You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [60]
Meditation works the same way, with chants or mantras meant to “calm the mind.” Shutting down those nagging voices in the head is helpful for stressed-out individuals but even more helpful to a guy who wants to shut down an audience full of nagging voices suggesting that what he’s saying might be ridiculous.
3. SLIPPING BULLSHIT INTO YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS
The rise of the Internet has given birth to a whole new, sly technique of bullshit insertion. People who get paid to manipulate your opinion have figured out that most of us browse headlines instead of actually reading the news. And there’s a way to exploit that based on how the brain stores memories.
The Drudge Report lives off this. A single anonymous source will report to a news blog that, say, Senator Smith runs a secret gay bordello. Drudge will run the headline:
NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT SMITH’S SECRET GAY BORDELLO
Or perhaps there’ll just be a question mark on the end:
SMITH: SECRET GAY BORDELLO ASS MASTER?
It doesn’t matter that the headline merely involves “questions” about the bordello. The idea has been planted, and two months later when somebody mentions Senator Smith around the water cooler you’ll say, “The gay bordello guy, right?”
Why it works
It’s called source amnesia. According to a 2008 article in the New York Times, it’s the reason why “you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.” The brain has limited storage, so it stores just the important nugget but usually discards the trivial context, such as when and where you learned about it.
In the era of information overload, that’s a mechanism that can be easily exploited. A piece of information can be presented with all sorts of qualifiers, but often the brain will only remember the ugly rumor and completely forget the qualifiers. It happens even if the headline we read was specifically about the rumor being untrue.
You’ll see this every election cycle. The entire point of putting a shaky rumor into the press is to force your opponent to deny it, because denial works just as well as the accusation to secure the rumor in the brains of voters. Thanks to source amnesia, for millions of people all three of these:
SMITH DENIES GAY BORDELLO RUMORS
SMITH REFUSES COMMENT ON GAY BORDELLO RUMORS
SMITH ADMITS STARTING, VISITING, BURNING DOWN BORDELLO-ORPHANAGE
register as the exact same headline.
2. CONTROLLING WHAT YOU WATCH AND READ
Restriction of reading material is common to every cult. The idea is to insulate the members from any opposing points of view. That’s why the guys claiming to be sex messiahs tend to start their polygamous compounds out in the middle of the desert. Not a lot of dissenting voices out there.
It turns out that technique works just as well out in the real world. Only nobody has to drag you into the desert and tell you what to read. Your brain handles that part for them.
Why it works
Our brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our own point of view. Scientists at Emory University actually hooked scanners up to the brains of staunch conservatives and liberals and asked them about politically divisive issues. The scans showed the brain’s pleasure center lit up when people heard something they agreed with and lit up again when intentionally dismissing information that they disagreed with. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks.
This is why the Right and Left each has its own publishing arm, and why each one’s favorite topic of discussion is how corrupt and ridiculous the other side’s media is. Most of us will gladly close ourselves in whichever echo chamber of talk radio, blogs, and cable news outlets give us that little “I knew it!” high.
1. KEEPING YOU IN LINE WITH SHAME
You can win any formal debate in college by using our patented technique of simply repeating your opponent’s argument in a high-pitched,