I recently wrote a piece about science and quacks, in which I made (or tried to make) the following point:

…there’s nothing New Age-y about the idea that our emotions produce physical consequences. We need look no further than adrenaline to prove a scientifically accepted and tangible mind-body connection.

Now a company called Emotiv is commercializing a product based on our ability to influence the physical world with our thoughts and emotions—and there’s no hint of quackery about it, according to the BBC News.

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

“It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer,” said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv.

“It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively,” she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity.

Ms Le said: “Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we’ve created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically.”

Okay, so let me get this straight. We accept that emotions produce physiological responses: fear/adrenaline, stress/cortisol, etc. We accept that our thoughts can manipulate an avatar in a video game. But it’s still considered quackery to posit that our beliefs impact our DNA.

I’m sorry; I just don’t get it. Do you?

Following yesterday’s post, I received two fascinating comments.

One was from Angela Segal, who brings a surprising and refreshing frankness to her plastic surgery consultation practice:

In 12 years of patient consulting and plastic surgery management a day would not pass when a patient would ask “don’t you think I need this?” My reply: “NO, we don’t have anything here that you need. Everything is extra”.

The other came from Paul Hancox over on Same Traffic, More Sales:

Seth’s article is somewhat of a generalization. Not everything in marketing is a lie, not every benefit is a placebo. If I buy a product which saves me time or money, or improves my health, that’s real… not imagined.

I guess it depends on the type of product being marketed. I’m sure Vodka requires a little more “spin” than, say, tablets to cure arthritis (for example).

Paul’s comment opens the door to a conversation that deserves its own post, so here goes.

‘Lie’ is a word that almost invariably provokes a negative reaction. To call someone a liar is one of the worst insults we can muster—which is why the word ’story’ is much more palatable. Really, though, what is the difference between a story and a lie, other than awareness?

The point of yesterday’s post was not to invoke the L word, and all of its negativity, as a means of slamming marketers. Rather, my aim was to demonstrate that all commercial interactions depend on stories.

I’ll take this a step further: our lives as we live them depend on stories.

‘Saving time’, for example, is a positive story. On the other hand, there are thousands of time-saving devices, from the vacuum cleaner to email, and yet most of us don’t seem to have more time. The reality is that there is no more time, only different choices of what to do with it.

Arthritis pills come with a story as well. They were created by Scientists, proven by Doctors, approved by The FDA. Every time you take a pill, you are demonstrating your trust in the story of Western medicine. If a homeless man gave you the pill, would you take it? What about a shaman, or a chiropractor, or a lawyer? I am not saying they don’t work. I’m saying that the story is an integral part of the experience of taking them.

The economy is another great example of a story. The only way any economy works is through the belief that it works. This belief is why we’re willing to put our money in the banks. This belief is why we’re willing to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy property. This belief is why we invest in the stock market. Do you think I am saying that the story is bad? On the contrary; we need the story for our economy to survive.

Here is a fable:

Two women are sitting in chairs, facing each other. The first asks the second, “When you look at me, what do you see?”

The other woman replies, “I see a pretty woman with long hair. She is interesting and intelligent.”

“Ah ha,” says the first. “You are telling stories.

“You think my hair is long? Look at Crystal Gayle.

“You think I am interesting? Ask my husband at the end of a long day.

“You think I am intelligent? By whose standards? Compared to whom?

“When I look at you,” she concludes, “I see—I think I see—a woman, sitting in a chair, with one leg crossed over the other.”

The first story we tell ourselves is that we are not telling ourselves a story.

I’d be delighted to hear more of your views on this, and, of course, more of your stories!

Summary: The job of a marketer is to create a story that positions the product as a need. Is this an amoral lie? No more than the stories we tell ourselves every day.

The Values of the Plastic Surgeon

Do you ever wonder about the value your business provides to the world? Whether by marketing your product or service you are making people’s lives better?

These might be trickier questions than they seem at first blush. Last night I watched part of a documentary: Louis Theroux spent a few weeks immersed in the world of plastic surgery. At one point, he got into a bit of a debate with a plastic surgeon.

“Don’t you agree,” he asked, “that, as more women get plastic surgery, the ones who don’t get it feel more inadequate?”

“Well, sure,” the doctor replied.

“So how do you feel about that? That you’re contributing to these women’s sense of inadequacy?”

“Well, I just sleep easy knowing that I’m making my patients feel better about themselves.”

“But you just agreed that by making your patients feel better about themselves, you’re making other women feel worse.”

…and so on.

It was an unwinnable argument, of course, but that’s not really the point. The point is that there are few—if any—business offerings that could not serve as the subject of this debate. Do you think that you are serving humanity by selling clothes, or cars, or education, or software? Who defines service to humanity?

Marketing’s Long Tales

This isn’t a debate about obvious marketing manipulations: drink this expensive champagne, live a life of luxury; wear this makeup, become irresistible to men; use this aftershave, become irresistible to women. We consider ourselves quite clever when we spot the spin being fed us, even as it disappears down our gullets.

Beyond the obvious, though, sits every other company in existence. Each one of these companies has a view of the world and how its own products or services fit in.

And that’s where the stories come in. Anything that we sell, anything, has a story associated with it: the story that posits this item as a need. The story involves assumptions about how the world works, assumptions about the direction industry is taking, assumptions about the desires of our clients and potential clients and about the validity of those desires.

“We serve a genuine market need,” might be said by Steve Jobs or a heroin dealer. (Note: I am not calling Steve Jobs a heroin dealer.) “Our products provide real value to people,” point out baby food manufacturers and gun merchants.

We sell because we have determined a need and because we believe that need to be acceptable.

Is that bad? Absolutely not.

Seth’s Placebo

Seth Godin just republished an article he wrote three years ago called The Placebo Affect (spelled wrong on purpose). He discusses the ability of marketers to influence people’s beliefs that a product is important, thereby making it important:

Very rarely do vodka marketers tell the truth and say, “here’s our new vodka, which we buy in bulk from the same distillery that produces vodka for $8 a bottle. Ours is going to cost $35 a bottle and come in a really, really nice bottle and our ads will persuade laddies that this will help them in the dating department… nudge, nudge, know what I mean, nudge, nudge…”

It would be surprising to meet a monk or a talmudic scholar or a minister who would say, “yes, we burn the incense or turn down the lights or ring these bells or light these candles as a way of creating a room where people are more likely to believe in their prayers,” but of course that’s exactly what they’re doing. (and you know what? there’s nothing wrong with that.)

…We don’t like to admit that we tell stories, that we’re in the placebo business. Instead, we tell ourselves about features and benefits as a way to rationalize our desire to to help our customers by allowing them to lie to themselves.

The design of your blog or your package or your outfit is nothing but an affect designed to create the placebo effect. The sound Dasani water makes when you open the bottle is more of the same. It’s all storytelling. It’s all lies.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In fact, your marketplace insists on it.

Marketers are not in any way isolated in the practice of telling stories; we are all telling ourselves stories all the time. I’m smart; I’m dumb; I’m rich; I’m poor; I have power over my life; I’m a victim: all stories.

The marketing stories only work if they match the stories customers are already telling themselves. If the story you tell yourself is that people will sleep with you based on the vodka you drink, then that type of marketing will resonate with you. If the story you tell yourself is that you are a spiritual being with a higher purpose in life, then a different type of story will resonate with you.

We choose the stories we tell and those to which we listen, those that we will ignore and those that we will perpetuate.

What stories have you told in your lifetime? What stories are you telling yourself now?

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Thus begins a BBC News report about the thoughts of engineer Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil has been brought together with Larry Page, Dr. J. Craig Venter, and 15 others to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. So he’s obviously pretty smart. So smart, in fact, that he may have overlooked the obvious: in seeking to replicate human intelligence, AI might be setting its sights too low.

Humans are brilliant, creative, vibrant creatures. We are also ignoramuses. In fact, it appears we are absolutely ignorant about how ignorant we are.

Following my piece about the Exploratorium last week, Brian Hayes proffered a couple of tasty posts for dessert. The first, from PhysOrg.com, describes a study that shows our propensity to fill in the blanks when the complete picture isn’t available to us:

Eighteen observers were asked to concentrate on the centre of a black computer screen. Every time a buzzer sounded they pressed one of two buttons to record whether or not they had just seen a small, dim, grey ‘target’ rectangle in the middle of the screen. It did not appear every time, but when it did appear it was displayed for just 80 milliseconds (80 one thousandths of a second).

“People saw the target much more often if it appeared in the middle of a vertical line of similar looking, grey rectangles, compared to when it appeared in the middle of a pattern of bright, white rectangles. They even registered ‘seeing’ the target when it wasn’t actually there,” said Professor Zhaoping, lead author of the paper. “This is because people are mentally better prepared to see something vague when the surrounding context is also vague. It made sense for them to see it – so that’s what happened. When the target didn’t match the expectations set by the surrounding context, they saw it much less often.

In other words, we see what we expect to see, as dictated by the surrounding context.

It isn’t often I’m required to identify the brief appearance of a target rectangle, but this phenomenon does have more real-world applications. Just yesterday I was in a cafe with a girlfriend when I spotted someone walking towards the door.

It wasn’t even close to our friend Lynne—but the face, which had been the first thing I had seen, was. I saw the face and thought, “There’s Lynne.” Then I thought, “She’s not wearing the right clothes. Her hair is wrong. The body shape is different.” But those things were contradictory to my initial conclusion, and I discarded them immediately.

“There’s Lynne,” I said to the woman I was with.

“That isn’t Lynne,” she said.

“Of course it isn’t,” I replied, stunned that I could have perceived all of the many non-Lynne characteristics displayed by the stranger and yet still insist that it was she.

The other piece Brian sent in was about ’split brain’ people, and the fact that our use of logic is usually employed after the fact as a means of retroactively understanding our behavior. This behavior is more easily seen in people whose left and right hemispheres are disconnected (a ‘callosal disconnection’), although the authors make it clear that we all do it:

…the right hemisphere, upon seeing an image with strong emotional connotations, generates the appropriate response. However, due to the callosal disconnection, it cannot transmit the associated sensory data to the left hemisphere and its language centers. The left hemisphere perceives a change in the body’s state, but does not know why - and so it “fills in” the missing details, fabricating a logical reason for the emotional reaction. This happens at a subconscious level, so that the person genuinely believes the verbal explanation they provide. In the language of psychology, this filling-in process of unconscious invention is called confabulation.

All of these ideas are utterly bizarre. On the one hand, we only ever perceive a microfraction of the potential data in our environment. On the other, our brains go to the trouble of adding in stuff that’s not there. The hemispheres of our brains are like Steven Wright’s humidifier and dehumidifier, left in a room to fight it out.

So are attempts at Artificial Intelligence aiming to replicate phenomena such as these? Will a smart machine be able to justify its actions? Or perhaps this will be the stumbling block limiting the development of AI: that we don’t even understand our own intelligence beyond the flimsy rationales we invent after the fact, and that we’re reverse engineering our behavior based on false assumptions.

Have you ever caught yourself making up stories to explain situations that otherwise don’t make sense? Or do you think your perceptions are absolutely genuine at all times?

I frequently blather on about free will and human empowerment on this blog, but Lore Sjöberg at Wired has just turned my world upside down following his visit to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Over the course of a three-hour immersion experience, he found out that “the mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can’t be trusted with even an ounce of responsibility.”

Read the article. It’s freakin’ hilarious.

Lore learned that memory doesn’t exist and that perception is a joke, self-perception even more so. The cruelest discovery, though, was on the topic of free will:

How about decision-making? At least you have free will, the ability to rise above the limitations of your mind, right? You’re precious when you lie to yourself. The fact is that by the time you actually think you’re making a decision, a shadowy cabal of hormones and electrical currents have already set you on your course. I’m not just talking about fight-or-flight level stuff here. Even your hour-long diatribe about Neutral Milk Hotel that had everyone at the party last week checking their cellphones for new messages was delivered to you by some attention-deprived corner of your unconscious mind.

I learned that, in the end, you can’t trust what you see, you can’t trust what you know, and you can’t even trust your sense of self. Sure, on some level you think, therefore you are, but when it comes down to it, all you really are is the Betty Crocker on the cake mix of your own existence, a pleasant fiction wrapped around a container of chemicals and carbon.

I want to go to the Exploratorium! It sounds awesome!

The fog of illusion with which we surround ourselves was stripped naked and thrust into Lore’s face. Free will? You’ve gotta earn it—if you can. You’ve gotta get past the psychological and chemical and emotional gatekeepers that are heavily invested in the status quo.

Do you think it’s possible? Or does Lore’s experience prove that free will is just a pipe dream?

One of the questions on the VortexDNA survey is about the percentage of time you feel you’re able to be yourself at work.

It’s a great question. The first time I took the survey, I was in a job that I didn’t enjoy. My natural state is one of irrepressible exuberance, and yet I spent my days sullenly biting my tongue and tamping down my spirit. As I responded to the question, I knew how much I was letting myself down.

Things have gotten a lot better since then. I work for myself. I share an office with two friends, people with whom I genuinely enjoy spending time. I choose how I spend my days and with whom I choose to do business.

Yesterday my officemates and I went out to lunch together. As we placed our orders, I spied Raf, from VortexDNA, coming in.

Now, you may have figured out from the title of this blog that I do a bit of work for VortexDNA. And I certainly would never want to jeopardize my business relationship in any way. But here’s the beauty of it: he came in, and he joined me and my friends for lunch, and the dynamic didn’t change. It didn’t grow stilted. I didn’t feel fearful that he might see the non-work side of me.

We all adjust our behavior to be appropriate for a given situation. I might swear with my friends, for example; I wouldn’t on this blog or with my mother-in-law. I choose carefully when and with whom I’m willing to engage in a conversation about politics or religion. But there’s a big difference between deciding to be appropriate and suppressing your inner nature.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of the privacy issues surrounding Facebook. A lot of the complaining is from people who have carefully compartmentalized their lives and would be livid if their various personas were ever to overlap. Professional career women having their lesbianism dissected at the office water cooler. Authoritarian parents letting their kids see them as real people.

Take this quote from a New York Times article dissecting Facebook’s privacy problems:

Mr. Das, who joined Facebook on a whim after receiving invitations from friends, tried to leave after realizing that most of his co-workers were also on the site. “I work in a small office,” he said. “The last thing I want is people going on there and checking out my private life.”

“I did not want to be on it after junior associates at work whom I have to manage saw my stuff,” he added.

There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Das’ desire for privacy, and I’m not suggesting that our every weekend fling should be shared indiscriminately with our business colleagues. I do wonder, though, if they are two separate issues: the Facebook one, and the one in which our many lives are kept completely dis-integrated. Is there something wrong with the fact that so many of us don’t want people to see who we really are?

What do you think about it?