff, but nothing else compares. Priming effect: Quality. I deserve the best. Reward.

    I enter my home

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