Tricks Of The Mind

There is a real irony to the NLPers I knew who prided themselves on their communication skills yet because of their need to let everyone know how engaging they were, they were among the least engaging

If you concern yourself with telling or showing people how interesting you are, you will at best provoke a temporary response of polite interest until even that gives way to annoyance. If you let people find it out for themselves, you become a real source of fascination.

For a while now I have concerned myself with engaging people’s beliefs. A large part of me wishes to have people retain a scepticism about what I do and apply that to other areas in life where our beliefs are manipulated in ugly ways.

The appreciation of a painting or a piece of music, for example, or even falling in love, is all about our subjectivity. But to decide that the entire universe operates in such a way, let alone to go to war because we are so convinced we are right that others must agree with us or die, that surely should demand a higher level of argument than 'It's true because I really, really feel it is.

Science is unusual in that it is cumulative. It is a system built over time, wherein useful information is retained and ideas that simply don't stand up are discarded, based on the confirmation of knowledge through testing.

If a piece of 'alternative medicine' can be shown to work reliably, it ceases to become alternative. It just becomes medicine.